But this question of love (she thought, putting her coat away),
this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in
the old days with
Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?
She sat on the floor-that was her first impression of Sally-she
sat on the floor with her arms round her knees, smoking a cigarette.
Where could it have been? The Mannings? The Kinlock-Jones’s? At some
party (where, she could not be certain), for she had a distinct
recollection of saying to the man she was with, "Who is that?" And he
had told her, and said that Sally’s parents did not get on (how that
shocked her- that one’s parents should quarrel!). But all that
evening she could not take her eyes off Sally. It was an
extraordinary beauty of the kind she most admired, dark, large-eyed,
with that quality which, since she hadn’t got it herself, she always
envied-a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do
anything; a quality much commoner in foreigners than in Englishwomen.
Sally
always said she had French blood in her veins, an ancestor had been
with Marie Antoinette, had his head cut off, left a ruby ring.
Perhaps that summer she came to stay at Bourton, walking in quite
unexpectedly without a penny in her pocket, one night after dinner,
and upsetting poor Aunt Helena to such an extent that she never
forgave her. There had been some quarrel at home. She literally
hadn’t a penny that night when she came to them-had pawned a brooch
to come down. She had rushed off in a passion. They sat up till all
hours of the night talking. Sally it was who made her feel, for the
first time, how sheltered the life at Bourton was. She knew nothing
about sex-nothing about social problems. She had once seen an old man
who had dropped dead in a field -- she had seen cows just after their
calves were born. But Aunt Helena never liked discussion of anything
(when Sally gave her William Morris, it had to be wrapped in brown
paper). There they sat, hour after hour, talking in her bedroom at
the top of the house, talking about life, how they were to reform the
world. They meant to found a society to abolish private property, and
actually had a letter written, though not sent out.
The ideas were Sally’s, of course-but
very soon she was just as excited-read Plato in bed before breakfast;
read Morris; read Shelley by the hours.