Annette smiled. Musingly she said:
“What a silly question!”
Minna returned to Burdley Park little enlightened but uneasy and troubled. She went to the kitchen and worked, as she thought, very hard, and scolded the servant and lashed herself into a state of anger with things in general. By the evening she was entirely miserable. She sat down in her bedroom and wrote to Basil Haslam:
“I am miserable. Things are getting worse and worse. You have often scolded me for not taking things seriously enough. You little know me. Do men ever know women? Do they ever take women seriously? Don’t they always fall back on the woman’s instinct which they have invented as an excuse for their own silence and reticence? . . .
“I have been to see Annette. Poor child! It has upset me. I should like to see you—to-morrow, if possible. Can you come?
“Yours, M.”
She also wrote to Herbert Fry, on a sudden mischievous impulse which she did not take the trouble to understand, she enjoyed it so thoroughly:
“I am going to be married, and I hope to come to London. This place isn’t fit to live in, certainly not to be married in.”
Her pen scrawled triumphantly as she added:
“Kind regards to Mrs. Fry.
“Yours, M.”
She sent the letter to Mr. Fry’s office address in London Wall. She did not know where he lived.