"She wants the Man-with-the-Stick," he briefly summed up Muriel.
Mrs. Carmichael did not pursue that idea. It was so bluntly lowering to the dignity of Womanhood as to make her feel mildly uncomfortable. There were wife-beaters in the slums—very sad—but she always closed fastidious eyes to the thought that among Us, also, the thing called Human Nature could betray itself in crude unmentionable ways.
Exploited as it might be in these days, Human Nature always seemed to her to have an undressed sound.
Her own marriage had been a reticent affair: separate dressing-rooms and so on.
There was something about Muriel, though her father's first cousin was an Earl, which reminded one of the pictures kept in the house because they were classical but which one did not look at very closely and hung in darkish corners of the landing. Necessary to Art but hardly to Life.
* * * * * *
While Cyprian was laying in stocks of quinine, dark glasses and thin pyjamas, and the Carmichaels were busily embracing relations whom they never set eyes on except at the "Ave atque Vale" occupying the two separate ends of their four-yearly "leaves," and while Peter was interesting himself in illicit Natural History during class hours, and Ferlie in members of her own sex as a regiment, in class and out, Muriel was brooding over her bones and finding them tasteless.
She came out of her bath one morning after washing her hair and, having given the damp cloud a desultory rub with a large fluffy towel, tossed that shield from her and paused before the long pier-glass.
"And God, who made that body for delight"—
She quoted under her breath—