My remark pleased her. She smiled graciously and said, “Ah, I had not got Mars rising in Capricorn for nothing when I was born.”
As we became more intimate she insisted on drawing out my horoscope, and after a week of intense mental activity produced a sort of cart wheel on paper at which I looked with respectful misgiving.
“I hope it does not say anything about my living anywhere except here,” I said anxiously.
I had long had a fear at the back of my mind that she might need my cottage for some benevolent scheme. Jimmy, who had always been fond of me, had let it to me at a nominal rent in his easygoing widower days, because the mild climate suited my rheumatism, and my society suited him. Round the cottage had gradually sprung up what many, though not Gertrude, considered a beautiful garden.
“No travelling at all,” she said, “no movement of any kind. And I am afraid, Anne, I can’t hold out the slightest hope of a marriage for you.”
“Since I turned forty I had begun to fear I might remain unwedded,” I remarked.
“No sign of marriage,” she said, exploring the cart wheel, “and there must have been considerable lethargy in the past when openings of this kind did occur. Your Venus seems for many years to have been in square to Neptune, and that would tend to make these chances slip away from you.”
“I endeavoured to pounce on them,” I said humbly. “My dear mother’s advice to me as to matrimony was ‘clutch while you can’—I assure you I left no stone unturned.”
“In that case you probably turned the wrong ones,” she said judicially. “And I am sorry to tell you that I don’t see any good fortune coming to you either, and rather bad health. In short, you will have a severe illness next spring. March especially will be a bad month for you. Your Moon will be going through Virgo, the sign of sickness.”
It generally was. I don’t mean my moon, but March. I rarely got through the winter without an attack of rheumatism at the end of it.