But the “sick little pain” was not to be tamed into regularity so easily as all that, and it cared nothing for pacts. Virginia’s body was rebellious of Virginia’s heart. And London saw them long before October; it saw them approaching from the sky in a wide-winged, colourless thing which many men had died to make so convenient for Ivor and Virginia.
Maybe Virginia had not been quiet enough. Although she very seldom left the studio and its little garden over Paris, maybe she had not been quiet enough. Le docteur David, on every one of her weekly visits, reminded her—and sometimes Ivor, when he accompanied her—of his urgent command. But, as Dr. David himself had said, these things are very difficult. And Ivor and Virginia were in love.
Everything seemed to be going very well until a certain morning in July. Ivor was leisurely dressing—with one arm one dresses either very leisurely or very frantically—in his little room off the gallery, when the Smith came in. She would often come in thus, of a morning or evening, to help him with his tie or suchlike; for though Ivor was now very expert in managing his clothes, he was not averse from a little help from the amiable Smith. But she looked concerned this morning.
“Milady is not well to-day,” she said.
“Why, what’s the matter, Smith?”
“Milady is too pale,” Smith said mysteriously.
And indeed, when in a few minutes he came down into the studio, Virginia was “too pale.” She lay propped up in the bed—that which was “a lovely divan by day”—and her face was whiter than the pillows behind her head.
“This bed is not going to be a divan to-day,” she turned her head to him to say, as he came down the little stairway. And she smiled at his concern through the loose mass of her hair, for she was brushing it. Whenever Virginia felt tired and lazy in bed she would brush her hair for a long time, with a very special and hard brush; and as she brushed it she would incline her head a little this and that way, peering at you the while through the golden mesh, which shone gloriously with the brushing.
“But, Virginia!” he cried, beside her bed: “are you very ill?”
“Not awfully,” said Virginia.