And Christine's sisters drew in their nostrils in a last
genteel effort at self-control.
Christine packed his trunk with ragged odds and ends of clothing, and
they made a long journey to No. 14, Acacia Grove, where Christine had
taken two furnished rooms and a scullery, which served also as kitchen
and bath-room. Acacia Grove was the deformed extremity of a
misbegotten suburb. There were five acacia trees planted on either
side of the unfinished roadway, but they had been blighted in their
youth, and their branches were spinsterish and threadbare. Behind the
houses were a few dingy fields, and then a biscuit factory, an obscene,
congested-looking building with belching chimneys.
Every morning at nine o'clock Robert walked with Christine to the
corner of the road, and a jolly, red-faced 'bus, rollicking through the
neighbourhood like a slightly intoxicated reveller who has landed by
mistake in a gathering of Decayed Gentlefolk, carried her off
citywards, and at dusk returned her again, grey and worn, with wisps of
tired brown hair hanging about her face and bundles of solemn letters
and folded parchment documents bulging from her dispatch-case. Then
she and Robert shopped together at the Stores, and afterwards she
cooked over a gas-jet in the scullery, and they had supper together,
almost in the dark, but very peacefully.
It was too peaceful. One couldn't believe in it. When supper was over
Robert washed up and Christine uncovered the decrepit, second-hand
typewriter which she had bought, and began to copy from the letters,
bending lower and lower over the crabbed writing and sighing deeply and
impatiently as her fingers blundered at the keys.
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