"Ye-e-e-s." Grisel looked up quickly from her ring, which she was twisting round her finger in the lamp light. "Oh, yes. Father will be pleased."
"They are great friends, aren't they?" her mother asked, as the clock struck half-past ten.
Grisel hesitated. "Well, I don't know that they are great friends," she said in a thoughtful voice. "Sir John is very different from father, you know. He's very dignified and rather stern, and he couldn't bear the Crichells. But father likes him, anyhow——"
"Well, come along, dear, we must get to bed. I don't know where anyone in the household is, but they've got keys, of course."
"Poor mother, you've been alone all day." There was sudden compunction in Grisel's voice as they went up the dark stairs to the ground floor.
"Oh, no. I haven't. I've not been alone at all," the mother answered gaily. "Caroline came to lunch and stayed all the afternoon. I just walked home with her——"
She would have liked to go into her child's bedroom with her on that important evening of her life, and help her undress, and even brush her hair, as one of the mothers in her own books would have done. But though she was old-fashioned herself, she knew that her daughter was not. So they kissed on the landing, and separated for the night without any further display of sentiment. But it was a long, long time before Violet Walbridge slept that Sunday. At half-past twelve she crept out and saw the light still burning in Grisel's room, and at two she did the same thing. Finally, knowing that she could not sleep, she put on her dressing-gown and padded softly upstairs in her old felt slippers to the room in the attic, and, having lit her lamp, did two hours hard work, while the winter sky was gradually drained of its darkness, and the clear grey that is neither darkness nor light took the place of the night, to give way slowly, as if reluctantly, to the morning.
She wrote rapidly, her face white and sharp, bent over the paper. She had forgotten now her sad conviction of the book's worthlessness. Words came out in a torrent, as if independently of herself, and her hand struggled to keep up with her ideas. She knew that this was the wrong way to write—that the great novelists whom she so admired worked carefully, measuring their words, weighing each one as if it was a pearl—her own facility having always been like that of an older child telling tales by the fire to the little ones. She had connected the mediocrity of her work with this fatal ease of narration. She had been scorned kindly (for one of her troubles had never been that horrid one of envy and bitterness in the minds of others) for this effortless facility, and she knew it. But now she could no more have held back for what she called polishing her phrases than a little brook in full freshet forcing itself into a pool. On and on she wrote, forgetting fatigue, forgetting her troubles, forgetting everything but the fate of the people she was describing, and at last, just as the clock struck five, her pen wrote "finis" to her twenty-third novel, and laid itself down. She sat for a moment staring at the paper, suddenly very tired, and conscious that her feet were numb with cold. She went to the window and looked out into the livid unfriendly light, and then, stuffing the manuscript into the drawer of her table, she crept downstairs.
As she went back to her room, it occurred to her that she had not heard Ferdie come in. He had slept on a camp bed in his dressing-room since his return, because of his cough, which, he said, troubled him a good deal at night.
She opened his door softly. He lay there asleep, with the growing daylight falling on his face. She stood for a moment, looking at him, wondering that she had not heard him come in, reproaching herself mildly for her indifference to him, and deliberately recalling him as he had been in the old days, when she first knew him.