"I feel old," said Milly. "Really old and tired."
Christina still smiled at her, but smiled over a sudden choking in her throat. It was not sympathy for her friend's Weltschmertz; it was the recognition of something in her eyes, her voice—something she could not analyze, as if a faint barrier wavered, impalpable, formless, between them, and as if, did she say that it was there, it would change suddenly to stone and perhaps shut her out for ever.
What was it in Milly that made her afraid that to cry out her fears might make them permanent? She battled with them all the winter. They had arranged to go to Sicily and Greece for the spring, and Christina looked forward to this trip as a definite goal. It would break the spell, turn the difficult corner,—for all her fierce idealism she was too wise a woman not to know that every human relation must have corners; and, indeed, in talking over plans, getting up information, burnishing historical memories, Milly showed some of her old girlish eagerness. She and Christina even read the Greek tragedies over together, in order, Milly said, that they should steep themselves in the proper atmosphere. It was therefore with a shock of bitter surprise and disappointment that Christina, only a fortnight before the time fixed for their departure, heard Milly announce, with evident openness, though she flushed slightly, that she thought she would rather put off the trip; she would rather spend April at Chawlton; and, at once going on, looking clearly at her friend: "You see, dear, I have just had a letter from Dick. He gets back next week and is going down there. He says that he wants to see the primroses after that horrid Africa;—quite a poetical touch, isn't it,—for Dick! And I think it would be really a little too brutal of me, wouldn't it, if I sailed off without seeing him at all—without pouring out his tea for even one week."
Milly was smiling, really with her own soft gaiety; the flush had gone. Christina was convinced of her own misinterpretation. Duty had called Milly away from pleasure, and she had feared, for a moment, that her friend would think too much sacrifice to it.
"Of course, dearest, of course we will put it off," she said. "And of course we will go down to welcome home the wanderer. It is sweet of you to have thought of it."
Milly kissed her. "You see I am becoming quite a virtuous woman," she said. "And it is a pity to miss the primroses."
The packing projects turned topsy-turvy, servants to be redistributed, Christina saw to all, while Milly, with still her new cheerfulness, flitted in the spring sunshine from shop to shop, decking herself in appropriate butterfly garments. They were to get to Chawlton only a day or two before Dick's arrival.
The gardens, the lawns, the woods, were radiant, and Milly, in the environment of jocund revival, shared the radiance. All barriers seemed gone, were it not that Christina, full of strange presages, felt the very radiance to make one.
Milly gathered primroses in the woods, hatless, her white dress and fair head shining among the young greys and greens. She came in laden with flowers, and the house smiled with their pale gold, their innocent and fragile gaiety. "Isn't the country delicious?" she said to Christina. "Much nicer than dreary Greece and tiresome ruins, isn't it?"
"Much," said Christina, who was finding the country, the spring, the sunshine, the very primroses, full of a haunting melancholy.