“When she’s going for a holiday, dear,” cried Olive.
“Oh, go on being mad,” cried Louisa.
“What, do you like it? I thought you’d be thanking Heaven that sanity was given me in large doses.”
“And holidays in small,” laughed Louisa. “Good! No, I like your madness, if you call it such. You are always so serious.”
“ ‘It’s ill talking of halters in the house of the hanged,’ dear,” boomed Olive.
She looked from side to side. She felt triumphant. Helena smiled, acknowledging the sarcasm.
“But,” said Louisa, smiling anxiously, “I don’t quite see it. What’s the point?”
“Well, to be explicit, dear,” replied Olive, “it is hardly safe to accuse me of sadness and seriousness in this trio.”
Louisa laughed and shook herself.
“Come to think of it, it isn’t,” she said.
Helena sighed, and walked down the platform. Her heart was beating thickly; she could hardly breathe. The station lamps hung low, so they made a ceiling of heat and dusty light. She suffocated under them. For a moment she beat with hysteria, feeling, as most of us feel when sick on a hot summer night, as if she must certainly go crazed, smothered under the grey, woolly blanket of heat. Siegmund was late. It was already twenty-five minutes past ten.
She went towards the booking-office. At that moment Siegmund came on to the platform.
“Here I am!” he said. “Where is Louisa?”
Helena pointed to the seat without answering. She was looking at Siegmund. He was distracted by the
