No; Mrs. Delafield had grasped her own security and her own danger. It had not been in remorse or tenderness that Rhoda’s eyes had fixed themselves upon her child, it had been in anxiety, lest Jane Amoret’s presence should be the signal of some final verdict against her. She had come because she hoped to be taken back; and if there was all the needed justification in Rhoda’s callousness, there was an undreamed-of danger in her expectation.
“Well, we must see,” Mrs. Delafield remarked; and already she was measuring the necessities of Rhoda’s pride against the urgencies of Rhoda’s disenchantment. It was Rhoda’s pride that she must hold to. Rhoda, even if she had come, had only come to make her own terms.
“Did you motor over?” she asked. “You are not very far from here, are you?”
No train could have brought her at that hour.
“Twenty miles or so away,” said Rhoda. “I was able to hire a motor, a horrible, open affair with torn flaps that let in all the air, so that I’m frozen.”
Her loveliness did, indeed, look a little pinched and sharpened, and there was more than the cold drive to account for it. But she was still surpassingly lovely, with the loveliness that, once you were confronted with it, seemed to explain everything that might need explanation. That was Rhoda’s strongest card. She left her appearance to speak for her and made no explanations, as now, when, indeed, she had all the air of expecting other people to make them. But her aunt only said, while Jane Amoret, from her rug, kept her grave gaze upon her mother, “Won’t you have some hot milk?”
“Thanks, yes, I should be glad of it,” said Rhoda. “How lucky you are to have it. We are given only condensed for our coffee at the hotel. It’s quite revolting.” And after Mrs. Delafield had rung, and since no initiative came from her, she was, in a manner, forced to open the conversation. “Niel has only himself to thank,” she said. “He’s been making himself too impossible for a long time.”
“Really? In what way? Perhaps the hard life over there has affected his temper.”
Mrs. Delafield allowed herself the irony. Rhoda, indeed, must expect that special flavour from her.
“Something has certainly affected it,” said Rhoda, drawing a chair to the fire and spreading her beautiful hands before it. “I’m quite tired, I confess,—horrid as I’m perfectly aware it sounds to say it,—of hearing about the hard life. Life’s hard enough for all of us just now, heaven knows; and I think they haven’t had half a bad time over there, numbers of them—men like Niel, I mean, who’ve travelled comfortably about the world and never had the least little wound, nor been, ever, in any real danger, as far as I can make out; at least, not since he’s had the staff work. It’s very different from my poor Christopher, who rotted in the cold and mud until it nearly killed him. There would be some point in his talking of a hard life.”