"Well, why not?" Muriel clasped her necklace and set straight the things upon her dressing-table. She wished that this domestic wrangle had not come just when she was feeling calmer and more sane.
"Connie? On a farm? Well, now, Muriel, you do know her a little. And in any case, her father won't hear of it. The breeches, Muriel. And then, it isn't as if there wasn't plenty to do here. I'm sure that I could do with a little more help."
Muriel was ready to go downstairs. She shivered in the cold room. Her mother still talked.
"If only she would be reasonable. . . . So naughty to her father."
With Mrs. Hammond's complaints still trickling over her, Muriel went down to a supper of fish-pie and apple-tart. It somehow failed to stimulate her. Her father had gone out, as usual. Connie sat glum and injured, eating incredible quantities of fish-pie, to assert her independence.
Muriel lay afterwards in an arm-chair in front of the morning-room fire. There were magazines that Mrs. Hammond had collected for the Hospital, and Muriel loved magazines. She saw photographs of lovely ladies in pearls and white veils, "Working for our brave lads," "Helping with the wounded," "Among our hospitals." It had become fashionable for beauty to go meekly dressed, with clasped hands, and the light directed becomingly upon a grave profile.
"I ought to go to bed," she thought, but it was cold upstairs.
The lovely ladies soothed her. She almost forgot to think about Godfrey, and how she had let him go. She almost forgot the deathliness of spirit that her years of failure had left for her, and that had come between her and Godfrey, so that she could not hold him when he came. Indeed, she knew that she had lost him long before he came to her. But until he had kissed her, she had never looked like this into the future, to see how it held nothing more of life for her.
She lay back luxuriously, warming her toes, and letting the friendly heat of the fire steal through her body.
"Signora Clare Alvarados," she read, below a full page photograph of a most lovely lady, "is the daughter of Félix Duquesne, whose delightful comedies have taken by storm the French-speaking public. Signora Alvarados has recently returned to London to take part in the organization of concerts for our brave lads in the hospitals. All society is speaking of her beautiful soprano voice. It will be remembered that her husband was killed about a year ago in a tragic motor accident in Chile."