Lily met this query with an impatient gesture. “My dear Gerty, I always understand how people can spend much more money—never how they can spend any less!”
She loosened her furs and settled herself in Gerty’s easy-chair, while her friend busied herself with the tea-cups.
“But what can they do—the Miss Silvertons? How do they mean to support themselves?” she asked, conscious that the note of irritation still persisted in her voice. It was the very last topic she had meant to discuss—it really did not interest her in the least—but she was seized by a sudden perverse curiosity to know how the two colourless shrinking victims of young Silverton’s sentimental experiments meant to cope with the grim necessity which lurked so close to her own threshold.
“I don’t know—I am trying to find something for them. Miss Jane reads aloud very nicely—but it’s so hard to find any one who is willing to be read to. And Miss Annie paints a little——”
“Oh, I know—apple-blossoms on blotting-paper; just the kind of thing I shall be doing myself before long!” exclaimed Lily, starting up with a vehemence of movement that threatened destruction to Miss Farish’s fragile tea-table.
Lily bent over to steady the cups; then she sank back into her seat. “I’d forgotten there was no room to dash about in—how beautifully one does have to behave in a small flat! Oh, Gerty, I wasn’t meant to be good,” she sighed out incoherently.
Gerty lifted an apprehensive look to her pale face, in which the eyes shone with a peculiar sleepless lustre.
“You look horribly tired, Lily; take your tea, and let me give you this cushion to lean against.”
Miss Bart accepted the cup of tea, but put back the cushion with an impatient hand.
“Don’t give me that! I don’t want to lean back—I shall go to sleep if I do.”