"Oh, the dear College! I wish my lessons hadn't come to an end, but of course I shan't have time now. Miss Marchrose is going to come and stay with us, later on—when——"
"When you're married?"
Iris put her head on one side.
"It is nice and generous of you to have taken a fancy to poor Miss Marchrose," said Lady Rossiter, who seldom divested the Lady Superintendent of the adjective. "But after all, there are one or two things to be considered. Your husband may not take a very great fancy to her."
Edna's warning would have tallied much more with her very real distrust of the proposed scheme had she omitted the word "not" in the last sentence.
Iris, however, answered confidently, "Oh, but Douglas will always like my friends, and I shall always like his. We have every single thing in common, you know."
Leaving Iris to her delusion, that wreathed her pretty, silly little face in dreamy smiles, Lady Rossiter leant back and indulged in reflections of her own. She was more tired than was usual with her, and her habitual serenity of mind was invaded by a certain discontent of which she did not seek to analyse the cause.
She looked at the hoar-frost, sparkling on the hedges, and at the chill blue of the sky, and perfunctorily told herself, as often before, "God's in His Heaven—all's right with the world"; recalled, in a vague and disjointed manner, fragments of R. L. Stevenson that she had often thought to be peculiarly applicable to herself, and remembered that two of her particular friends were a humble little dressmaker and a quaint old seafarer; she humorously adjured herself to "t'ink ob de blessings, children, t'ink ob de blessings." But all was of no avail. She felt saddened, inexplicably depressed.
For many years Edna Rossiter had believed that her strong suit, so to speak, was Love. She "gave out."
As a young girl, she had perhaps fancied, as young girls are prone to fancy, that only as the heroine of a grande passion could she fulfil herself. Her first love had disappointed her. A cheerful, beauty-loving young architect, he had failed to return adequate replies to the letters, pulsating with quotations from Laurence Hope, in which Edna had poured forth her soul during a temporary absence.