When the parlour-maid had been sent for and Miss Deane had gone, Rachel
stood up and looked down at Adrian with all her old hauteur.
"Can you realise," she asked, "that once my aunt was supposed to be
very, very like me?"
He smiled and shook his head, as if the possibility was too absurd to
contemplate.
Rachel turned and looked at herself in the glass, raising her chin and
slightly pursing her lips, staring superciliously at her own image
under half-lowered eyelids.
"Some day I may be as she is now," she said, with the superb
contemptuous arrogance of youth.
Adrian was watching her with adoration. "You will never grow old," he
said.
"So long as one does not get the idea of growing old into one's head,"
Rachel began speculatively....
* * * * *
But Miss Deane had got the idea so strongly now that she died that
night.
Rachel was with her at the last.
The old woman was trying to mouth a text from the Bible.
"What did you say, dear?" Rachel murmured, bending over her, and caught
enough of the answer to guess that Miss Deane was mumbling again and
again: "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face."
THE OLIVE
By ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
(From _Pearson's Magazine_, London)
1922
He laughed involuntarily as the olive rolled towards his chair across
the shiny parquet floor of the hotel dining-room.
His table in the cavernous _salle a manger_ was apart: he sat alone, a
solitary guest; the table from which the olive fell and rolled towards
him was some distance away. The angle, however, made him an unlikely
objective. Yet the lob-sided, juicy thing, after hesitating once or
twice _en route_ as it plopped along, came to rest finally against his
feet.
It settled with an inviting, almost an aggressive air. And he stooped
and picked it up, putting it rather self-consciously, because of the
girl from whose table it had come, on the white tablecloth beside his
plate.
Then, looking up, he caught her eye, and saw that she too was laughing,
though not a bit self-consciously. As she helped herself to the _hors
d'oeuvres_ a false move had sent it flying. She watched him pick the
olive up and set it beside his plate. Her eyes then suddenly looked
away again--at her mother--questioningly.
The incident was closed. But the little oblong, succulent olive lay
beside his plate, so that his fingers played with it. He fingered it
automatically from time to time until his lonely meal was finished.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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