The Progress of Love

see her, find out what was going on. But before he got there, she phoned again.
    “Dane. I just wanted to tell you. About those girls I noticed walking by the house. They are girls. They’re just dressed up in army outfits. They came and knocked on my door. They said they were looking for a Violet Thoms. I said there was no such person living here, and they looked very downcast. Then I said there was a Violet Tebbutt, and would she do?”
    She seemed in high spirits. Dane was busy; he had a meetingwith some town councillors in half an hour. He also had a toothache. But he said, “You were right, then. So who are they?”
    “That’s the surprise,” said Violet. “They are not just any girls. One of them is your cousin. I mean, the daughter of your cousin. Donna Collard’s daughter. Do you know who I’m talking about? Your cousin Donna Collard? Her married name is McNie.”
    “No,” said Dane.
    “Your Aunt Bonnie Hope, out in Edmonton, she was married to a man named Collard, Roy Collard, and she had three daughters. Elinor and Ruth and Donna. Now do you know who I mean?”
    “I never met them,” he said.
    “No. Well, Donna Collard married a McNie, I forget his first name, and they live in Prince George, British Columbia, and this is their daughter. Heather. This is their daughter Heather that has been walking past my house. The other girl is her friend. Gillian.”
    Dane didn’t say anything for a minute, and Violet said, “Dane? I hope you don’t think that I’m confused about this?”
    He laughed. He said, “I’ll have to come around and see them.”
    “They are very polite and good-hearted,” said Violet, “in spite of how they might look.”
    He was fairly sure that these girls were real, but everything was slightly out of focus to him at the time. (He had a low-grade fever, though he didn’t know it yet, and eventually would have to have a root-canal job done on his tooth.) He actually thought that he should ask around town to find out if anybody else had seen them. When he did get around to doing this, sometime later, he found out that a couple of girls of that description had been staying at the hotel, that they owned a beat-up blue Datsun but walked a lot, in town and out, and were generally thought to be woman’s libbers. People didn’t think much of their outfits, but they didn’t cause any trouble, except for getting into some sort of argument with the exotic dancer at the hotel.
    In the meantime, he had heard a lot from Violet. She phoned him at home, when his mouth was so sore he could hardly talk, and said it was too bad he wasn’t feeling well—otherwise he could have got to meet Heather and Gillian.
    “Heather is the tall one,” Violet said. “She has long, fair hair and a narrow build. If she resembles Bonnie Hope at all, it is in her teeth. But Heather’s teeth suit her face better and they are beautifully white. Gillian is a nice-looking sort of girl, with curly hair and a tan. Heather has that fair skin that burns. They wear the same sort of clothes—you know, the army pants and work shirts and boys’ boots—but Gillian always has a belt on and her collar turned up, and on her it looks like more of a style. Gillian is more confident, but I think Heather is more intelligent. She is the one more genuinely interested.”
    “What in?” said Dane. “What are they, anyway—students?”
    “They’ve been to university,” Violet said. “I don’t know what they were studying. They’ve been to France and Mexico. In Mexico, they stayed on an island that was called the Isle of Women. It was a women-ruled society. They belong to a theater and they make up plays. They make up their own plays. They don’t take some writer’s plays or do plays that have been done before. It’s all women, in this theater. They made me a lovely supper. Dane, I wish you could have been here. They made a salad with artichoke hearts in it.”
    “Violet sounds as if she’s on drugs,” said Dane to Theo. “She sounds as if they’ve got her spinning.”
    When he could talk again, he called her. “What are those girls interested in, Aunt Violet? Are they interested in old china and jewellery and things?”
    “They are not,” said Violet crossly. “They are interested in family history. They are interested in our family and what I can remember about what it was like. I had to tell them what the reservoir was on a stove.”
    “What would they want to know that for?”
    “Oh. They