As he stood, his hand gently held aside the spilled golden hair that almost hid her face.
“But you’ve got no right to look as white as this, my dear! You’ve given Smith an awful fright.”
“Oh, Smith!” she smiled up at him. “She ought to know better, I do think—that ever-anxious little Smith!”
“It’s really quite all right,” she assured him. “I’m apt to get like this now and then—more or less. I’ll just lie about in bed to-day, and to-morrow I’ll be as well as anything. Especially if you’ll read me out that new Shaw play Smith brought up from Brentano’s yesterday. But don’t read the preface, please, for he always gets so angry in his prefaces, and I couldn’t bear any one to be angry with me to-day.”
Ivor sat down on the edge of the bed. He took her hand, and looked very miserable.
“I feel a beast,” he said.
Virginia rapped his knuckles sharply with her brush. Virginia was angry.
“Don’t be silly, Ivor! What on earth has it to do with you?” And she opened her eyes very wide at him, and raised her eyebrows with the “Is this man mad?” look.
Then Smith came in with breakfast, which they had from a little table beside the bed. Virginia always took a large glass of milk at breakfast: to make her strong and fat, she said.
It was half-past nine by Ivor’s watch. He rose. “I will now dash down to Paris,” he told her sternly, “to have a little speech with Dr. David. And then Dr. David will dash up here to have a little speech with you.”