They had the sort of drawing-room that such women might be expected to have, of the coldest grays and greens, with no individuality of decoration. The whole house was the same, cheerless and depressing even to those familiar with London in a November fog, but blighting to one who knew not London in any weather. Even the servants seemed cold, mechanical creatures, made of well-oiled steel or iron; and when Lady MacMillan had driven off to a hotel, Mary cried heartily in her own bleak room, with motor-omnibuses roaring and snorting under her windows.
At dinner, which was more or less cold, like everything else, there was talk of the cousin who had left Mary a legacy of fifty thousand pounds; and it was easy to divine in tone, if not in words, that the Home-Davises felt deeply aggrieved because the money had not come to them. This cousin had lived in the Cromwell Road house during the last invalid years of her life, and had given them to understand that Elinor was to have almost, if not quite, everything. The poor lady had died, it seemed, in the room which Mary now occupied, probably in the same bed. Mary deeply pitied her if she had been long in dying. The wall-paper was atrocious, with a thousand hideous faces to be worried out of it by tired eyes. The girl had wondered why the money had been left entirely to her, but now she guessed in a flash why the Home-Davises had had none of it. The years in this Cromwell house had been too long.
"We've always imagined that Cousin Katherine must have been in love with your father, Uncle Basil, before he married," said Elinor, when they had reached the heavy stage of sweet pudding; "and when the will was read, we were sure of it. For, of course, mother was just as nearly related to her as uncle Basil was."
It was difficult for Mary to realize that this Aunt Sara could be a sister of the handsome, dark-faced man with burning eyes whose features had remained cameo-clear in her memory since childhood. But Mrs. Home-Davis was the ugly duckling of a handsome and brilliant family, an accident of fate which had embittered her youth, and indirectly her daughter's.
"How shall I get away from them?" Mary asked herself, desperately, that night. But fate was fighting for her in the form of a man she had never seen, a man not even in London at the moment.
In a room below Mary's Elinor was asking Mrs. Home-Davis how they could get rid of the convent cousin.
"She won't do," the young woman said.
"She reminds me of her mother," remarked Mrs. Home-Davis. "I thought she would grow up like that."
"Yet there's a look in her eyes of Uncle Basil," Elinor amended, brushing straight hair of a nondescript brown, which she admired because it was long.
"With such a combination of qualities as she'll probably develop, she'd much better have stayed in her convent," the elder woman went on.