CHAPTER XVI
TIME
1
February at St. Mary's Bay. The small fire flickered and fluttered in the grate with a sound like the windy beating of wings. The steady rain sloped against the closed windows of The Gulls, and dropped patteringly on the asphalt pavements of Marine Crescent outside, and the cold grey sea tumbled moaning.
Grandmama sat in her arm-chair by the hearth, reading the Autobiography of a Cabinet Minister's Wife and listening to the fire, the sea and the rain, and sleeping a little now and again.
Mrs. Hilary sat in another arm-chair, surrounded by bad novels, as if she had been a reviewer. She was regarding them, too, with something of the reviewer's pained and inimical distaste, dipping now into one, shutting it with a sharp sigh, trying another; flinging it on the floor with an ejaculation of anger and fatigue.
Grandmama woke with a start, and said "What fell? Did something fall?" and adjusted her glasses and opened the Autobiography again.
"A sadly vulgar, untruthful and ill-written book. The sort of autobiography Gilbert's wife will write when she has time. It reminds me very much of her letters, and is, I am sure, still more like the diary which she no doubt keeps. Poor Gilbert...." Grandmama seemed to be confusing Gilbert momentarily with the Cabinet Minister. "I remember," she went on, "meeting this young woman at Oxford, in the year of the first Jubilee.... A very bright talker. They can so seldom write...." She dozed again.
"Will this intolerable day," Mrs. Hilary enquired of the housemaid who came in to make up the fire, "never be over? I suppose it will be bed-time some time...."
"It's just gone a quarter past six, ma'am," said the housemaid, offering little hope, and withdrew.