CHAPTER XVI.
MISS HEYDINGER'S PRIVATE THOUGHTS.
The way from Chelsea to Clapham and the way from South Kensington toBattersea, especially if the former is looped about a little to makeit longer, come very near to each other. One night close uponChristmas two friends of Lewisham's passed him and Ethel. But Lewishamdid not see them, because he was looking at Ethel's face.
"Did you see?" said the other girl, a little maliciously.
"Mr. Lewisham--wasn't it?" said Miss Heydinger in a perfectlyindifferent tone.
* * * * *
Miss Heydinger sat in the room her younger sisters called her"Sanctum." Her Sanctum was only too evidently an intellectualisedbedroom, and a cheap wallpaper of silvery roses peeped coquettishlyfrom among her draped furniture. Her particular glories were thewriting-desk in the middle and the microscope on the unsteadyoctagonal table under the window. There were bookshelves ofworkmanship patently feminine in their facile decoration andstructural instability, and on them an array of glittering poets,Shelley, Rossetti, Keats, Browning, and odd volumes of Ruskin, SouthPlace Sermons, Socialistic publications in torn paper covers, andabove, science text-books and note-books in an oppressiveabundance. The autotypes that hung about the room were eloquent ofaesthetic ambitions and of a certain impermeability to implicitmeanings. There were the Mirror of Venus by Burne Jones, Rossetti'sAnnunciation, Lippi's Annunciation, and the Love of Life and Love andDeath of Watts. And among other photographs was one of last year'sDebating Society Committee, Lewisham smiling a little weakly near thecentre, and Miss Heydinger out of focus in the right wing. And MissHeydinger sat with her back to all these things, in her blackhorse-hair arm-chair, staring into the fire, her eyes hot, and herchin on her hand.
"I might have guessed--before," she said. "Ever since that_seance_. It has been different ..."
She smiled bitterly. "Some shop girl ..."
She mused. "They are all alike, I suppose. They come back--a littledamaged, as the woman says in 'Lady Windermere's Fan.' Perhaps hewill. I wonder ..."
"Why should he be so deceitful? Why should he act to me ...?
"Pretty, pretty, pretty--that is our business. What man hesitates inthe choice? He goes his own way, thinks his own thoughts, does his ownwork ...
"His dissection is getting behind--one can see he takes scarcely anynotes...."
For a long time she was silent. Her face became more intent. She beganto bite her thumb, at first slowly, then faster. She broke out at lastinto words again.
"The things he might do, the great things he might do. He is able, heis dogged, he is strong. And then comes a pretty face! Oh God! _Why_was I made with heart and brain?" She sprang to her feet, with herhands clenched and her face contorted. But she shed no tears.
Her attitude fell limp in a moment. One hand dropped by her side, theother rested on a fossil on the mantel-shelf, and she stared down intothe red fire.
"To think of all we might have done! It maddens me!
"To work, and think, and learn. To hope and wait. To despise thepetty arts of womanliness, to trust to the sanity of man....
"To awake like the foolish virgins," she said, "and find the hour oflife is past!"
Her face, her pose, softened into self-pity.
"Futility ...
"It's no good...." Her voice broke.
"I shall never be happy...."
She saw the grandiose vision of the future she had cherished suddenlyrolled aside and vanishing, more and more splendid as it grew more andmore remote--like a dream at the waking moment. The vision of herinevitable loneliness came to replace it, clear and acute. She sawherself alone and small in a huge desolation--infinitely pitiful,Lewisham callously receding with "some shop girl." The tears came,came faster, until they were streaming down her face. She turned as iflooking for something. She flung herself upon her knees before thelittle arm-chair, and began an incoherent sobbing prayer for the pityand comfort of God.
* * * * *
The next day one of the other girls in the biological course remarkedto her friend that "Heydinger-dingery" had relapsed. Her friendglanced down the laboratory. "It's a bad relapse," she said. "Really... I couldn't ... wear my hair like that."
She continued to regard Miss Heydinger with a critical eye. She wasfree to do this because Miss Heydinger was standing, lost in thought,staring at the December fog outside the laboratory windows. "She lookswhite," said the girl who had originally spoken. "I wonder if sheworks hard."
"It makes precious little difference if she does," said her friend. "Iasked her yesterday what were the bones in the parietal segment, andshe didn't know one. Not one."
The next day Miss Heydinger's place was vacant. She was ill--fromoverstudy--and her illness lasted to within three weeks of theterminal examination. Then she came back with a pallid face and astrenuous unavailing industry.