It was true, the likeness was striking. Virginia even coloured slightly as she gazed. "Chocolate box!" said she disdainfully. "Greuze is only pretty-pretty! I would far rather be like Isabella de Vos!"
As she spoke she moved away with her undulating grace, the lame man having again approached nearer than was quite consistent with good manners.
"That's the worst of you, Virginia—you can't go about without dragging backwards the heads of all the men that pass," said Mims in injured tones.
"Talk about glass-houses!" was her friend's sarcastic response, adding with a little sigh: "Well, you won't long be troubled. Cinderella's clock strikes to-morrow, and I go back to Wayhurst and my native obscurity."
Miriam's soft, dark eyes clouded.
"Native obscurity! No, my dear, that's the tragedy! You were not born to it, and you will never thrive in it! Oh, the pity! I could cry when I think of you, mewed up in that wee brick-box of a villa, and when I remember that it's not much more than two years ago since we were staying with you at Lissendean—riding, hunting, motoring!"
"Don't talk of it, Mimsie, for pity's sake! It can't be helped, you know; and, of course, it isn't half as bad for me as for poor mother."
Mims made a grumpy sound. She was depressed, not only by her friend's impending departure, but by the thought of that friend's destiny.
Virginia Mynors, in the days when she and Miriam Rosenberg were at school together, had been queen of everything. She was the elder daughter of a county gentleman, her clothes came from the best places, she took all the extras, rode, swam, hunted—with no more thought of ways and means than her present appearance led one to suppose.
During the weary days of her father's long illness—a kind of creeping paralysis which lasted for two years—Virginia had known that he had money troubles. But though she had been his devoted nurse and trusted secretary, she was no more prepared than was her butterfly mother for the state of financial catastrophe revealed at his death. The solid ground had failed beneath her feet. Everything was gone. Even Lissendean, the home in which she had been born, was mortgaged. They all moved out, the house was let, and upon the few hundreds a year received as rent her mother, herself, her brother Antony, and her little sister Pansy, were to live.