“Oh, I don’t mean to feel,” returned Amethyst, lightly, “I have a great deal too much to do; let bygones be bygones. Now then, don’t let us make mountains of molehills. Here is all your hair tumbling down, I’ll do it up prettily. If you had any consideration for the small amount of lady’s-maiding we ever get, you wouldn’t grow such a quantity.”
“My ridiculous hair,” said Una, pulling it through her fingers, and lingering a little on the epithet. Then, with a hot blush she rose.
“Yes, it tires me dreadfully to do it myself.”
A deficiency of personal attendance was one of the forms of “simplicity” with which the Miss Haredales had to put up, and both Amethyst and Kattern spent most of their leisure in “fixing”—to use a convenient Americanism—their own and their sisters’ costumes. A constant attention to frills does not leave much time for feelings, but it was of set purpose that Amethyst absorbed herself in the present.
“You know, dear,” she said, as she divided and twisted the long heavy lengths of Una’s hair, “it is absurd to think that all one’s cargo must be in one ship. No one thing is enough, and there’s always something more. For instance, one can’t think only of society, and of looking well. That’s one thing. It’s a good big thing, but there are so many others. Now last night I should have liked to have looked at all those pictures, and talked about them to some one that understood. If I go to a concert, I feel as if there was enough in music to fill up one’s life. I want to have something of it all. There’s no end to the possibilities of everything. I could talk to that queer Mr Carisbrooke for hours!”
“I wonder what Sir Richard would say if you told him that,” said Una, rather dryly.
“Oh, it’s only that he gave me a new idea. I want to work it out. So you see, no one thing ought to spoil everything else. Of course we’re none of us likely to expect beds of roses, we’ve learned our lesson. But when there are so many chances, it is wise and right to take the life that offers the most—the most chances of doing, and being.”
Una’s hair was finished by this time, and she stood up in her long white dressing-gown, leaning her hand on the toilet-table, and looking at her sister with searching eyes.
“Amethyst,” she said, “I don’t believe you were ever really in love with Lucian Leigh at all.”
The colour flamed into Amethyst’s face, and her bosom heaved.