She got up and ran up the broad and shallow stairs, knocked at her mother’s door, and, without waiting for an answer, entered the room.
“I say, mother,” she said.
Regina was standing before the glass, evidently in the act of taking the pins out of her hat. She turned round.
“You want me?” she asked. Her tone was quite pleasant and sweet, but there was an indefinable sense of woundedness about it which touched Julia to the very quick.
“Oh, I say, mother, I was beastly rude to you just now. But I didn’t mean to be.”
“I am sure you didn’t.”
“You see, when one has a mother that one thinks an awful lot of, and who always wears her hair the same, one feels sort of blank when she makes herself look different. But I was rude, and I’m awfully sorry; I didn’t mean it for that.”
She came to the side of the dressing-table and stood looking at her mother with honest, troubled eyes. Regina caught her by the hand and drew her to her ample bosom.
“I felt myself growing such a frump,” she said. “I don’t know when, I think it was about the time of Maudie’s wedding, that I felt, all at once, that I was getting into a fossil like all other women workers. I never saw it all those years till about that time, and I hated myself for being frumpy and ridiculous.”