The door opened and Louise entered with an enigmatical look on her face. Louise had been listening outside for the tempestuous sounds that in her country would have issued from any two normal women under the same circumstances.
But no such sounds had reached her attentive ears, and here was Lady Dashwood moving about with a serene countenance. She was even smiling. Oh, what a country, what people!
CHAPTER VIII
THE LOST LETTER
The next morning it was still raining. It was a typical Oxford day, a day of which there are so many in the year that those who have best known Oxford think of her fondly in terms of damp sandstone.
They remember her gabled roofs, narrow pavements, winding alleys humid and shining from recent rain; her mullioned windows looking out on high-walled gardens where the over-hanging trees drip and drip in chastened melancholy. They remember her floating spires piercing the lowering sodden sky, her grey courts and solemn doorways, her echoing cloisters; all her incomparable monastic glory soaked through and through with heavy languorous moisture, and slowly darkening in a misty twilight.
It is this sobering atmosphere that has brought to birth and has bred the "Oxford tone;" the remorseless, if somewhat playful handling of ideas.
Gwendolen Scott was no more aware of the existence of an "Oxford tone," bred (as all organic life has been) in the damp, than was the maidservant who brought her tea in the morning; but she perceived the damp. She could see through the latticed windows of the breakfast-room that it rained, rained and rained, and the question was what she should do to make the time pass till they must start for Chartcote? No letter had yet come from her mother—and the old letter was still lost.