Their hand-grasp was very intimate and mutually comprehending.  He was pleased by the quick responsiveness of her temperament, and the masterful vigour which occasionally flashed out in her replies.  He noticed the hardly perceptible distortion of her handsome, worn face, and he said to himself:  “She’s been through a thing or two,” and:  “She’ll have to mind her p’s and q’s.”  Sophia was pleased because he admired her, and because with her he dropped his bedside jocularities, and talked plainly as a sensible man will talk when he meets an uncommonly wise woman, and because he echoed and amplified her own thoughts.  She honoured him by standing at the door till he had driven off.

For a few moments she mused solitary in the parlour, and then, lowering the gas, she went upstairs to her sister, who lay in the dark.  Sophia struck a match.

“You’ve been having quite a long chat with the doctor,” said Constance.  “He’s very good company, isn’t he?  What did he talk about this time?”

“He wanted to know about Paris and so on,” Sophia answered.

“Oh!  I believe he’s a rare student.”

Lying there in the dark, the simple Constance never suspected that those two active and strenuous ones had been arranging her life for her, so that she should be jolly and live for twenty years yet.  She did not suspect that she had been tried and found guilty of sinful attachments, and of being in a rut, and of lacking the elements of ordinary sagacity.  It had not occurred to her that if she was worried and ill, the reason was to be found in her own blind and stupid obstinacy.  She had thought herself a fairly sensible kind of creature.

III

The sisters had an early supper together in Constance’s bedroom.  Constance was much easier.  Having a fancy that a little movement would be beneficial, she had even got up for a few moments and moved about the room.  Now she sat ensconced in pillows.  A fire burned in the old-fashioned ineffectual grate.  From the Sun Vaults opposite came the sound of a phonograph singing an invitation to God to save its gracious queen.  This phonograph was a wonderful novelty, and filled the Sun nightly.  For a few evenings it had interested the sisters, in spite of themselves, but they had soon sickened of it and loathed it.  Sophia became more and more obsessed by the monstrous absurdity of the simple fact that she and Constance were there, in that dark inconvenient house, wearied by the gaiety of public-houses, blackened by smoke, surrounded by mud, instead of being luxuriously installed in a beautiful climate, amid scenes of beauty and white cleanliness.  Secretly she became more and more indignant.

Amy entered, bearing a letter in her coarse hand.  As Amy unceremoniously handed the letter to Constance, Sophia thought:  “If she was my servant she would hand letters on a tray.” (An advertisement had already been sent to the Signal.)