“Your mother’s coming to tea on Thursday, Gilbert.  Tea with me.  She says she wants a talk.  I feel flattered.  She says nothing about wanting to see you, so you’d better leave us alone, anyhow for a bit.”

Rosalind’s beautiful bistre-brown eyes smiled.  She enjoyed her talks with her mother-in-law; they furnished her with excellent material, to be worked up later by the raconteuse’s art into something too delicious and absurd.  She enjoyed, too, telling Mrs. Hilary the latest scandals; she was so shocked and disgusted; and it was fun dropping little accidental hints about Nan, and even about Gilbert.  Anyhow, what a treasure of a relic of the Victorian age!  And how comic in her jealousy, her ingenuous, futile boasting, her so readily exposed deceits!  And how she hated Rosalind herself, the painted, corrupt woman who was dragging Gilbert down!

“Whatever does she want a talk about?” Rosalind wondered.  “It must be something pretty urgent, to make her put up with an hour of my company.”

4

At four o’clock on Thursday afternoon Rosalind went upstairs and put on an extra coating of powder and rouge.  She also blackened her eyelashes and put on her lips salve the colour of strawberries rather than of the human mouth.  She wore an afternoon dress with transparent black sleeves through which her big arms gleamed, pale and smooth.  She looked a superb and altogether improper creature, like Lucrezia Borgia or a Titian madonna.  She came down and lay among great black and gold satin cushions, and lit a scented cigarette and opened a new French novel.  Black and gold was her new scheme for her drawing-room; she had had it done this spring.  It had a sort of opulent and rakish violence which suited her ripe magnificence, her splendid flesh tints, her brown eyes and corn-gold hair.  Against it she looked like Messalina, and Gilbert like rather a decadent and cynical pope.  The note of the room was really too pronounced for Gilbert’s fastidious and scholarly eloquence; he lost vitality in it, and dwindled to the pale thin casket of a brain.

And Mrs. Hilary, when she entered it, trailing in, tall and thin, in her sagging grey coat and skirt, her wispy grey hair escaping from under her floppy black hat, and with the air of having till a moment ago been hung about with parcels (she had left them in the hall), looked altogether unsuited to her environment, like a dowdy lady from the provinces, as she was.

Rosalind came forward and took her by the hands.

“Well, mother dear, this is an unusual honour.... How long is it since we last had you here?”

Rosalind, enveloping her mother-in-law in extravagant fragrance, kissed her on each cheek.  The kiss of Messalina!  Mrs. Hilary glanced at the great mirror over the fireplace to see whether it had come off on her cheeks, as it might well have done.

Rosalind placed her on a swelling, billowy, black and gold chair, piled cushions behind her shoulders, made her lie back at an obtuse angle, a grey, lank, elderly figure, strange in that opulent setting, her long dusty black feet stretched out before her on the golden carpet.