“And don’t they mind your going away?”
“Not a bit, I shouldn’t think. I’m no asset to them,” Mrs. Aviolet declared frankly. “And they’ll get quite enough of me in the holidays.”
“Couldn’t you come here for a few days before you go?” said Miss Lucian.
Rose was like a joyfully surprised child, in her acceptance. “Oh, I’d love to! How kind of you to want me. You’ll hardly believe it, but I haven’t once been to stay with any one, except relations, since we got to England. I have some friends, people we’d known in Ceylon, retired, with a house at Bexhill, and they always used to say I must go and stay with them when I came home, but they never asked me, after all. I wrote to Mrs. Judd, too, from Squires, but she only wrote back and said how nice it must be for me to be with Jim’s people, and wasn’t Squires quite a show place, or some rot of that kind. Not a word about me going to them.”
“Then there was Lord Charlesbury. We were supposed to go and stay with him, last year, but his boy got measles, so we didn’t go. I was frightfully disappointed, but they didn’t seem to care a bit. They never do, about anything.”
Henrietta Lucian shrugged her shoulders. “People are as they’re made, I suppose,” she said philosophically. “Our sort gets much more fun out of life than their sort—though it cuts both ways, too.”
“I’d rather Cecil was like me than like them,” said Rose with decision.
“I quite agree with you. Well, tell me about Cecil. How’s he getting on?”
Miss Lucian’s hearty interest in Cecil always roused in his mother all the passionate gratitude that the entirely unenthusiastic bestowal of material benefits from the Aviolets failed to evoke.
“I’ve had such nice letters from that kind Mrs. Lambert. She’s been so good about writing, and she says he’s getting on very well, and seems thoroughly well and happy. And his own letters say he’s happy, too.”