Alexandra put down her cup and stretched out her hand across the table. Maggy took it and gave it a squeeze. "There’s a bit of poetry I learnt once," she said. "I say it whenever I feel the limit. It’s a sort of psalm. "All’s well with the world, my friend, And there isn’t an ache that lasts; All troubles will have an end, And the rain and the bitter blasts. There is sleep when the evil is done, There’s substance beneath the foam; And the bully old yellow sun will shine Till the cows come home!" "Can’t you see ’em in your mind’s eye, Lexie dear, a string of them—brown ones with soft eyes—their heads moving from side to side, coming down the long lane just round the turning ... and the sun shining behind them through clouds.... Cheer up, ducky!" VIII Maggy said very little about Woolf. On certain topics there was a barrier of silence between the two girls, imposed by Alexandra. Maggy was disposed to be utterly unreserved, crude. Brought up in stage surroundings she had heard undiscussable things talked of openly all her life. Alexandra showed such distaste for laxity of speech that Maggy now refrained from touching on the subject of sex almost entirely. Had she been unreserved about Woolf, his conversation with her and her own attitude toward him, she would have had to show herself in a light that Alexandra would have disliked and certainly not understood. Maggy was never quite sure in her mind whether Alexandra was very cold by nature or completely reserved. She, herself, belonged to the type of woman, not a rare one, who can discuss her marital relations with others with a frankness that no man would ever dream of employing when speaking of his wife to his most intimate friend. Alexandra, except under extraordinary stress, would be as secretive as a man. To discuss sexual emotions or indulge in speculation about them with another girl was a thing quite foreign to her. At school she had, in that sense, been a being apart, while the other girls whispered in corners. Instinctively she shrank from having her mind contaminated by second-hand knowledge of the most vital and delicate functions of nature. Her upbringing had been different from Maggy’s. Maggy’s mind had been forced prematurely on the hot-bed of theatrical laxity. Alexandra’s life, up till the last year, had been one of calm and sweet companionship with an adored mother. She had lived a healthy, normal existence, met men of her own class who would no more have dreamt of thinking irreverently of her than of their own mothers or sisters. She was aware that strong passions, illicit unions, and trouble and misery resulting from immorality, did exist in the world. She read of these things in newspapers and the books that were never kept from her; but these passions and unions and dissolving of unions seemed things that did not touch her class.