STREETS AND HOUSES
193
the seeds of cynicism had flowered, withered, been planted in other
ground? It was possible for them, indeed breathtakingly possible, to
open the doors on which they had knocked in youth, with a gesture
to reveal the riches beyond; possible for each of them to reveal to a
woman unseen, almost unthought of but always somewhere at the
back of the mind, two decades of the life once envisioned and now a
reality.
Their eyes met, Margaret's blazing with excitement: a glance
of recognition passed between them. Ah! Sally thought, dropping her
match carefully into the tray, she would tell Margaret everything;
her heart thrilled painfully as she realized she could, even, tell Mar–
garet-as she had never been able to tell anyone,
else~about
death,
could spread over it the words at last that would wholly unfold for
her the meanings she had found in it from her father's long agony,
her sister's tragedy; that she could talk for once. of the intricacies
and subtleties she had explored in marrying John, the degradation
and miserable end which had so peculiarly enriched her. Only by
Margaret could she hope to be, understood in speaking of the year
in which she couldn't sleep but had walked incessantly, thinking
incessantly, testing the validity of her courage to keep on living in the
small town, to keep on teaching school, to keep on pointing implac–
ably to the summits to students who understood no terrain but that
of the desert nor desired to understand any other, in explaining the
curious circumstance that in finally finding her courage valid it had
in the same moment vanished and never returned. Only Margaret
would recognize the oddity, without the presence of courage, of the
chirping comfort of amateur theatricals which she laughed at but did
not despise, the remarkable cheerful willingness, even eagerness, to
grow old. And certainly only to Margaret could be revealed the poems
written out of every particle of her passion and thrown away, inferior.
"We never wrote," she announced abruptly, her bony hand, still
consciously awkward, picking at the napkin delicately, with nervous
loathing.
Margaret shook her head, saying abstractedly, ."I never trusted
letters-that is, after I stopped gushing into them," watching the hand
with fascinated and abhorring recollection of a gesture she had years
ago hated, knowing it was in an obscure way a gesture of contempt
toward herself and frustrated from expressing her objection to it by
the fact of its apparent innocence-it was, after all, only a napkin that
the hand, with its delicate, finicky annoyance, despised.
Sally saw Margaret watching her hand: she forced herself to
drop the napkin with the flicking gesture of impatience and exaspera-
