"You like pretty clothes." It was a careless effort to make conversation, but as he dropped into the armchair on the hearthrug, his face softened. There was a faint scent of violets in the air from a half-faded little bunch in Caroline's lap.
She met the question frankly. "On other people."
"Do you like nothing for yourself? You are so impersonal that I sometimes wonder if you possess a soul of your own."
"Oh, I like a great many things." Mammy Riah had brought tea, and Caroline put down her knitting and drew up to the wicker table. "I like books for instance. At The Cedars we used to read every evening. Father read aloud to us as long as he lived."
"Yet I never see you reading?"
"Not here." As she shook her head, the firelight touched her close, dark hair, which shone like satin against the starched band of her cap. Almost as white as her cap seemed her wide forehead, with the intense black eyebrows above the radiant blue of her eyes. "You see I want to finish these socks."
"I thought you were doing a muffler?"
"Oh, that's gone to France long ago! This is a fresh lot Mrs. Blackburn has promised, and Mrs. Timberlake and I are working night and day to get them finished in time. We can't do the large kind of work that Mrs. Blackburn does," she added, "so we have to make up with our little bit. Mrs. Timberlake says we are hewers of wood and drawers of water."
"You are always busy," he said, smiling. "I believe you would be busy if you were put into solitary confinement."
To his surprise a look of pain quivered about her mouth, and he noticed, for the first time, that it was the mouth of a woman who had suffered. "It is the best way of not thinking——" She ended with a laugh, and he felt that, in spite of her kindness and her capability, she was as elusive as thistle-down.