Rush would go—rather!—but he laughed at the word "frightened."
"I'm not joking," she said, and reaching out she covered his hand, which rested on the cloth, with one of hers.
He flushed instantly at that; then said to the others with slightly elaborated surprise, "It is, cold, for a fact."
"So is the other one," said Paula. "For that matter, so are my feet. And getting colder every minute. Come along or we'll be late."
Mary branded this as a bit of rather crude coquetry. It wasn't conceivable that a professional opera singer of Paula's experience could look forward with any sort of emotion to the mere singing of a few songs to a group of familiar friends. It occurred to her, too, that Paula had calculated on her refusal to go to the matinée as definitely as on Aunt Lucile's and for a moment she indulged the idea of changing her mind and going along with them just to frustrate this design. Only, of course, it wouldn't work that way. She couldn't keep Rush from being taken away from her by playing the spoil-sport. She couldn't keep him anyhow she supposed. She made a hasty, rather forlorn retreat to her own room as soon as the departing pair were safely out of the house.
That room of hers exerted now a rather curious effect upon her mood. It had been hers ever since her promotion from the nursery and it, like her brother's adjoining, had been kept unchanged, unoccupied during her long absence.
The furniture and the decoration of it had been her mother's last Christmas present. The first Mrs. Wollaston had lived under the influence of the late Victorian esthetes, and Mary's room looked as if it had been designed for Elaine the lily maid of Astolat, an effect which was heightened by a large brown picture in a broad brown frame of Watts' Sir Galahad. After her mother's death, that winter, Mary added a Botticelli Madonna, the one with the pomegranate, which she hung by itself on a wall panel. There was a narrow black oak table under it to carry a Fra Angelico triptych flanked by two tall candlesticks. It wasn't exactly a shrine, even if there was a crimson cushion conveniently disposed before it, and if Mary for a while said her prayers there instead of in the old childish way at her bedside, and if she genuflected when she passed it, that was her own affair.
Coming to it now, as to port after storms, with the intention almost openly avowed to herself of lying down upon the bed and, for an hour or two, feeling as sorry for herself as she could, she found an appalling strangeness about its very familiarity that pulled her up short. The abyss she stared into between herself and the Mary Wollaston whose image was so sharply evoked by the ridiculously unchanged paraphernalia of that Mary's life, turned her giddy. Even the face which looked back at her from the frame of that mirror seemed the other Mary's rather than her own.
From the doorway she stood, for a moment, staring. Then she managed a smile (it was the only possible attitude to take) at Sir Galahad, above the bed. The notion of flinging herself down for a self-pitying revel upon that bed,—the other Mary's virginal little narrow bed—had become unthinkable. The thing to do was to stop thinking. Quickly.
She stripped off her suit and blouse, slipped on a pongee kimono that she got out of her hand-bag, unlocked her trunk and began discharging its contents all about the room. She covered the chairs with them, the bed, the narrow table—that had never had anything upon it but that Fra Angelico triptych and the two candlesticks—the round table with the reading lamp, the writing desk in the corner, the floor. Then, a little out of breath, she paused.