“Do let me help you, dearest.”
“Thanks, Nina, if you would. The girls are somewhere, I suppose.”
“Ah, they’ll be a comfort to you, I hope. They who owe you even more than Hazel does, if possible.”
“One does what one can. It seems to me that it’s all give, give, give on our side, and take, take, take on theirs. I feel rather like an unfortunate pelican feeding its young, sometimes.”
With the words, and the curt laugh that dismissed them, Bertha Tregaskis regained possession of herself.
IX
ROSAMUND, though unhappy, was not as unhappy as she would have liked to think herself. The defection of Morris Severing, although gaining in poignancy by contrast with Hazel’s serene happiness, was a sorrow of the emotions only, and a certain fierce sincerity of outlook prevented Rosamund from rating it otherwise.
But she felt that she could have borne it better had the disappearance of her quondam lover touched the mainsprings of her life, and left that life dignified by a lasting grief, instead of merely rendered unprofitable and savourless from an unrecognized sense of vague discontent.
“I don’t know what Rosamund’s grievance is!” her guardian was exasperated into exclaiming, nearly a year after Hazel’s marriage. “I don’t believe she knows herself.”
And, in so saying, diagnosed the case.