She remained away on one excuse after another.
Her old schoolmate, Dorothy, came home from India, and although Lily admired Dorothy's healthy, fair-headed, unbeautiful babies, and went almost daily to play with them, she would not admit that her own childlessness roused in her any regret.
Nor did it.
But she watched with sick envy Dorothy's eagerness for her Indian mail letters, and the tears that clouded her frank, unsentimental gaze, as she spoke of "poor Frank"—who would not be able to afford leave for a long while.
"You are lucky, Lily, to live in England with no dreadful complications about having to go up to the hills, for the sake of the babies, and leave your man, sweltering away in the awful heat. And now I've got to leave Dolly behind, and go back with only Aileen, and I shan't have her after our next leave at home, I don't suppose. Frank is so good he'd let me stay at home with them altogether, like some wives do—but of course I wouldn't."
"Do you think he needs you more than the children do?"
"Well, I do, but apart from that," said Dorothy, "I know I jolly well can't do without him!"
She laughed as she spoke, and Lily knew that she did so because she was so much in earnest.
"I've got to finish my mail letter," said Dorothy, who had always hated writing letters.
Lily watched her pull out the perennial block of thin ruled paper to which every day she added a fresh, scrawled contribution.