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.

Desperately uncomfortable and angular Rosalind made you feel, petting
you and purring over you and calling you "mother dear," with that glint
always behind her golden-brown eyes which showed that she was up to no
good, that she knew y