Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction; Staffordshire (England) -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
She thought vividly, one afternoon about three months later, of that
final scrap of conversation. Just as she had sat opposite George Cannon
in a second-class compartment, so now she was sitting opposite Sarah
Gailey in a second-class compartment. The train, having passed Lewes,
was within a few minutes of Brighton. And following behind them,
somewhere at the tail of the train, were certain trunks containing all
that she possessed and all that Sarah Gailey possessed of personal
property--their sole chattels and paraphernalia on earth. George Cannon
had willed it and brought it about. He was to receive them on the
platform of Brighton Station. She had not seen very much of him in the
interval, for he had been continually on the move between Brighton and
Turnhill. "In a moment we shall all be together again," she reflected.
"This meeting also will happen, as everything else has happened, and a
new period will definitely have begun." And she sat and stared at the
closed eyes of the desiccated Sarah Gailey, and waited for the instant
of arrival apprehensively and as it were incredulously--not with fear,
not with pleasure, but with the foreboding of adventure and a curious
idea that the instant of arrival never would come.
For thirteen weeks, which had gone very quickly, she had devoted herself
to Sarah Gailey, acting as George Cannon's precursor, prophet, and
expounder. While the summer cooled into autumn, and the boarding-house
season slackened and once more feebly brightened, she had daily
conversed with Sarah about George's plans, making them palatable to her,
softening the shocks of them, and voluntarily promising not to quit her
until the crisis was past. She had had to discourse on the unique
advantages of Brighton as a field for George's enterprise, and on
George's common sense and on Sarah's common sense, and the
interdependence of the two. When the news came that George had acquired
down there a house in going order, she had had to prove that it was not
the end of the world that was announced. When the news came that George
had re-sold the Cedars to its original occupier, she had had to prove
that the transaction did not signify a mysterious but mortal insult to
Sarah. When the news came that the Cedars must be vacated before noon on
a given Saturday, she had had to begin all her demonstrations afresh,
and in addition attempt to persuade Sarah that George was not utterly
mad--buying and selling boarding-house tenancies all over the South of
England!--and that the exit from the Cedars would not be the ruin of
dignity and peace, and the commencement of fatal disasters. In the hour
when Sarah Gailey learnt the immutable Saturday of departure, the
Cedars, which had been her hell, promised to become, on that very
Saturday, a paradise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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