CHAPTER FOUR
I
She needn’t have worried; neither Enid nor Dodo Mell asked a single question. Somewhere near ten o’clock Enid woke up and at once shook her sleepy friend, who, after putting on her spectacles and a lavender kimono, set to work to make coffee. And suddenly discovered Rosaleen asleep in a chair in the studio.
“Coffee, Rosaleen!” she called, cheerfully.
She awoke with a start and sat up, pale and dishevelled, in her party dress and slippers. But they showed no surprise. Breakfast was ready on a trunk in the back room and they all sat down to it, the benign Dodo in her kimono, Enid in a smock and petticoat, with her bare feet in mules, and Rosaleen with her incongruously dissipated look.
“Nice rolls!” said Enid. “Where’d you get them, Rosaleen?”
“A little new baker’s,” Rosaleen answered.
Never had her friends seemed so charming, or a feminine world so desirable. The coffee cheered her sad heart, and raised her spirits, and after she had bathed and dressed, she lost all sense of fatigue. She had, in fact, that false vigour one sometimes has after a sleepless night, that sensation of being all mind and spirit and no body.
“Ambrose is coming this afternoon!” called Miss Mell, suddenly, from her drawing, to Rosaleen washing handkerchiefs in the rusty sink.
“Who’s Ambrose?” she asked.