E Nesbit

The Literary Sense E Nesbit

SHE was going to meet her lover. And the fact that she was to meet him at Cannon StreetStation would almost, she feared, make the meeting itself banal, sordid. She would haveliked to meet him in some green, cool orchard, where daffodils swung in the long grass, andprimroses stood on frail stiff little pink stalks in the wet, scented moss of the hedgerow. The time should have been May. She herself should have been a poem-a lyric in a whitegown and green scarf, coming to him through the long grass under the blossomed boughs. Her hands should have been full of bluebells, and she should have held them up to his facein maidenly defence as he sprang forward to take her in his arms. You see that she knewexactly how a tryst is conducted in the pages of the standard poets and of the cheaperweekly journals. She had, to the full limit allowed of her reading and her environment, theliterary sense. When she was a child she never could cry long, because she always wantedto see herself cry, in the glass, and then of course the tears always stopped. Now that shewas a young woman she could never be happy long, because she wanted to watch herheart's happiness, and it used to stop then, just as the tears had.