She stood at the open window of the bedroom, staring with unseeing eyes; her thoughts were revolving round her own problems, but gradually the sights and sounds without won her to notice of them.  The back windows of the house looked on to other house-backs that formed a square well, wherein smaller, much lower roofs and flat expanses of ribbed leads and stable yards all huddled together in soft blue shadow.  Only an occasional chimney-pot, higher than its fellows, made a note of glowing orange where it pierced the slant of the evening sun:  To Blanche’s left there showed a pale gleam from the Thames between the house-backs of brownish-grey brick; to her right roof-tops and fantastic cowls were patterned in a flat purple tone against the luminous sky.  In the eaves the sparrows were chirping shrilly; one flew downwards so swiftly between Blanche’s eyes and the sky that his little body seemed nothing but a dark blot with a flickering upon either side of it.  The sight caught at her memory, and she had a quick vision of a day when she had lain upon a sloping cliff and watched the gulls wheel far above her, the light of the setting sun making their breasts and the underneath of their wings flash like silver.  A smaller bird had darted past, and then, as now, she had noted the curious effect of the solid little body flanked by that flickering which meant wings invisible through their own speed.  The surface of her mind was quick to respond to suggestion, and the thought of the country struck her as being an answer to the unspoken questionings that were pricking at her.  The West—­the land of ready sleep and sweet dreams.  So Ishmael had told her, and the way lay open if she chose to take it, a way that would not necessarily commit her to anything.  When she saw Ishmael in his own environment, then she would know whether it were worth it or not....

To blot herself out of existence for a few weeks, that was what it amounted to; there should be no such person as the town-ridden Blanche Nevill on the face of the earth.  She felt a delightful stirring of anticipation, and nothing had had power to awaken that emotion in her for several years.  Her own surroundings once shed, she would, she felt, meet a new world with all the hopes and dreams that had once been hers.  She was twenty-six years of age, though with her bland face she looked much younger; and the truth was she had no love for any work in itself, but only for the praise it brought her—­a temperament which can never make the artist, but results in the brilliant amateur.

She was sick of the stage, for no worthy captive of her bow and spear had presented himself, and she detected the dawning of criticism in the friends that had been so warm when she first met them in town.  Blanche was always posing, and people had found it out.  As a child she had played the misunderstood genius or shy mother’s darling as occasion demanded; she had posed with others till she was unable to do anything but pose with herself.  A few years, a very few years, ago, and even her own sex had had to admit her charm; now she was beginning to be played out, and she knew it.  Her triumphant personality always attracted attention, even when prettier and cleverer women were present, but it was a very critical attention she attracted now.