Aunt Dot stroked in silence.
'Has your temperature been taken?' she asked presently.
'No,' whispered Lucy contentedly.
'Oughtn't you—' after another pause 'to see a doctor?'
'No,' whispered Lucy contentedly. Delicious, simply delicious, to lie like that having one's hair stroked back by Aunt Dot, the dear, the kind, the comprehensible.
'So sweet of you to come,' she whispered again.
Well, thought Miss Entwhistle as she sat there softly stroking and watching Lucy's face of complete content while she dozed off even after she was asleep the corners of her mouth still were tucked up in a smile—it was plain that Everard was making the child happy. In that case he certainly must be all that Lucy had assured her he was, and she, Miss Entwhistle, would no doubt very quickly now get fond of him. Of course she would. No doubt whatever. And what a comfort, what a relief, to find the child happy. Backgrounds didn't matter where there was happiness. Houses, indeed. What did it matter if they weren't the sort of houses you would, left to yourself, choose so long as in them dwelt happiness? What did it matter what their past had been so long as their present was illuminated by contentment? And as for furniture, why, that only became of interest, of importance, when life had nothing else in it. Loveless lives, empty lives, filled themselves in their despair with beautiful furniture. If you were really happy you had antlers.
In this spirit, while she stroked and Lucy slept, Miss Entwhistle's eye, full of benevolence, wandered round the room. The objects in it, after her own small bedroom in Eaton Terrace and its necessarily small furniture, all seemed to her gigantic. Especially the bed. She had never seen a bed like it before, though she had heard of such beds in history. Didn't Og the King of Bashan have one? But what an excellent plan, for then you could get away from each other. Most sensible. Most wholesome. And a certain bleakness about the room would soon go when Lucy's little things got more strewn about,—her books, and photographs, and pretty dressing-table silver.
Miss Entwhistle's eye arrived at and dwelt on the dressing-table. On it were two oval wooden-backed brushes without handles. Hairbrushes. Men's. Also shaving things. And, hanging over one side of the looking-glass, were three neckties.
She quickly recovered. Most friendly. Most companionable. But a feeling of not being in Lucy's room at all took possession of her, and she fidgeted a little. With no business to be there whatever, she was in a strange man's bedroom. She averted her eyes from Wemyss's toilet arrangements, they were the last things she wanted to see; and, in averting them, they fell on the washstand with its two basins and on an enormous red-brown indiarubber sponge. No such sponge was ever Lucy's. The conclusion was forced upon her that Lucy and Everard washed side by side.