“I shouldn’t take it if I were you.  It’s too interesting.  It’ll keep you awake.”

“Oh, I’ll not sleep in any case.  I feel awful wakeful.  But it’ll be all right as soon as Richard comes.”

Her tone, betraying so unreproachfully that she quite expected that till then things would be all wrong, reminded Marion what evenings of aborted intimacies and passages of slow liking truncated by moments of swift dislike, had passed in this room whose appearance she had been watching with such satisfaction.  She reflected on the inertia which inanimate matter preserves towards the fret that animate creatures conduct in its midst, the refusal of the world to grow grey at anybody’s breath.  Exhibited by nature in the benedictions of sunlight that fall through the court windows on the criminal in the dock, or the rain that falls on the flags and Venetian masts of the civic festival, it has an air of irony.  But there is obstinacy about the way a chair keeps its high polish though its sitter cries her eyes red....  With alarm she perceived that she was showing a disposition to flee from a difficult situation into irrelevant thought, which she had always regarded as one of the most contemptible of male characteristics.  She checked herself sharply.  It was necessary that she should use the remaining moments of the evening in making Ellen like her.

“I think I’ll wish you good-night, Mrs. Yaverland,” said the girl.

“Let me come and see if you’ve got all you want.”

But there was nothing Ellen wanted.  She passed into the room of bright new things and sat down on her bed and expressed complete satisfaction in dogged tones.  “Indeed, that gas-fire’s sheer luxury,” she said, “for I’m strong as a horse.  Really, I’ve everything, thank you....”

“Let me brush your hair.”

As she took out the coarse black pins, her heart rejoiced because Richard would have all this beautiful hair to play with; yet as she brushed it out she wished that his thirst for beauty could have been gratified by some inorganic gorgeousness, some strip of cloth of gold in whose folds there would not lie any white triangle of a face that had to be understood and conciliated.  Her wish that it were so reminded her how much it was not so, and she bent forward and looked over the girl’s shoulder at her reflection in the glass.  “It is a face that believes there is no foe in the world with which one cannot fight it out,” she thought.  “Well, that is probably true for her.  I, with my foes who are a part of myself, am unusually cursed.  If these young people have ordinary luck they ought to make a fine thing of the world, and I will enjoy standing by and watching them.  Oh, I must make friends with her.  We have many things in common.  I will talk to her about the Suffragettes.  What shall I say about them?  I do honestly think that they are splendid women.  I think there was never anything so fine as the way they go out into the streets knowing they will be stoned....”  A memory overcame her.  “Ah!” she cried out, and laid down the brush.