“But we shall have to next term,” Gladys said, “because Miss Ashley’s written home about them.”
“And that stuck-up thing Gwendyr Jones said they were positively disgusting,” Enid went on.
“Yes,” added Gladys, “and I told her they weren’t half as disgusting as her ankles. And they aren’t, are they, Sylvia?”
“Some of the girls call her marrow-bones,” said Enid.
Sylvia would have preferred to avoid any intimate talks with Mrs. Worsley, but it was scarcely to be expected that she would succeed, and one night, looking ridiculously young with her fair hair hanging down her back, she came to Sylvia’s bedroom, and sitting down at the end of her bed, began:
“Well, are you glad you got married?”
At any rate, Sylvia thought, she had the tact not to ask if she was glad she had taken her advice.
“I’m not so sorry as I was,” Sylvia told her.
“Ah, didn’t I warn you against the first year? You’ll see that I was right.”
“But I was not sorry in the way you prophesied. I’ve never had any bothers with the country. Philip’s sister was rather a bore, always wondering about his clothes for the year after next; but we made a treaty, and she’s been excluded from The Old Farm—wait a bit, only till next October. By Jove! I say, the treaty’ll have to be renewed. I don’t believe even memories of Sirene would enable me to deal with Gertrude this winter. No, what worries me most in marriage is not other people, but our two selves. I hate writing Sylvia Iredale instead of Sylvia Scarlett. Quite unreasonable of me, but most worries are unreasonable. I don’t want to be owned. I’m a book to Philip; he bought me for my binding and never intended to read me, even if he could. I don’t mean to say I was beautiful, but I was what an American girl at Hornton House used to call cunning; the pattern was unusual, and he couldn’t resist it. But now that he’s bought me, he expects me to stay quite happily on a shelf in a glass case; one day he may perhaps try to read me, but at present, so long as I’m taken out and dusted—our holiday at Sirene was a dusting—he thinks that’s enough. But the worm that flies in the heart of the storm has got in, Victoria, and is making a much more unusual pattern across my inside—I say, I think it’s about time to drop this metaphor, don’t you?”