Chapter 42

Miss Starbrow did not leave London after all, but day followed day only
to find her in the same unsettled mind as at first. Having no one else to
quarrel with, she quarrelled with and mocked at herself. "I shall wait
till the heats are over," she said, "and then stay on to see the end of
the November fogs; then I can go north to winter at Aberdeen or some such
delightful place." But these late London days, while her mind was in this
unsatisfactory state, studying to deceive itself, had one great pleasure
--the letters which came at intervals of two or three days from her loved
friend. Even to her eyes they looked beautiful. The girl of the period,
when she writes to her friend, usually dips the handle of her sunshade in
a basin of ink, and scrawls characters monstrous in size and form, an
insult to the paper-maker's art and shocking to man's aesthetic feelings.
Now from the first Fan had spontaneously written a small hand, with fine
web-like lines and flourishes, which gave it a very curious and delicate
appearance; for, unlike the sloping prim Italian hand, it was all
irregular, and the longer curves and strokes crossed and recrossed
through words above and beneath, so that, while easy enough to read, at
first sight it looked less like writing than an intricate pattern on the
paper, as if a score of polar gnats had been figure-skating on the
surface with inked skates. To her complaint that she was not clever, not
musical, like other girls, Mary had once said:

"Ah, yes; all your cleverness and originality has gone into your
handwriting."

"It is such a comfort, such a pleasure," said Fan in one of her letters,
"to have you to write to and put Mary--Mary--Mary twenty times over in a
single letter, wondering whether it gives you the same pleasure to see
your name written by me as you often say it is to hear it from my lips.
Do you remember that when I promised to write everything you sneered and
told me not to forget to make the usual mental reservations? That is the
way you always talk to me, Mary; but I make no reservation, I tell you
everything, really and truly--everything I see and hear and think. I know
very well that Constance will never tell me any of her secrets--that she
will never open her heart to anyone, as one friend does to another,
except her husband; so that it was quite safe for me to make you that
promise."

Again she wrote: "For some hidden reason Constance consented very
reluctantly to take Merton out of town, and I feel convinced that it was
not on account of the risk there would be in moving him, nor because they
were too poor to move away from Mile End. There was some other reason,
and I feel pretty sure that if the proposal