She had slept at Dover, and had come to London by an afternoon train. She liked even the hotel at Dover better than this great house in Grosvenor Square. There she had at least the sea to look at, and not this splendid loneliness.
"Well," she thought, with a long-drawn sigh, "I must plunge into the vortex again, another mill-round of lunches and dinners, theatres and dances, park and Princes', Ranelagh and Hurlingham—the same things over and over and over and over again. But, after all, I enjoy the nonsense while I am in it, enjoy it just as much as the other people do. We all go dancing round the fashionable maypole, in and out, left hand here, right hand there, smiling, smiling, smiling, and quite satisfied while it lasts. We only pretend to be bored."
The little drawing-room—twenty feet by fifteen—looked almost comfortable. There was a bright fire in the low grate, reflected dazzlingly in turquoise tiles, and the old-fashioned bow window was filled with a bank of flowers, which shut out the view of the chimneys and the great glass roof over the stable-yard.
Lady Perivale sank into one of her favourite chairs, and poured out a cup of tea.
"Toujours cet azur banal," she said to herself, as she looked at the pale blue china, remembering a line of Coppée's. "Poor Hector chose this turquoise because he thought it suited my complexion, but how ghastly it will make me look when I am old—to be surrounded by a child-like prettiness—vouée au bleu, like a good little French Catholic!"
The butler came in with her letters. Three, on a silver salver that looked much too large for them.
"These cannot possibly be all, Johnson," she said; "Mrs. Barnes must have the rest."
"Mrs. Barnes says these are all the letters, my lady."
"All! There must be some mistake. You had better ask the other servants."
Her butler and her maid had been with her in Italy—no one else; the butler, elderly and devoted, a man who had grown up in the Perivale family; her maid, also devoted, a native of her father's parish, whom she had taught as a child in the Sunday school, when scarcely more than a child herself, not a very accomplished attendant for a woman of fashion, but for a parson's daughter, who wore her own hair and her own eyebrows, the country-bred girl was handy enough, nature having gifted her with brains and fingers that enabled her to cope with the complicated fastenings of modern frocks, changing every season.