She evaded his eyes.
“I was getting settled, and studying, and learning to knit, and—oh, I'm the most wretched knitter, Clay! I just stick at it doggedly. I say to myself that hands that can play golf, and use a pen, and shoot, and drive a car, have got to learn to knit. But look here!”
She held up a forlorn looking sock to his amused gaze. “And I think I'm a clever woman.”
“You're a very brave woman, Audrey,” he said. “You'll let me come back, won't you?”
“Heavens, yes. Whenever you like. And I'm going to stop being a recluse. I just wanted to think over some things.”
On the way home he stopped at his florist's, and ordered a mass of American beauties for her on Christmas morning. She had sent her love to Natalie, so that night he told Natalie he had seen her, and such details of her life as he knew.
“I'm glad she's coming to her senses,” Natalie said. “Everything's been deadly dull without her. She always made things go—I don't know just how,” she added, as if she had been turning her over in her mind. “What sort of business did she want to see you about?”
“She has a girl she wants to get into the mill.”
“Good gracious, she must be changed,” said Natalie. And proceeded—she was ready to go out to dinner—to one of her long and critical surveys of herself in the cheval mirror. Recently those surveys had been rather getting on Clayton's nerves. She customarily talked, not to him, but to his reflection over her shoulder, when, indeed, she took her eyes from herself.
“I wonder,” she said, fussing with a shoulder-strap, “who Audrey will marry if anything happens to Chris?”