f doubting the
reality of her own experiences, she was convinced that her experiences
were more real than those of any other created girl, and hence she
felt a slight condescension towards all the rest. "I am a married
woman," she reflected at intervals, with intense momentary pride.
And her fits of confusion in public would end in recurrences of this
strange, proud feeling.

Then she had to face the return to Bursley, and, later, the At Home
which Louis propounded as a matter of course, and which she knew to be
inevitable. The house was her toy, and Mrs. Tams was her toy. But
the glee of playing with toys had been overshadowed for days by the
delicious dread of the At Home. "It will be the first caller that will
kill me," she had said. "But will anybody really come?" And the first
caller had called. And, finding herself still alive, she had become
radiant, and often during the afternoon had forgotten to be clumsy.
The success of the At Home was prodigious, startling. Now and then
when the room was full, and people without chairs perched on the end
of the Chesterfield, she had whispered to her secret heart in a tiny,
tiny voice: "These are my guests. They all treat me with special
deference. I am the hostess. _I am Mrs. Fores_." The Batchgrew
clan was well represented, no doubt by order from authority, Mrs.
Yardley came, in surprising stylishness. Visitors arrived from Knype.
Miss Malkin came and atoned for her historic glance in the shop. But
the dazzlers were sundry male friends of Louis, with Kensingtonian
accents, strange phrases, and assurance in the handling of teacups and
the choosing of cake.... One by one and two by two they had departed,
and at last Rachel, with a mind as it were breathless from rapid
flittings to and fro, was seated alone on the sofa.

She was richly dressed in a dark blue taffeta dress that gave
brilliance to her tawny hair. Perhaps she was over-richly dressed,
for, like many girls who as a rule are not very interested in clothes,
she was too interested in them at times, and inexperienced taste was
apt to mislead her into an unfitness. Also her figure was too stiff
and sturdy to favour elegance. But on this occasion the general
effect of her was notably picturesque, and her face and hair, and the
expression of her pose, atoned in their charm for the shortcomings
and the luxuriance of the frock. She was no more the Rachel that
Mrs. Maldon had known and that Louis had first kissed. Her glanc