It was impossible for Polly to disguise from herself the vast amount of pleasure her mother derived from the knowledge that Valentine was going to be so near to them.
“Tell your brother I am quite jealous of him,” she said, half laughingly, to Grace. “Mother even looks better when she knows she is going to see him.”
“I wish you shared her enthusiasm,” Grace said, dryly enough. “I should like to see an improvement in your looks, Polly.”
Polly opened her big eyes very wide.
“What is the matter with me, pray?”
“That is what I should like to know,” Grace replied. “Do you know you haven’t even the ghost of a color in your cheeks? And look at your hands, why, they are gone to nothing.”
“I am one of the lean kind, I fancy,” Polly said, indifferently; then earnestly, “but please, Grace, do not let mother know you don’t think I am looking very well. The truth is—I may as well confess to you, though I wouldn’t do so to your brother—this house bothers me a lot. I believe I have made a mistake, after all! Mother would have been better had I moved her to different surroundings; she is reminded every hour here of what she has lost. And apart from this, I find out I am not nearly so clever as I imagined I was.”
“I suppose you are like me in some things; you try to encompass difficulties, and will not see that they are difficulties till they get beyond you.”
Polly nodded her head.
“And this house has got beyond me, Grace; it is so much too big. I am sure we have a ton of dust to sweep up every week. It is getting shabbier and more dingy each day, and the atmosphere of it is so depressing, so—so blighting. You can’t think of all the wonderful ideas I had of utilizing the drawing room, and how they have all ended in nothing.”