“Look here, Vi,” said North. On a sudden impulse he put his long legs down from his deck-chair, sat erect, and swept her gay badinage aside. “We were talking about you.”
“Me!”
She bent her straight black brows at him, a shadow swept over her brilliance, she shivered a little.
“I suppose I have been pretty poisonous to you lately.” She meditated for a moment. Then her old irresistible mischievous smile shone out. “But it’s nothing to what I’ve been to poor Fred.”
She ran her lithe fingers through North’s grizzled hair and became serious again.
“Dad and Mums, darlings, I don’t know what’s been the matter with me—but I’ve been in hell. I woke up this morning and felt like Shuna-something’s daughter when the devil was driven out of her. And I got up and danced round the room in my nighty, because the old world was beautiful again and I didn’t hate everything and everybody. And don’t talk to me about what I’ve been like, darlings—I don’t want to think of it. All I know is, it’s gone, and if it ever comes back——”
She stopped and repeated slowly:
“If it ever comes back——”
Her slim erect figure shivered, as a rod of steel shivers driven by electric force.
Then she flung up a defiant hand and laughed. The gay light laughter of the old Violet. “But I won’t let it! Never again! Never, never, never! Mums, come out and wrestle with Mansfield’s lost artistic sense.”