Ah, well—
“Aline!”
After all, there was the sun in her window, there was the triangular glimpse of blue wind-bitten sea between the roofs, and a new day beginning, and hot chocolate coming, and a new hat to try on at the milliner’s, and—
“Aline!”
She had come to this cheap hotel just in order to keep her maid. One couldn’t afford everything, especially since the war, and she preferred veal for dinner every night to having to do her own mending and dress her hair: the unmanageable abundant hair which had so uncannily survived her youth, and sometimes, in her happier moods, made her feel that perhaps, after all, in the eyes of her friends, other of its attributes survived also. And besides, it looked better for a lone woman who, after having been thirty-nine for a number of years, had suddenly become forty-four, to have a respectable-looking servant in the background; to be able, for instance, when one arrived in new places, to say to supercilious hotel-clerks: “My maid is following with the luggage.”
“Aline!”
Aline, ugly, neat and enigmatic, appeared with the breakfast-tray. A delicious scent preceded her.
Mrs. Clephane raised herself on a pink elbow, shook her hair over her shoulders, and exclaimed: “Violets?”
Aline permitted herself her dry smile. “From a gentleman.”
Colour flooded her mistress’s face. Hadn’t she known that something good was going to happen to her that morning—hadn’t she felt it in every touch of the sunshine, as its golden finger-tips pressed her lids open and wound their way through her hair? She supposed she was superstitious. She laughed expectantly.