"It amuses me," she said, talking loudly, so that her words might reach Mary through the storm of the music, "to find that Agatha is just a woman, after all. It amuses me—and yet—it had been happier for you and me if she had contented herself with the unrealities of life a little longer."
Mary did not understand at the moment. She began to understand a little later when Mr. Jardine came. The novel, after all, had not been finished. For the last week or so before the visitor arrived her Ladyship had apparently lost interest in it.
"My brain has dried up, Mary," she said. "I should only spoil it if I went on. Put it away in a drawer, and when I feel like it we can go on again. You want a rest. I've over-tired you."
"I felt I couldn't rest till it was done," Mary said, with a little sigh. "I wanted to know what became of them all. And it is such an interesting point. Tell me, does Clotilde marry Mark, after all?"
"How should I know? I have nothing to do with what she does. Clotilde knows her own mind. I do not. Wait till we get back to it."
"Ah! you should finish it—you should finish it. You'll never get that young green world in it again. It was an inspiration. We should have held on to it like Jacob to the angel's robe."
But for the time Lady Agatha's literary energy was exhausted.
"I daresay there's a deal of fustian in it. There's sure to be," she said. "I don't think anything could be really good that was produced with so little pain. I daresay I'll be for tearing it up, so you'd better lock it away. Do you feel equal to walking ten miles? If not, get your bicycle and I'll walk beside you. I've been cramped up too long."
This time it was a mood of physical restlessness. She walked and rode and went out golfing, and played tennis, and rowed on the river, and did a thousand things, while Mrs. Morres made her delicate wheels and trefoils, and smiled a more Sibylline smile than ever.
At last he came. When the sound of his footstep and of his voice reached them where they stood in the drawing-room awaiting him, her Ladyship turned to Mary, and her face was full of an immense relief.