CHAPTER I
On a vast Chesterfield, every unoccupied square inch of which seemed to bulge with indignant pride, Mrs. Delarayne reclined in picturesque repose. Her small feet, looking if possible more dainty than usual in their spruce patent leather shoes, were resting on a rich silk cushion whose glistening gold tassels lay heavily amid all the crushed splendour of the couch. Other cushions, equally purse-proud and brazen, supported the more important portions of the lady's frame, and a deep floorward curve in the line of the Chesterfield conveyed the impression that, however tenderly Mrs. Delarayne might wish to be embraced by her furniture and its wedges of down, she was at all events a creature of substantial proportions and construction.
The picture presented was one of careless and secure opulence.
The contents of the room in which Mrs. Delarayne rested had obviously been designed and produced by human effort of the most conscientious and loving kind. All the objects about her were treasures either of art or antiquity, or both, and stood there as evidence of the power which their present owner, or her ancestors, must have been able to exercise over hundreds of gifted painters, cabinet-makers, needlewomen, potters, braziers, carvers, metal-workers, and craftsmen of all kinds for generations.
It was late in June in the ninth year of King Edward VII's reign—that halcyon period when nobody who was anybody felt particularly happy, because no such person had actually experienced what unhappiness was. Certainly Mrs. Delarayne had not, unless she had shown really exceptional fortitude and self-control over her husband's death.
A sound in the room suddenly made her turn her head, and she dropped her book gently into the folds of her dress.
"My dear child," she exclaimed, addressing her elder daughter, "are you still there? I thought you had gone long ago! I must have been asleep."
"You did sleep, Edith dear," her daughter replied, "because I heard you snoring. You only picked up your book a moment ago."
Mrs. Delarayne examined her own blue-veined knotty hands with the expression of one who is contemplating a phenomenon that is threatening to become a nuisance, and then dropping them quickly out of sight again, she glanced eagerly round the room as if she wished to forget all about them. She did not relish her daughter's allusion to her snoring,—another sign of the same depressing kind as her blue-veined knotty hands,—and her next remark was made with what seemed unnecessary anger.
"Instead of wasting your time here, Cleo," she observed, picking up her book again, "why don't you go upstairs and pull some of those nasty black hairs off your upper lip? You know who's coming to-day, and you also know that young men, in this country at any rate, strongly object to any signs of temperament in a girl. They think it incompatible with their ideal of the angel, or the fairy, or some other nonsense."