But if Connie was absorbed by finding relief in her emotions, and Muriel troubled by physical and mental weariness, Mrs. Hammond was fully alive to the possibilities of the situation. She, too, as both her daughters in their different ways had seen it, realized that Muriel and Connie were out of it in this war. She had seen the admiring group of friends round Daisy Weathergay, and the becoming uniform of Phyllis Marshall Gurney, but they summoned her like a call to arms. She wasted no time on tears nor vague repining. She drew her fur coat closer round her small, plump figure.
"Poor dears," she sighed appropriately. "Poor dears, this awful war!" Then, having disposed of her duty as a patriot, she continued, "Muriel, I've been thinking that since Aunt Rose has been so ill, and keeps on asking for some of us to go and see her, you and I might both go for a week to Scarborough before Christmas. What do you think?"
Muriel did not think anything much. Scarborough or Marshington was all the same to her, in a world where nothing ever happened in peace or war to draw her closer to the fullness of life which other people found and which her youth had promised. She stumbled along the sodden wood steps over the railway lines, having even forgotten that Godfrey Neale with the 1st Yorkshire Rangers was in camp three miles from Scarborough.
"Oh, I don't mind," she said, with the indifference that so much disheartened her poor mother; and splashed on, thinking of the cold, flat ham sandwiches and sugarless coffee awaiting them in the dining-room of Miller's Rise.
XVIII
Because Aunt Rose was not yet well, breakfast at 199 The Esplanade, Scarborough, was postponed until nine o'clock. Uncle George, of course, kept to his usual punctuality of half-past eight. Muriel at half-past seven that morning could hear him whistling cheerily as he trotted along to the bathroom.
She lay between linen sheets that felt chill and smooth. Her hot-water bottle had grown cold as a dead fish. Drowsily she moved it to the edge of the bed with her feet. She seemed to have lain like this all night, waiting for the maid to bring her water, and thinking sleepily of Godfrey Neale.
It had been such a funny evening. She and her mother and Uncle George had met him at the Princess Royal Hotel, and had dined together. A queer self-possession alien to her nature had seized upon Muriel. She remembered looking at her slim figure in the long glass of the corridor and thinking that she ought all her life to have worn that vivid cherry colour instead of blues and greys. It gave her a strange courage and merriment, so that she had laughed and talked, conscious of the flame of her bright dress, and feeling like a princess in a fairy tale suddenly released from her enchantment.
She had seen things about Godfrey too that she had never seen before. Most dearly she remembered how, when they were sitting in the lounge after dinner, his lean brown fingers had pressed the charred end of his cigarette into the saucer of his coffee-cup, and she had thought, "He is like that. When he has finished with a thing, he crushes it like that without thinking. He is not cruel, nor ungrateful, only a little stupid and lacking in imagination." She remembered the stories that Marshington told of his flirtations with Gladys Seton, and the Honourable Lucy Leyton, and then Phyllis Marshall Gurney. He had meant nothing. He simply had never given a thought to what they might have dreamed to be his meaning. She had felt old and very wise and disillusioned.
Then the orchestra played, and he had looked up suddenly, twisting his head and frowning and beating time against the arm of his chair. He said to Muriel: