Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

said Polly. “I should’ve got out while the going was good, that’s what I guess I should have done. But when was that? I don’t ever remember the going being so particularly good. I was stuck with having to see you through school first, for one thing.”
    Lorna had spoken in a regretful, helpful voice, but she refused to stop in her work, to give Polly’s news its due. She accepted it as if it concerned some people she knew and liked, but was not responsible for. She thought of her father lying on the couch in the evenings, dosing himself for pains he wouldn’t admit to, and Aunt Beatrice next door, worried about what people were saying about her, afraid they were laughing behind her back, writing things about her on walls. Crying because she’d gone to church with her slip showing. To think of home caused Lorna pain, but she could not help feeling that Polly was hammering at her, trying to bring her to some capitulation, wrap her up in some intimate misery. And she was bound that she would not give in.
    Just look at you. Look at your life. Your stainless-steel sink. Your house where the architecture is preeminent.
    “If I ever went away now I think I’d just feel too guilty,” Polly said. “I couldn’t stand it. I’d feel too guilty leaving them.”
    Of course some people never feel guilty. Some people never feel at all.

    “Quite a tale of woe you got,” said Brendan, when they were lying side by side in the dark.
    “It’s on her mind,” Lorna said.
    “Just remember. We are not millionaires.”
    Lorna was startled. “She doesn’t want money.”
    “Doesn’t she?”
    “That’s not what she’s telling me for.”
    “Don’t be too sure.”
    She lay rigid, not answering. Then she thought of something that might put him in a better mood.
    “She’s only here for two weeks.”
    His turn not to answer.
    “Don’t you think she’s nice-looking?”
    “No.”
    She was about to say that Polly had made her wedding dress. She had planned to be married in her navy suit, and Polly had said, a few days before the wedding, “This isn’t going to do.” So she got out her own high-school formal (Polly had always been more popular than Lorna, she had gone to dances) and she put in gussets of white lace and sewed on white lace sleeves. Because, she said, a bride can’t do without sleeves.
    But what could he have cared about that?

    Lionel had gone away for a few days. His father had retired, and Lionel was helping him with the move from the town in the Rocky Mountains to Vancouver Island. On the day after Polly’s arrival, Lorna had a letter from him. Not a poem—a real letter, though it was very short.

    I dreamt that I was giving you a ride on my bicycle.
    We were going quite fast. You did not seem to be afraid,
    though perhaps you should have been. We must not feel
    called upon to interpret this.

    Brendan had gone off early. He was teaching summer school, he said he would eat breakfast at the cafeteria. Polly came out of her room as soon as he was gone. She wore slacks instead of the flounced skirt, and she smiled all the time, as if at a joke of her own. She kept ducking her head slightly to avoid Lorna’s eyes.
    “I better get off and see something of Vancouver,” she said, “seeing it isn’t likely I’ll ever get here again.”
    Lorna marked some things on a map, and gave her directions, and said she was sorry she couldn’t go along, but it would be more trouble than it was worth, with the children.
    “Oh. Oh, no. I wouldn’t expect you to. I didn’t come out here to be on your hands all the time.”
    Elizabeth sensed the strain in the atmosphere. She said, “Why are we trouble?”
    Lorna gave Daniel an early nap, and when he woke up she got him into the stroller and told Elizabeth they were going to a playground. The playground she had chosen was not the one in a nearby park—it was down the hill, close to the street Lionel lived on. Lorna knew his address, though she had never seen the house. She knew that it was a house, not an apartment building. He lived in one room, upstairs.
    It did not take her long to get there—though no doubt it would take her longer to get back, pushing the stroller uphill. But she had already passed into the older part of North Vancouver, where the houses were smaller, perched on narrow lots. The house where Lionel lived had his name beside one bell, and the name B. Hutchison beside the other. She knew that Mrs. Hutchison was the landlady. She