She had fallen away a little from her friends in Thurston Square.  In three years Fanny Eliott and her circle had grown somewhat unreal to her.  She had been aware of their inefficiency before.  There had been a time when she felt that Mrs. Eliott’s eminence had become a little perilous.  She herself had placed her on it, and held her there by a somewhat fatiguing effort of the will to believe.  She had been partly (though she did not know it) the dupe of Mrs. Eliott’s delight in her, of all the sweet and dangerous ministrations of their mutual vanities.  Mrs. Eliott had been uplifted by Anne’s preposterously grave approval.  Anne had been ravished by her own distinction as the audience of Fanny Eliott’s loftier and profounder moods.  There could be no criticism of these heights and depths.  To have depreciated Fanny Eliott’s rarity by a shade would have been to call in question her own.

But all this had ceased long ago, when she married Walter Majendie, and his sister became her dearest friend.  Fanny Eliott had always looked on Edith Majendie as her rival; retreating a little ostentatiously before her formidable advance.  There should have been no rivalry, for there had been no possible ground of comparison.  Neither could Edith Majendie be said to have advanced.  The charm of Edith, or rather, her pathetic claim, was that she never could have advanced at all.  To Anne’s mind, from the first, there had been no choice between Edith, lying motionless on her sofa by the window, and Fanny at large in the drawing-rooms of her acquaintances, scattering her profuse enthusiasms, revolving in her intellectual round, the prisoner of her own perfections.  To come into Edith’s room had been to come into thrilling contact with reality; while Fanny Eliott was for ever putting you off with some ingenious refinement on it.  Edith’s personality had triumphed over death and time.  Fanny Eliott, poor thing, still suffered by the contrast.

Of all Anne’s friends, the Gardners alone stood the test of time.  She had never had a doubt of them.  They had come later into her life, after the perishing of her great illusion.  The shock had humbled her senses and disposed her to reverence for the things of intellect.  Dr. Gardner’s position, as President of the Scale Literary and Philosophic Society, was as a high rock to which she clung.  Mrs. Gardner was dear to her for many reasons.

The dearness of Mrs. Gardner was significant.  It showed that, thanks to Peggy, Anne’s humanisation was almost complete.

To-day, which was Peggy’s birthday, Anne’s heart was light and happy.  She had planned, that, if the day were fine, the festival was to be celebrated by a picnic to Westleydale.

And the day was fine.  Majendie had promised to be home in time to start by the nine-fifty train.  Meanwhile they waited.  Peggy had helped Mary the cook to pack the luncheon basket, and now she felt time heavy on her little hands.