"Mind you bring them all next week," had been Lady Rossiter's farewell injunction, to which Cooper had replied with great confidence and assurance.
Preparing for her guests on Sunday afternoon, therefore, Lady Rossiter gazed smilingly out of her window at a cloudless day of August. Evidently Nature was in league with her votary.
Lady Rossiter told her maid to bring the black-and-white mousseline de soie. No other colours suited her fairness so admirably, and she always wore the combination when embarking upon any enterprise of particular benevolence. The thick pallor of her complexion could afford to defy the sun, and she seldom wore a hat in the garden. A black-and-white-striped sunshade made quite as effective a background for her mass of auburn hair and black eyebrows and lashes.
Before going downstairs she thoughtfully slipped the rings from her long white fingers, and bade her maid substitute a small crystal cross on a velvet ribbon for her pearl necklace.
The maid had not been with her very long, and obeyed the mandate with such wooden matter-of-factness that Lady Rossiter added gently:
"One doesn't want anyone to feel the least little—difference—in any way. We have all grown to have such false ideas of values...."
"Yes, m'lady," said Mason, looking so thoroughly bewildered that Lady Rossiter resolved to read extracts from Ruskin aloud to her while her hair was being brushed at nights.
She went downstairs slowly, to find Julian reading in the hall.
"Jorrocks?" she enquired playfully, but with a meaning that she knew would not be lost upon her husband.
Ever since she had wrung from a monosyllabic Julian the admission that neither Ruskin, Pater, nor Stevenson "meant" to him that which they meant to her, Edna had assumed, by almost imperceptible degrees, that her husband's only literature consisted of Jorrocks and the volumes of the Badminton series.