Strelsa's upper lip curled faintly, then the happy expression returned, and she watched the decorating of Molly until the maid turned her out in the perfection of grooming from crown to toe.
There was nobody in the music-room. Molly turned again to Strelsa as they entered:
"What a brute he is!—asking me to invite him here for dinner when Mary Ledwith has just arrived."
"Did he do that?"
"Yes. And his excuse was that he had an explanation to make you. What a sneaking way of doing it!"
Strelsa looked out of the dark window in silence.
Molly said: "I wish he'd go away, I never can look at him without thinking of Chester Ledwith—and all that wretched affair.... Not that I am sniffy about Mary—the poor little fool.... Anyway," she added naïvely, "old lady Sprowl has fixed her status and now we all know how to behave toward her."
Strelsa, arms clasped behind her back, came slowly forward from the window:
"What a sorry civilisation," she said thoughtfully, "and what sorry codes we frame to govern it."
"What?" sharply.