“Who is your husband?” asked Mrs. Fisher, carefully adjusting another nut between the crackers.

“Who should he be,” said Rose quickly, roused at once by Mrs. Fisher to irritation, “except Mr. Arbuthnot?”

“I mean, of course, what is Mr. Arbuthnot?”

And Rose, gone painfully red at this, said after a tiny pause, “My husband.”

Naturally, Mrs. Fisher was incensed.  She couldn’t have believed it of this one, with her decent hair and gentle voice, that she too should be impertinent.

Chapter 14

That first week the wistaria began to fade, and the flowers of the Judas-tree and peach-trees fell off and carpeted the ground with rose-colour.  Then all the freesias disappeared, and the irises grew scarce.  And then, while these were clearing themselves away, the double banksia roses came out, and the big summer roses suddenly flaunted gorgeously on the walls and trellises.  Fortune’s Yellow was one of them; a very beautiful rose.  Presently the tamarisk and the daphnes were at their best, and the lilies at their tallest.  By the end of the week the fig-trees were giving shade, the plum-blossom was out among the olives, the modest weigelias appeared in their fresh pink clothes, and on the rocks sprawled masses of thick-leaved, star-shaped flowers, some vivid purple and some a clear, pale lemon.

By the end of the week, too, Mr. Wilkins arrived; even as his wife had foreseen he would, so he did.  And there were signs almost of eagerness about his acceptance of her suggestion, for he had not waited to write a letter in answer to hers, but had telegraphed.

That, surely, was eager.  It showed, Scrap thought, a definite wish for reunion; and watching his wife’s happy face, and aware of her desire that Mellersh should enjoy his holiday, she told herself that he would be a very unusual fool should he waste his time bothering about anybody else.  “If he isn’t nice to her,” Scrap thought, “he shall be taken to the battlements and tipped over.”  For, by the end of the week, she and Mrs. Wilkins had become Caroline and Lotty to each other, and were friends.

Mrs. Wilkins had always been friends, but Scrap had struggled not to be.  She had tried hard to be cautious, but how difficult was caution with Mrs. Wilkins!  Free herself from every vestige of it, she was so entirely unreserved, so completely expansive, that soon Scrap, almost before she knew what she was doing, was being unreserved too.  And nobody could be more unreserved than Scrap, once she let herself go.

The only difficulty about Lotty was that she was nearly always somewhere else.  You couldn’t catch her; you couldn’t pin her down to come and talk.  Scrap’s fears that she would grab seemed grotesque in retrospect.  Why, there was no grab in her.  At dinner and after dinner were the only times one really saw her.  All day long she was invisible, and would come back in the late afternoon looking a perfect sight, her hair full of bits of moss, and her freckles worse than ever.  Perhaps she was making the most of her time before Mellersh arrived to do all the things she wanted to do, and meant to devote herself afterwards to going about with him, tidy and in her best clothes.