CHAPTER II
ON THE MOOR
After tea my father went to his study, for it was late in the week, and he was a most conscientious writer of sermons. I read for an hour, and then, tired alike of my book and my own company, I strolled up and down the drive. This restlessness was one of my greatest troubles. When the fit came I could neither work nor read nor think connectedly. It was a phase of incipient dissatisfaction with life, morbid, but inevitable. At the end of the drive nearest the road, I met Alice, my youngest sister, walking briskly with a book under her arm, and a quiet smile upon her homely face. I watched her coming towards me, and I almost envied her. What a comfort to be blessed with a placid disposition and an optimistic frame of mind!
“Well, you look as though you had been enjoying yourself,” I remarked, placing myself in her way.
“So I have—after a fashion,” she answered, good humoredly. “Are you wise to be without a hat, Kate? To look at your airy attire one would imagine that it was summer instead of autumn. Come back into the house with me.”
I laughed at her in contempt. There was a difference indeed between my muslin gown and the plain black skirt and jacket, powdered with dust, which was Alice’s usual costume.
“Have you ever known me to catch cold through wearing thin clothes or going without a hat?” I asked. “I am tired of being indoors. There have been people here all the afternoon. I wonder that your conscience allows you to shirk your part of the duty and leave all the tiresome entertaining to be done by me!”
She looked at me with wide-opened eyes and a concerned face. Alice was always so painfully literal.
“Why, I thought that you liked it!” she exclaimed. I was in an evil mood, and I determined to shock her. It was never a difficult task.
“So I do sometimes,” I answered; “but to-day my callers have been all women, winding up with an hour and a half of Lady Naselton. One gets so tired of one’s own sex! Not a single man all the afternoon. Somebody else’s husband to pass the bread and butter would have been a godsend!”
Alice pursed up her lips, and turned her head away with a look of displeasure.