There was no colour in Laura Pavely's face, but her eyes, heavy-lidded, and fringed with eyelashes darker than her hair, were deeply blue.
To-night she was wearing a very simple evening dress, a white chiffon tea-gown with a long black lace coat. The under dress was almost high to the throat, but beneath the black lace the wearer's arms, soft, dimpled, and rounded, were bare to the shoulder, and gleamed palely, revealingly.
Mrs. Tropenell wondered whether Laura knew that her arms were unusually lovely; then, for she was a very honest woman, her conscience rebuked her. Laura's faults with regard to men were faults of omission, not of commission. Of course she was aware—she could not help being aware—that she was a singularly attractive and distinguished-looking creature. But she had always taken her own beauty, her own distinction, just as she did the rare, distinctive features of her garden, and the perhaps over-studied charm of her house—as something to be tended and kept beautiful, but also to be guarded from alien indifferent eyes.
Perhaps because in these days every intelligent woman claims to be picturesque and witty—beauty, sheer beauty, is somewhat under the weather. Laura Pavely, to use the current jargon of her day, was not a "success." She was thought to be affected, "deep," prudish, whereas she was simply indifferent to the more commonplace human elements about her.
Her marriage had withdrawn her from the circle of the old friends and neighbours among whom she had been brought up, in a measure because none of them could "do," excepting in a very casual and cursory sense, with Godfrey Pavely. The world of his youth, the little world in and about the country town of Pewsbury, to which he had introduced her as a bride with such exultant complacency, found her not only disagreeably superior, but also dull. Besides, during the early days of her marriage she had been too bewildered by the conditions of her new life, and of her relationship with her husband, to trouble about making new friends, or even new acquaintances.
And so it was that in any intimate sense Mrs. Tropenell was still Laura's only close friend, but the younger woman was rather pathetically aware of how little she really possessed of the older woman's heart, how constantly she was compared, and ever to her detriment, to her dead mother, even how unconscious a rival in the older woman's favour was Laura's own child—merry, cheerful, loving little Alice.
"Aunt Letty? I didn't see you were there."
Laura Pavely had a delightful voice—low, clear, vibrating. It was a voice which sometimes seemed to promise more depth of feeling than its owner ever chose to betray.
As she stooped to kiss Mrs. Tropenell, Laura let herself slide down on to the floor. She knelt there for a moment, and the light gleamed on her fair hair and upturned face. "Alice sent you her love," she said softly, "heaps of love. She's better to-night, though not quite well yet!" And then, as there came a sound of quick footsteps across the hall, she rose, and drew herself up to her full height, with the grace of movement and the absence of flurry which were both so characteristic of her.