“Why, dear,” answered Olive, heavily condescending to explain, “I offered Helena the handle of a pun, and she took it. What a flash! You know, it’s not that I’m afraid….”
The rest of her speech was overwhelmed in thunder.
Helena lay on the edge of the bed, listening to the ecstatics of one friend and to the impertinences of the other. In spite of her ironical feeling, the thunder impressed her with a sense of fatality. The night opened, revealing a ghostly landscape, instantly to shut again with blackness. Then the thunder crashed. Helena felt as if some secret were being disclosed too swiftly and violently for her to understand. The thunder exclaimed horribly on the matter. She was sure something had happened.
Gradually the storm drew away. The rain came down with a rush, persisted with a bruising sound upon the earth and the leaves.
“What a deluge!” exclaimed Louisa.
No one answered her. Olive was falling asleep, and Helena was in no mood to reply. Louisa, disconsolate, lay looking at the black window, nursing a grievance, until she, too, drifted into sleep. Helena was awake; the storm had left her with a settled sense of calamity. She felt bruised. The sound of the heavy rain bruising the ground outside represented her feeling; she could not get rid of the bruised sense of disaster.
She lay wondering what it was, why Siegmund had not written, what could have happened to him. She imagined all sorts of tragedy, all of them terrible, and endued with grandeur, for she had kinship with Hedda Gabler.
“But no,” she said to herself, “it is impossible
