Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/118

 exquisitely, after Mr. Fox had gone. She thought of life and how unlike a story it was.

Life was a patchwork of all things. Things ugly and beautiful, sordid, pathetic, wonderful. You never could make things in stories as wonderful as in life because the stories were just the heads of flowers pulled off without any stems or leaves, and surely no hidden roots with black mud caking them. And no dead flowers withering into new seed or decaying noisomely. Just the pretty heads pulled off and arranged in geometric design. In a story you could never tell the truth of Mr. Matthews's lewd embrace, or the fact that it was intended for her mother, or that she had afterwards retired to her room and been actually sick, in the English sense of the word.

Nor could you put into the story that one terrible moment in Miss Bigley's house when Anthony Jones had held her and hurt her very much, and for some diabolical reason the whole little room had flamed up with emotion ruddier than the firelight on the walls, and she, at once degraded and magnified, fled the room.

In stories you never put in what you really think of men. How once on a country road you had let an ox-team boy fold a blanket on one of his team and seat you on it, nor how he held your hand in his big red mitten and pressed his forehead a minute against your thigh. (The scene returned vividly, the boy's sturdy face framed in his wool cap looked helmeted and Roman.) Men—so strange. Other men a long way off, men walking in the spring with reins about their necks