Read Online Mansfield with Monsters by Katherine Mansfield - Free Book Online

and collected.
    Harry had such a zest for life. Oh, how she appreciated it in him. And his passion for fighting—for seeking in everything that came up against him another test of his power and of his courage—that, too, she understood. Even when it made him just occasionally, to other people, who didn’t know him well, a little fierce perhaps… For there were moments when he rushed into battle where no battle was… She talked and laughed and positively forgot until he had come in (just as she had imagined) that Pearl Fulton had not turned up.
    â€œI wonder if Miss Fulton has forgotten?”
    â€œI expect so,” said Harry. “She strikes me as rather unreliable.”
    â€œAh! There’s a taxi, now.” And Bertha smiled with that little air of proprietorship that she always assumed about her new and mysterious women friends. “She lives in taxis.”
    â€œShe’ll run to fat if she does,” said Harry coolly, ringing the bell for dinner. “Frightful danger for blonde women.”
    â€œHarry, don’t!” warned Bertha, laughing up at him.
    Came another tiny moment, while they waited, laughing and talking, just a trifle too much at their ease, a trifle too unaware. And then Miss Fulton, all in silver, with a silver fillet binding her pale blonde hair, came in smiling, her head a little on one side.
    â€œAm I late?”
    â€œNo, not at all,” said Bertha. “Come along.” And she took her arm and they moved into the dining-room.
    What was there in the touch of that cool arm that could fan—fan and start—blazing—the fire of bliss that Bertha did not know what to do with?
    Miss Fulton did not look at her; but then she seldom did look at people directly. Her heavy eyelids lay upon her eyes and the strange half-smile came and went upon her lips as though she lived by listening rather than seeing. But Bertha knew, suddenly, as if the longest, most intimate look had passed between them—as if they had said to each other: “You too?”—that Pearl Fulton, stirring the beautiful red soup in the grey plate, was feeling just what she was feeling.
    And the others? Face and Mug, Eddie and Harry, their spoons rising and falling, dabbing their lips with their napkins, crumbling bread, fiddling with the forks and glasses and talking.
    Harry was enjoying his dinner. It was part of his—well, not his nature, exactly, and certainly not his position, his… something or other—to talk about food and to glory in his “shameless passion for the white flesh of the lobster” and “the green of pistachio ices, green and cold like the eyes of an Egyptian cat”.
    When he looked up at her and said: “Bertha, this is a very admirable soufflé !” she almost could have wept with child-like pleasure.
    Oh, why did she feel so tender towards the whole world to-night? Everything was good, everything was fine. All that happened seemed to fill again her brimming cup of bliss.
    And still, in the back of her mind, there was the pear-tree. It would be silver now, in the light of poor Eddie’s moon, silver as Miss Fulton, who sat there turning a tangerine in her slender fingers that were so pale a light seemed to come from them.
    What she simply couldn’t make out—what was miraculous—was how she should have guessed Miss Fulton’s mood so exactly and so instantly. She was savouring every moment. Bertha never doubted for a moment that she was right and yet what had she to go on? Less than nothing.
    â€œI believe this does happen very, very rarely between women. Never between men,” thought Bertha. “But while I am making the coffee in the drawing-room perhaps she will ‘give a sign’.”
    What she meant by that she did not know, and what would happen after that she could not imagine.
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    It was over at last.
    â€œCome and see my new coffee machine,” said