The letter ended by saying that, in spite of very grave and urgent preoccupations, Aunt Josephine would endeavour to draw a little of the old life round her, if her nieces would come and stay with her in Lowndes Square for a few weeks.
"A London season!" Bettina cried.
I looked up from the letter and saw my mother watching with hungry delight Bettina's face of rapture. Bettina had not looked like that since the Helmstones went away.
But the most marked change, after all, was in my mother herself.
When Eric came he was staggered. "I'll believe in miracles after this!"—and we joked about the Dynamism of Mind.
My mother had taken for granted that both Bettina and I would accept Aunt Josephine's invitation, though I said at once I could not leave home. My mother put this aside with: "Bettina go alone! A wild idea."
When the question came up again in Eric's presence I did not press it far. But, going downstairs, I asked him how was I to put it to my mother?
"Put what?" he asked.
"Why, the fact that we can't leave her. Or, at least, that I can't." I agreed Betty must go.
"So must you," he said. My heart beat faster. His villeggiatura was near the end. London, for me, meant Eric. "You need the change," he said, "more than Betty does."