192
PARTISAN REVIEW
said at once, indifferent, "Toast and coffee please-" the first thing
that carne into her head. (She was not accustomed to having tea:
she wondered dimly if Sally was.) But Sally, still unable to let go of
the theatrical, against her will and yet with enjoyment, became irri–
tating. She seized- the menu with a harrassed expression of being
unprepared for this crisis, studied it, frowning as
if
bewildered, and
only after some seconds of discomfort shared alike by Margaret and
the waiter, said, as if at her wits' end, "I'll have that too," and threw
down the menu. The waiter sighed inconspicuously and went away.
Observing this familiar dramatization, Margaret now carefully
gave her face an expression of placidity, not only in an attempt to
force dissimulation out of Sally and to slow down the pace they were
going, but to quiet her for a moment in order that she herself might
become fully aware of all she found herself attaching to their presence
together.
"Are you here for long?" Sally asked.
While she replied vaguely, "For a month, about," and while
Sally busied herself with a package of cigarettes, Margaret tried to
discover what caused her sense of implications, of latencies.
It
was
not just the past, she thought, their mutually unknown pasts, which
could here be revealed.
It
was not simply an opportunity to tell some–
one what had been happening. It was far more, and the significance
she saw
in
it took her breath away, because it seemed to her it might
carry them into an experience that would give a new meaning to all
the idle areas of the past, a new importance, a utility. For between her
and Sally there already existed a pattern and in revealing their pasts
both the revelation and the past itself could be fitted into the pattern.
It could be, given full cognizance from them both, a rarity, a com–
pletion utterly satisfying-and of the. same indefinable quality she
realized suddenly, as she had been receiving over and over again,
in lesser ways, from the streets and houses of the revisited city: it
could be a culmination of enormous proportion. For was there not
something suggestive in their having, as girls, spoken of everything
under the sun, of love, death, hope, of Shakespeare and Milton, of
exaltations on looking out of their bedroom windows in the middle
of the night, of the young men whom they endowed with all the
virtues in order that the fantasy of being loved might become extra–
ordinary, of their cynical appraisal of the world, of all their feelings
about everything they knew? And was there not, here, now, the ful–
fillment of the old suggestion, in their meeting again now that love,
death and hope had run through their own hands, that they had been
reading Hamlet for twenty years since they last talked about it, that
