“Why don’t you lie the other way then?”

“My dear, Steven wouldn’t like that.  Oh, what a mess my hair’s in!”

She turned to the glass and smoothed her disordered waves and coils, while she kept her eyes fixed on Gwenda’s image there, appraising her clothes, her slenderness and straightness, the set of her head on her shoulders, the air that she kept up of almost insolent adolescence.  She noted the delicate lines on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes; she saw that her small defiant face was still white and firm, and that her eyes looked violet blue with the dark shadows under them.

Time was the only power that had been good to Gwenda.

“She ought to look more battered,” Mary thought.  “She does carry it off well.  And she’s only two years younger than I am.

“It’s her figure, really, not her face.  She’s got more lines than I have.  But if I wore that long straight coat I should look awful in it.”

“It’s all very well for you,” she said.  “You haven’t had two children.”

“No.  I haven’t.  But what’s all very well?”

“The good looks you contrive to keep, my dear.  Nobody would know you were thirty-three.”

“I shouldn’t, Molly, if you didn’t remind me every time.”

Mary flushed.

“You’ll say next that’s why you don’t come.”

“Why—­I—­don’t come?”

“Yes.  It’s ages since you’ve been here.”

That was always Mary’s cry.

“I haven’t much time, Molly, for coming on the off-chance.”

“The off chance!  As if I’d never asked you!  You can go to Alice.”

“Poor Ally wouldn’t have anybody to show the baby to if I didn’t.  You haven’t seen one of Ally’s babies.”

“I can’t, Gwenda.  I must think of the children.  I can’t let them grow up with little Greatorexes.  There are three of them, aren’t there?”

“Didn’t you know there’s been another?”

“Steven did tell me.  She had rather a bad time, hadn’t she?”

“She had.  Molly—­it wouldn’t do you any harm now to go and see her.  I think it’s horrid of you not to.  It’s such rotten humbug.  Why, you used to say I was ten times more awful than poor little Ally.”

“There are moments, Gwenda, when I think you are.”

“Moments?  You always did think it.  You think it still.  And yet you’ll have me here but you won’t have her.  Just because she’s gone a technical howler and I haven’t.”

“You haven’t.  But you’d have gone a worse one if you’d had the chance.”

Gwenda raised her head.

“You know, Molly, that that isn’t true.”

“I said if.  I suppose you think you had your chance, then?”

“I don’t think anything.  Except that I’ve got to go.”

“You haven’t.  You’re going to stay for dinner now you’re here.”

“I can’t, really, Mary.”

But Mary was obstinate.  Whether her sister stayed or went she made it hard for her.  She kept it up on the stairs and at the door and at the garden gate.