"Well, what else can I do? I daresay I'd love the children, and be quite happy in a way, but the worst of it is, it's such a blind alley, and leads to nothing. It's all very well to be a nursery governess when you're eighteen, but I'd like to be something better at thirty-six. If you want to get anything decent in the way of a post you have to train."
Diana, to whom all these ideas were fresh and bewildering, was trying to adjust her brains to the new problems. She wrenched her mind from the near present, and took a mental review of Loveday's far future.
"But aren't you going to get married?" was the result of her cogitations.
Loveday, busy plying her hair-brush, shook her long flaxen mane dolefully.
"I don't say I wouldn't like to. But I don't think it's at all likely. I'm not an attractive kind of girl; I know that well enough. I'm so shy. I never know what to say to people when they begin to talk to me. They must think me a silly goose. You should see my cousin Dorothy; she's always the very life and soul of a party. If I were like that now! I don't suppose anybody'll ever trouble to look at me twice. I'm sure Auntie thinks so. No; I expect I've just got to make up my mind to be a nursery governess for the rest of my days."
Diana, still in a state of mental bewilderment, looked at pretty Loveday sitting on the bed brushing out her silky fair hair, and her memory switched itself back suddenly to the last evening of their motor trip. She had been sitting in the lounge of the hotel, and through the open door could see Giles standing in the hall. Loveday had come running downstairs. Diana would never forget the look that for an instant flashed across Giles's face. It contained something that she had not yet altogether grasped or realized.
"I wouldn't make up my mind too soon if I were you," she said slowly. "You might change it some day."
Whatever the future might hold in store, the present was the most immediate concern. Loveday wished to take back a good report to her uncle and aunt, and studied hard so as to obtain a fair place in the examination lists. She had just a faint hope that if they thought she showed any intellectual promise they might consider it worth while to have her trained. They had never made much of her attainments, but if she could come out third or fourth in the school she felt they would be pleased. It would be impossible to overstep Geraldine or Hilary, but her work was tolerably on a level with Ida's and Stuart's, and certainly above Nesta's.
It was just at this crisis that Miss Todd offered a prize for the best essay on "The Reconstruction of England after the Great War, and its Special Application to Women's Labour and Social Problems".