Dark Hester by Anne Douglas Sedgwick — Read

It was only half-past three when she started, and she would be half an hour too early for Celia and Norah's tea-party, but they would be glad to see her and there would be thus an opportunity to make some casual enquiry about Aunt Harriet. Clive and Hester were to come, and Captain Ingpen would surely be there: more surely because of this morning; his was the task of nonchalance and unawareness; all that was left him to do was to watch her and to hold his hand, hoping that by some stroke of fortune she would be baffled and perhaps satisfied. Her heart was sick and heavy in her side as she thought of him, and with him now came the thought of Jeremy and of the other little dog; -but the lassitude that had fallen upon her tumult was in itself a strength. What she needed was stillness and calm; and it gave her this. She could promise herself that even the sight of the three together, Hester, Ingpen and Clive,-would not make her quail, and as she stepped out into the sunlight, the heavy beating of her heart, the bright hot sun, brought back, by some odd trick of association, just such another day in London, twenty-five years ago, when she had set forth down the dusty little street in West Kensington to make her way to the unknown London of the City and publishers' offices for her first business interview. She had been horribly frightened, no doubt, though not until this minute had she known it-so armed had she been with Clive and Winchester and Oxford-and looking back, really understanding at last that girl of twenty-five years ago, she saw her as incredibly ignorant of herself and of life. Until then she had only seen life from the deck of a ship, her father's gallant craft, with its stout engine throbbing beneath one, its pennons flying above. But now her father was dead, and she was to know what it was to swim in the open sea alone, and the first intimation of the contrast had come to her from the manner of the editors who received her. Until then, in her relations with men, she had met with implicit homage, with deference or assiduity, and had taken them for granted as a woman's due. It was revealed to her, now, in the cool jocose eye, the note of familiarity that greeted her, that to the employing male a woman in search of work was in a very different category from a woman secure and independent. The editor was kind and had agreed to take her series of articles on the French countryside; but her cheek had oddly burned as, not waiting for the lift, she had run down the steep, echoing stone staircase. Things, perhaps, were better for women now; -because of Hester and her kind. And as she paused thus, looking back into the past, she saw Hester approaching her from across the green.

Hester had just come down from The Crofts and was evidently arrayed for the tea-party in her best dark blue coat and skirt. She wore a red silk jumper and a small red hat, and, among the geese and ducks and care-free dogs, advanced with steady deliberation. Monica stood still at her gate, fixing her with a guarded eye. Her instinct that morning in meeting Captain Ingpen had been well justified; she had waited for him to speak first. She would wait for Hester to speak first now.