“And the services? Do you go to the services too?”
“Of course, and enjoy them so much that they have fond hopes of converting me altogether. They won’t; but that’s a detail. Thank goodness, I am so constituted that it’s always the similarity between creeds that strikes me, never the difference, so I find help in them all... We’ll allow a month for the convent,—I can’t decently recover from a nervous breakdown in less than a month,—but we’ll take a few days off now and then for excursions in the neighbourhood, and then, darling, we come home by Paris! Food for the spirit, and food for the flesh... Nothing is more reviving than a becoming hat. We’ll buy hats, Cassandra, and be blowed to expense... What’s the very most you have ever spent on a hat?”
“I never have told, and I never will,” Cassandra said firmly, “but it had a real lace veil.” She sighed with melancholy resignation. “Somehow, Grizel, even hats lose their savour, when there’s no one to care...”
“Rubbish!” cried Grizel tersely, “and you know it. A woman buys hats to please herself. Half the time her husband calls them ‘The Limit’! and her friends wonder how she can, but so long as she and the mirror are agreed, it doesn’t make a rap of difference. She wears it to the end... Cassandra, darling, I feel it in my bones that I’m going to find the hat of my life! Oughtn’t we to be dreadfully thankful that we go in for different styles? All would be over between us, if we fell in love with the same model!”
Chapter Thirty Three.
“It’s Just—Life!”
Grizel came slowly down the long, straight path leading from the convent to the orchard wall, which marked the boundary of the grounds. It was a high wall rising some eight or ten feet above the path, and serving as a support for fruit trees, but at the farther end a sloping gangway of grass led to a terraced walk from which a view could be obtained over the low-lying country stretching towards the sea. On the terrace stood Cassandra, her white figure strongly outlined against the blue of the skies. She turned at her friend’s approach, and beheld that in Grizel’s eyes which startled her into attention.
“You have something to tell me?”