Irma turned from the window, and straightened her drooping figure. She took the lamp in her hand, and moved to the door.
“Good night, Giles! It does not matter, there is nothing to be done, you know—nothing.”
The voice sounded staccato, level, monotonous, as if the words were ground out of her; only her eyes, in the backward look she gave him, had meaning.
And from the bent figure, in the darkness of the room behind her, came a muttered word—“Nothing.”
CHAPTER IX
In her bedroom Jocelyn was thinking. The inner door stood open, and from the next room came a stream of murmured comments, broken now and then by a mumble, denoting pins in the mouth, or by the trickle of water into a basin. Mrs. Travis was going to bed; she loved to relieve the monotony of the process by discussion upon the events of the day, which never assumed such vast proportions as when she was taking her leave of them.
Jocelyn leant, in her night-dress, against her open window, smoking a tiny cigarette through a long amber mouthpiece. She drew at the cigarette, and, holding it far from her, puffed vigorously through her parted lips; the smoke, caught by the faint outdraught, blew harmlessly away in little wreaths and clouds.
Her aunt’s voice came to her in jerky, complacent periods.
“How hot the nights are getting! We can’t stay here much longer, my dear, nobody stays till June, it’s very late already. If it wasn’t for my new ‘system,’ I wouldn’t stay another day—I’m sure there’s something in it.” She appeared for a moment at the door with her arms raised rectangularly to her back hair.
“How thin Giles is growing!” she said in an injured voice, with a shrewd look at her niece. “It makes me quite uncomfortable to see him.”