“It can’t be morning yet? It is hardly light.” She struggled with her drowsiness. “I don’t hear rain, do I?”
“There’s no saying what you hear, but it’s raining sure enough, a miserable morning for May.”
“May! But it is nearly June!”
“I’m not gainsaying the calendar.”
“Pull up the blind.”
A short time before she had gazed on a roseate dawn, now rain was driving pitilessly across the landscape, and all the sky was grey. No longer could she hear the breakers on the shore. All she heard was the rain. Stevens shut the window.
“You’d best not be getting up early. There’s nothing to get up for on a morning like this. It’s not as if you was in the habit of going to church.” Margaret was conscious of depression. Stevens’s grumbling kept it at bay, and she detained her on one excuse or another; tried to extract humour from her habitual dissatisfaction.
“It will be like this all day, you see if it isn’t. The rain is coming down straight, too, and the smoke’s blowing all ways.” She changed the subject abruptly, as maids will, intent on her duties. “I’ll have to be getting out your clothes. What do you think you’ll wear?”
“I meant to try my new whipcord.”
“With the wheat-ear hat! What’s the good of that if you won’t have a chance of going out?”