Georgie stared at her in round-eyed silence for a moment, struck by a weary something that was no more old than young, that was eternal, in Judith’s voice.  Suddenly the elder girl seemed so much woman as she lay there—­the everlasting feminine, the secret store of the knowledge of the ages....  Georgie, for all she was newly engaged, felt somehow like a little girl.  Judith’s long half-closed eyes met hers, but with no frank giving in their depths at the moment.  She was withdrawn and Georgie felt it.

“Well, I must get up,” said Judith suddenly.  “Clear out and see if you can hurry Mrs. Penticost over breakfast.”

Georgie went, and Judith slipped out of bed, and going to the window, examined her face in the clear morning light, lifting her hand-glass at many angles.

After her bath she took up the glass again and began with infinite care to rub in first rouge and then powder.  Gradually she became a less haggard-looking creature and the years seemed to fall away.  When she had done she examined herself anxiously.  The dread that her eye would get “out,” as Blanche’s had, was upon her.

Relieved by the scrutiny, she stepped into a soft rose cashmere frock and buttoned up the long, close-fitting bodice, settled the little ruffle at the throat, and adjusted with deft fingers the perky folds of the bustle.  “Making-up makes one look so much better that it makes one feel better,” she reflected.  She took a final look at herself in the dimpled glass that gave back her figure in a series of waves and angles, and suddenly she gave a little half-rueful laugh.  She was comparing herself with the slangy fresh girl downstairs, that product of the new decade, so different from the generation born only ten years before her.  Judith had spoken to this wholesome, adorably gauche young creature of truth, while, to maintain the thing that stood to her for light and food and truth itself, she had, amongst other shifts, to resort even to this daily paltering with the verities upon her face.

CHAPTER VIII

WHAT NICKY DID

Killigrew arrived a couple of days later, and Ishmael drove Georgie over to meet him.  Judith had refused to go and Georgie liked the idea of a drive.  Ishmael was still shy in Georgie’s presence, simply because he had never met anyone in the least like her.  He was only a matter of some thirteen or fourteen years her senior, but that made all the difference at that period.  Ishmael had been born in the midst of the dark, benighted ’forties; Georgie at the beginning of the ’sixties.  He had grown up before any of the reforms which made modern England; she had first become intelligently aware of the world at a time when nothing else was in the air, when even woman was beginning to feel her wings and be wishful to test them.  She was alarmingly modern, the emancipated young thing who began to blossom forth in the late ’seventies and early ’eighties;