"Why not wear your black velvet?"
"Too obvious a pis aller. I have not enough diamonds to carry off black velvet."
"But your fine old lace—rose-point, I think you call it—surely that would carry off black velvet for once in a way."
"My dear Conrad, Lady Ellangowan knows my rose-point by heart. She always compliments me about it—an artful way of letting me know often she has seen it. 'Oh there is that rose-point of yours, dear Mrs. Winstanley; it is too lovely.' I know her! No, Conrad; I will not go to the Ellangowans in a dress made last year; or in any réchauffé of velvet and lace. I hope I have a proper pride that would always preserve me from humiliation of that kind. Besides, I am not strong enough to go to parties. You may not believe me, Conrad, but I am really ill."
The Captain put on an unhappy look, and murmured something sympathetic: but he did not believe in the reality of his wife's ailments. She had played the invalid more or less ever since their marriage; and he had grown accustomed to the assumption as a part of his wife's daily existence—a mere idiosyncrasy, like her love of fine dress and strong tea. If at dinner she ate hardly enough for a bird, he concluded that she had spoiled her appetite at luncheon, or by the consumption of sweet biscuits and pound-cake at five o'clock. Her refusal of all invitations to dinners and garden-parties he attributed to her folly about dress, and to that alone. Those other reasons which she put forward—of weakness, languor, low spirits—were to Captain Winstanley's mind mere disguises for temper. She had not, in her heart of hearts, forgiven him for closing Madame Theodore's account.
Thus, wilfully blind to a truth which was soon to become obvious to all the world, he let the insidious foe steal across his threshold, and guessed not how soon that dark and hidden enemy was to drive him from the hearth by which he sat, secure in self-approval and sagacious schemes for the future.
Once a week, through all the long year, there had come a dutiful letter from Violet to her mother. The letters were often brief—what could the girl find to tell in her desert island?—but they were always kind, and they were a source of comfort to the mother's empty heart. Mrs. Winstanley answered unfailingly, and her Jersey letter was one of the chief events of each week. She was fonder of her daughter at a distance than she had ever been when they were together. "That will be something to tell Violet," she would say of any inane bit of gossip that was whispered across the afternoon tea-cups.