Hole and Corner Read Online Free

showed no sign of becoming human.
    â€œTo lie here hour after hour and listen to the feet going by in the street—happy, hurrying feet of happy, hurrying people! Ah well, you’re too young to understand—but your time will come. Si jeunesse savait! ” She inhaled deeply, and rather spoilt the die-away effect by a loud resounding sneeze.
    Shirley stood by the foot of the sofa and waited until Mrs Huddleston had finished patting her nose and dabbing her eyes. Then she said,
    â€œWhat would you like me to do this afternoon? Shall I read to you?”
    â€œNo,” said Mrs Huddleston—“no, I don’t think I feel equal to being read to. There is something exhausting about another person’s voice—I have always found it so. Even when I was a girl I used to find society exhausting. Other people’s voices, other people’s thoughts, other people’s ideas—I found them terribly depleting. I have, of course, a peculiarly sensitive nature—easily jarred, easily bruised. I remember my mother taking me to see Sir Sefton Carlisle when I first came out—he was the great nerve specialist in those days—and I remember so well his saying to my mother, ‘There is no disease, no actual weak spot, but she is fragile, madam, fragile. There must be no strain, nothing to jar the sensitive nerves, or I cannot answer for the consequences’.”
    Shirley listened to this, her smile decorously modified into an expression of sympathetic attention. Once off, Mrs Huddleston would go on happily relating apocryphal interviews with the leading lights of the medical profession for hours, and hours, and hours. You didn’t have to listen, thank goodness—you only had to look as if you were listening. You could plan a frock, or write a letter in your head, or make up stories about the people in the bus. At intervals such phrases as “He said I had the lowest pulse he had ever felt”, or, “No one could imagine how I survived,” or, “Five doctors, and four nurses,” might impinge upon your ear, but you didn’t have to do anything about them.
    Mrs Huddleston flowed on. If the voices of other people exhausted her, the prolonged exercise of her own had no such effect.
    When Shirley got tired of standing she let herself down into a little armless chair in the gap between the sofa end and the chimney corner. The day was cold, and it was a good opportunity of getting really warm through and through before she had to go back to her fire-less room. This was one of the weeks that she couldn’t afford a fire. It had started very mild, and she had blued her fire money on a cinema with jasper Wrenn. Cinemas with Jas were always strictly on a fifty-fifty basis, because he had even less money than she had, whereas when she went out with Anthony it was dinner at the Luxe, and stalls, and the very best chocolates. Only in a way it was more expensive than sharing with Jas, because it meant decent stockings and shoes, and things like that—and what on earth she was going to do when her one and only evening dress gave out she couldn’t imagine. Like Mrs Huddleston it was no longer young, and like Mrs Huddleston it had been a beauty in its day. Shirley had had it for two years, and it had come to her from Alice Carlton, who had swopped a rather hideous hat for it and then found it was too tight for her, its original owner having been Selma Van Troyte, a fabulously rich American girl who bought all her clothes in Paris. It was in fact a pedigree garment—black georgette, and practically indestructible. Alice had been a school friend and was now in China. Selma was merely a legend, but the black georgette endured. Anthony liked it—men always did like black. Anthony—
    With a start she heard Mrs Huddleston say like an echo,
    â€œAnthony—” And then, sharply. “Dear me, Miss Dale, are you listening? You look half