“Get away? But doesn’t he love this place?”
“No, he’s sick of it,” she said, still in the same indifferent voice. “We’re going to sell it, and move to London in the autumn.”
“But Robert was so wild to take it!”
“That was five years ago.”
“It’s perfectly lovely, of course,” returned her friend, glancing round her. “But you never wanted to come, I remember. You wanted so much to live in town. The discussion of town versus country was at its height when I left. So country won?”
“Yes, country won,” Cecily repeated.
“Well, it’s beautiful,” Rose repeated. “I never saw such flowers. What a gardener you must have!”
Cecily laughed. “I am the gardener. I do it nearly all myself.”
Rose’s astonishment kept her silent. Cecily, who knew nothing of country things! Cecily, who, in spite of her love for nature, belonged first to the town—to its life, its thoughts, its opportunities! To this meeting with the friend of her girlhood she had been looking forward for months, and she had met a stranger. She had foolishly expected to take up the thread of intimacy where she had dropped it, and in the interval a whole new pattern had been woven,—a pattern in faded colors, whose design she did not understand.
Cecily was obviously unhappy; obviously, also, she was keeping her at arm’s length, and with such success that she had not the courage to ask direct questions. With gratitude she hailed the appearance of a maid who came with tea, as a relief to her embarrassment—that terrible embarrassment one feels in the presence of a close friend to whose mind one has lost the key.