"Oh, let me look, Gerty," cried Phyllis, taking possession of the bit of pasteboard. "'The Misses Lorimer and friends.' Why Conny might go with us."
Constance Devonshire had dropped in upon them unexpectedly that afternoon, after an absence of several weeks. She was looking wretchedly ill. Her usually blooming complexion had changed to a curious waxen colour; her round face had fallen away; there were dark hollows under the unnaturally brilliant eyes.
"I should rather like to go, if you think you may take me," she said; then added, with an air of not very spontaneous gaiety; "I suppose it will be what the society papers call a 'smart function.'"
Stoicism, it has been observed, is a savage virtue. There was something of savagery in Conny's fierce reserve; in the way in which she resolutely refused to acknowledge, what was evident to the most casual observer, that there was something seriously amiss with her health and spirits.
"Is it not fortunate," said Lucy, "that Uncle Sebastian should have sent us that cheque? Now we shall be able to get ourselves some decent clothes."
"I mean to have a grey cachemire walking-dress, and my evening dress shall be grey too," announced Phyllis, who was one of the rare people who can wear that colour to advantage. Fanny, who had rigid ideas about mourning, declared with an air of severity that her own new outfit should be black, then sighed, as though to call attention to the fact of her constancy to the memory of the dead, in the face of the general heedlessness.
"Gerty is thinking of rose-colour, is she not?" asked Phyllis, innocently, as she marked Gertrude's rapidly-suppressed movement of irritation.
"As regards a gown for this precious Private View—I am not going to it."
"The head of the firm ought to show up on such an occasion, as a mere matter of business," observed Lucy, smiling amiably at every one in general.