Read Online This Was Tomorrow by Elswyth Thane - Free Book Online

to a meeting,” Hermione muttered, looking into her cup as she stirred her tea.
    “Mummy, you can’t ‘join’ and you can’t ‘resign.’ It’s all according to the kind of life you live. You simply surrender, listen, and obey. If you keep open to guidance the inward peace will come.”
    “I see,” said Virginia rather tightly, and Mab, advancing to the cake plate, remarked with an instinctive into-the-breach irrelevance that Jeff was bringing her a gift from Paris. “Jeff always brings wonderful gifts, doesn’t he,” Virginia agreed hastily.
    “Like the Greeks,” said Hermione with her inevitable, often pointless sarcasm.
    “Why don’t you like Jeff?” Mab asked directly, more from the tone than from the significance of Hermione’s words.
    “But she does like him,” said Evadne in her clearest, most life-changing voice. “If only you would admit to yourself, Hermione, that you are in love with Jeff, and be absolutely honest about it, it would stop hurting and then this foolish necessity to—”
    Hermione’s spoon clattered into the saucer and she stood up, her small tense face quite white and her hands shaking so that the cup lurched as she set it down on the tray.
    “Evadne, sometimes you go too far! It’s all very well to talk about Absolute Honesty, but that doesn’t give you the right to invade everyone’s life with a scalpel! Besides, I’m older than Jeff and he—I—you—I will not go to your horrible meeting and make a fool of myself, you can all let me alone, do you hear, and mind your own business!” And she begun rather fumblingly to collect her gloves and handbag, while Evadne rose with leisurely grace and went towards her, speaking in the soothing sort of tone one uses to a nervous horse.
    “Now, now, darling, it only came to me a few days ago, that if only I could help you to get it all out in the open—if only you would talk things over with some understanding fellow human being—”
    “Like yourself, I suppose! You think because you decided to turn Mark down you have a right—” Hermione’s voice was a little shrill, and she started blindly for the door.
    “But it’s only because I’ve been through it all, with guidance, and I know exactly how you must feel, so I—” Evadne’s arm was round Hermione’s waist as they reached the door, but Hermione did not pause.
    “You know nothing whatever about Jeff and me!” she cried furiously. “We’ve loathed each other for years, and I’ll thank you not to talk like that, especially in front of the children, you have absolutely no right —”
    “Darling, don’t be angry and put up resistance like this, I’m only trying to help you—”
    There was a large, aghast silence in the drawing-room where Mab and Virginia were left staring at each other in mutual dismay.
    “Well!” said Virginia, as though they were also of an age. And then, “It’s so humourless!” she said unbelievingly. “Surely no child of Archie’s and mine—they seem to think they’re being so gay and helpful, and it’s all so— heavy- handed —”
    “But— is she?” said Mab.
    “Who? What?”
    “Is Hermione in love with Jeff?”
    “Oh, that,” said Virginia. “Well, now that it’s come up—I wonder—”
2
    But Hermione did go to the meeting with Evadne, and bore witness publicly that she had always loved a man, since they were children, she supposed, though not, she was sure, in any Impure way—and that because the circumstances were impossible for love between them, and he had not reciprocated anyhow, she had tried to hate him and do him harm, for which sin she was now prepared to make restitution. She had not realized, she said, that it was love, or that it was a sin, tillEvadne’s loving fellowship and understanding had made her see that. There was quite a lot more, about how she meant to try not to make spiteful remarks and had started a Guidance Book that very morning, but nothing seemed to come through that was worth