STREETS AND HOUSES
197
she could remember saying to them, or not saying, the lies, .the fail–
ures, the cruelties; the realization finally that she would never expiate
the guilt, that it had become part of everything she did, adding to
everything a singularly beautiful luster. She was now, lifting her coffee
cup, saturated in the idea of death. Remembering suddenly the stiff-
t.
faced undertaker, she laughed and said, "The funerals were the worst
part, really ghastly.... " Then she added, "But that's all over now,
thank goodness." And when she looked at Margaret, who shrank
away, she saw that they had fallen into a crude misunderstanding;
that Margaret thought she meant she had fortunately got all over the
deaths, when she had meant merely the disappearance of undertakers
and flowers. With a phrase she could clear up the :rpisunderstanding:
but it marked to her the end, it put them within the boundaries of
farce. So, instead of speaking the phrase, deliberately she put on her
courageous smile.
Margaret saw with bitterness the courageous smile, the same
courageous smile, she thought, that Sally had affected as a girl doomed
to be misunderstood. Impossible, impossible! she cried to herself. "Yes,
I expect it was dreadful for you," she said with an effort toward polite
consolation, while she felt the past shrink into nothing behind them,
and she thought: we talked about the future easily enough, but now
that it's all happened we close the, door on it-oh, wretched, wretched
cowards! In agitation she broke her toast in half, thinking for an
instant of pleading with Sally for honesty. But it was unthinkable;
for it wasn't wholly Sally's pretense that had brought the occasion to
ruin, any more than it was her own fastidiousness (that had, she knew,
prevented her from helping Sally to escape from pretense). Perhaps
the gap was too huge, perhaps twenty years was too long. How, over
a small white tea table, could one sum up, present the important
thing? What could she herself say, beyond, "I am so happily mar–
ried ...
"?
It
seemed to her now that to attach subtle meanings to
their former friendship, their unnatural quarrel, was to be made a
fool of: it was neither because they had been friends nor because
they had ended enemies that they failed now-they could have been
merely acquaintances and failed, beloved sisters and failed: the occa–
sion itself was what dominated everything, it loomed over them, an
occasion wholly for failure and defeat. She might have known, she
might have known! she cried to herself, crumbling her toast; she might
have known the occasion would overwhelm them, she might have
guessed that she would have to be content with the voiceless streets
and houses of the city! She listened incredulously to Sally's continuing
conversation:
