“I never saw anything like them!” said Nora stoutly.
Constance Bledlow took no notice. She and Annette were chattering fast, and Nora could not understand a word. She stood by awkward and superfluous, feeling certain that the maid who was gesticulating, now towards the ceiling, and now towards the floor, was complaining both of her own room and of the kitchen accommodation. Her mistress listened carelessly, occasionally trying to soothe her, and in the middle of the stream of talk, Nora slipped away.
“It’s horrid!—spending all that money on yourself,” thought the girl of seventeen indignantly. “And in Oxford too!—as if anybody wanted such things here.”
Meanwhile, she was no sooner gone than her cousin sank down on the armchair, and broke into a slightly hysterical fit of laughter.
“Can we stand it, Annette? We’ve got to try. Of course you can leave me if you choose.”
“And I should like to know how you’d get on then!” said Annette, grimly, beginning again upon the boxes.
“Well, of course, I shouldn’t get on at all. But really we might give away a lot of these clothes! I shall never want them.”
The speaker looked frowning at the stacks of dresses and lingerie. Annette made no reply; but went on busily with her unpacking. If the clothes were to be got rid of, they were her perquisites. She was devoted to Constance, but she stood on her rights.
Presently a little space was cleared on the floor, and Constance, seeing that it was nearly seven o’clock, and the Hoopers supped at half past, took off her black dress with its crape, and put on a white one, high to the throat and long-sleeved; a French demi-toilette, plain, and even severe in make, but cut by the best dressmaker in Nice. She looked extraordinarily tall and slim in it and very foreign. Her maid clasped a long string of opals, which was her only ornament, about her neck. She gave one look at herself in the glass, holding herself proudly, one might have said arrogantly. But as she turned away, and so that Annette could not see her, she raised the opals, and held them a moment softly to her lips. Her mother had habitually worn them. Then she moved to the window, and looked out over the Hoopers’ private garden, to the spreading college lawns, and the grey front beyond.