“You must be very stupid, then. I give leave to any one of you to explain why I said ‘Bah,’” and Sir John stumped out of the room.
“Really, your father is impossible,” sighed Lady Alard.
Mary did not talk much—her tongue skimmed the surface of Christmas: the dances they had been to, the people they had had to dinner. She looked fagged and anxious—strung. At her first opportunity she went upstairs to take off her travelling clothes and dress for dinner. Of dressing and undressing Mary made always a lovely ceremony—very different from Jenny’s hasty scuffle and Doris’s veiled mysteries. She lingered over it as over a thing she loved; and Jenny loved to watch her—all the careful, charming details, the graceful acts and poses, the sweet scents. Mary moved like the priest of her own beauty, with her dressing table for altar and her maid for acolyte—the latter an olive-skinned French girl, who with a topknot of black hair gave a touch of chinoiserie to the proceedings.
When Mary had slipped off her travelling dress, and wrapped in a Mandarin’s coat of black and rose and gold, had let Gisèle unpin her hair, she sent the girl away.
“Je prendrai mon bain à sept heures—vous reviendrez.”
She leaned back in her armchair, her delicate bare ankles crossed, her feet in their brocade mules resting on the fender, and gazed into the fire. Jenny moved about the room for a few moments, looking at brushes and boxes and jars. She had always been more Mary’s friend than Doris, whose attitude had that peculiar savour of the elder, unmarried sister towards the younger married one. But Jenny with Mary was not the same as Jenny with Gervase—her youth easily took colour from its surroundings, and with Mary she was less frank, more hushed, more unquiet. When she had done looking at her things, she came and sat down opposite her on the other side of the fire.
“Well—how’s life?” asked Mary.
“Oh, pretty dull.”
“What, no excitements? How’s Jim?”
“Oh, just the same as usual. He hangs about, but he knows it’s no good, and so do I—and he knows that I know it’s no good, and I know that he knows that I know—” and Jenny laughed wryly.