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Updated: June 18, 2025
"You must send me away," she said; "I'm not a success here. You don't like me." Aunt Anne looked at Maggie with eyes that were clear and cold like deep unfriendly waters. "You mustn't say that. We love you, but you have very much to learn. To-night I shall speak to Miss Avies and arrange that you go to have a talk with her sometimes. She is a wise woman who knows many things.
Perhaps this meeting would enlighten her. It did. On arriving at Miss Avies' gaunt and menacing apartment she found herself in the very stronghold of the Inside Saints. It was a strange affair, and Maggie was never to see anything quite like it again. In the first place, Miss Avies' room was not exactly the place in which you would have expected to discover a meeting of this kind.
It was wonderful to think that in another half-hour she would see Miss Avies once more, hear those wild hymns again, catch the stridency of Thurston's voice; all these things spoke of Martin. She felt as though he were stealing towards her out of the dusk, it was as though, without any reason, she expected to find him at the service ... although she knew that he could not be there.
Miss Avies' two friends, huddled and frightened like fledglings suddenly surprised by a cuckoo, stirred Maggie's sympathy. She disliked Miss Avies from the very first moment. Miss Avies had a pale, thin, pointed face with no eyebrows, grey eyes dim and short-sighted, and fair colourless hair brushed straight back under a hard, ugly black hat.
It was not that the forces that surrounded her were especially interesting, but she felt that all of them had taken on some especial dramatic character from the occasion. Such personalities as Aunt Anne and Miss Avies were in any case vivid and dramatic, but to-night Aunt Elizabeth and the placidly rotund Mrs.
For a time she was so sleepy that she nodded on her chair, and the green lamp swelled and quivered and the very bed seemed to sway in the dark, but soon the cold air cleared her head, and she was wide awake, staring before her at the grey window-panes. Her aunt did not for a long time speak again. Maggie sat there her mind a maze of the Chapel, old Crashaw, Miss Avies, and Martin.
The voice was so abrupt and the words so unexpected that Maggie jumped. "Why don't I?" she repeated. "Yes, you," said Miss Avies. "You've no place here in all this business. You don't believe in it, do you?" "No," said Maggie. "And you don't want to use it for something you do believe in?" "No," said Maggie. "Well then, clear out."
Thurston, Miss Avies knew about that wonderful, marvellous thing, her love for Martin, his for her. They were turning it over in their hands, soiling it, laughing at it, sneering at it. And what were they doing to Martin? At that thought she sprang up and began hurriedly to walk about. Oh, they must leave him alone! What were they saying to him?
Maggie, colouring a little, said: "My aunts have been very good to me. I oughtn't to leave them." "Fiddlesticks," said Miss Avies. "Your life's your own, not your aunts'." She sat down and stayed bolt upright and motionless near the fire; she flung a thin dark shadow like a stain on the wall. There was a long pause between them. After that abrupt opening there seemed to be nothing to say.
Of course I don't, although sometimes it makes one quite creepy all down one's spine. In case, after all, He really should come, you know." "Are my aunts inside?" asked Maggie. "Of course they are. Miss Anne Cardinal's one of the chief of them. Miss Avies is jealous as anything of her, but your aunt's so quiet that Miss Avies can't do anything. I just love your aunts. I think they're sweet.
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