“What’s the harm?” said Galinda. “Just here. No one else need see you.”
Elphaba stood facing the fire, but turned her head on her shoulders to look long and unblinkingly at Galinda, who had not yet hopped down from the chair. The Munchkinlander was in her nightgown, a drab sack without benefit of lace edging or piping. The green face above the wheat-gray fabric seemed almost to glow, and the glorious long straight black hair fell right over where breasts should be if she would ever reveal any evidence that she possessed them. Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life. There was an expectancy but no intuition, was that it?—like a child who has never remembered having a dream being told to have sweet dreams. You’d almost call it unrefined, but not in a social sense—more in a sense of nature not having done its full job with Elphaba, not quite having managed to make her enough like herself.
“Oh, put the damn hat on, really,” said Galinda, for whom, where introspection was concerned, enough was enough.
Elphaba obliged. The thing was the lovely roundel bought from the best milliner in the Pertha Hills. It had orangey swags and a yellow lace net that could be draped to achieve varying degrees of disguise. On the wrong head it would look ghastly, and Galinda expected to have to bite the inside of her lip to keep from laughing. It was the kind of superfeminine thing boys in a pantomime wore when they pretended to be girls.
But Elphaba dropped the whole sugary plate onto her strange pointed head, and looked at Galinda again from underneath the broad brim. She seemed like a rare flower, her skin stemlike in its soft pearlescent sheen, the hat a botanical riot. “Oh Miss Elphaba,” said Galinda, “you terrible mean thing, you’re pretty.”
“Oh, and now you have lied, so go confess to the unionist minister,” said Elphaba. “Is there a looking glass?”
“Of course there is, down the hall in the lavatory.”
“Not there. I’m not going to be seen by those ninnies in this.”
“Well then,” decided Galinda, “can you find an angle without hiding the firelight, and look at your reflection in the dark window?”
They both gazed at the green and flowery spectre reflected in the watery old glass, surrounded by the blackness, driven through with the wild rain beyond. A maplefruit leaf, shaped like a star with blunted points, or like a heart grown lopsided, suddenly whirled out of the night and plastered itself on the reflection in the glass, gleaming red and reflecting the firelight, just where the heart would be—or so it seemed from the angle at which Galinda stood.
“Entrancing,” she said. “There’s some strange exotic quality of beauty about you. I never thought.”
“Surprise,” said Elphaba, and then nearly blushed, if darker green constituted a blush—“I mean, surprise, not beauty. It’s just surprise. ‘Well, what do you know.’ It’s not beauty.”
“Who am I to argue,” said Galinda, tossing her curls and striking a pose, and Elphaba actually laughed at that, and Galinda laughed back, partly horrified as she did so. Elphaba tore the hat off then, and returned it to its box, and when she picked up her book again Galinda said, “So what is Beauty reading anyway? I mean really, tell me, why the old sermons?”
“My father is a unionist minister,” said Elphaba. “I’m just curious what it’s all about, that’s all.”
“Why don’t you just ask him?”
Elphaba didn’t answer. Her face took on a solid, waiting look, like that of an owl just about to go for a mouse.
“So what’re they on about? Anything interesting?” said Galinda. No sense giving up now, there was nothing else to do and she was too wrought up by the storm to sleep.
“This one is thinking about good and evil,” said Elphaba. “Whether they really exist at all.”
“Oh, yawn,” said Galinda. “Evil exists, I know that, and its name is Boredom, and ministers are the guiltiest crew of all.”
“You don’t really think that?”
Galinda didn’t often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversation was flow. “Well, I didn’t mean to insult your father, for all I know he is an entertaining and lively preacher.”
“No, I mean do you think evil really exists?”
“Well, how do I know what I think?”
“Well, ask yourself, Miss Galinda. Does evil exist?”
“I don’t know. You say. Does evil exist?”
“I don’t expect to know.” The look went slanty and inwards somehow, or was it the hair swinging forward like a veil again?
“Why don’t you just ask your father? I don’t understand. He should know, that’s his job.”
“My father taught me a lot,” Elphaba said slowly. “He was very well educated indeed. He taught me to read and write and think, and more. But not enough. I just think, like our teachers here, that if ministers are effective, they’re good at asking questions to get you to think. I don’t think they’re supposed to have the answers. Not necessarily.”
“Oh, well, tell that to our boring minister at home. He has all the answers, and charges for them, too.”
“But maybe there’s something to what you say,” said Elphaba. “I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.”
