Chapter 17 - Page 2

always took to it as if it
belonged to her!

Well, the awakening was bound to come, and it was perhaps better
that it should have come so soon. At any rate there was no use
in letting her thoughts wander back to that shattered fool's
paradise of theirs. Only, as she sat there and reckoned up the
days till Strefford arrived, what else in the world was there to
think of?

Her future and his?

But she knew that future by heart already! She had not spent
her life among the rich and fashionable without having learned
every detail of the trappings of a rich and fashionable
marriage. She had calculated long ago just how many dinner-
dresses, how many tea-gowns and how much lacy lingerie would go
to make up the outfit of the future Countess of Altringham. She
had even decided to which dressmaker she would go for her
chinchilla cloak-for she meant to have one, and down to her
feet, and softer and more voluminous and more extravagantly
sumptuous than Violet's or Ursula's ... not to speak of silver
foxes and sables ... nor yet of the Altringham jewels.

She knew all this by heart; had always known it. It all
belonged to the make-up of the life of elegance: there was
nothing new about it. What had been new to her was just that
short interval with Nick--a life unreal indeed in its setting,
but so real in its essentials: the one reality she had ever
known. As she looked back on it she saw how much it had given
her besides the golden flush of her happiness, the sudden
flowering of sensuous joy in heart and body. Yes--there had
been the flowering too, in pain like birth-pangs, of something
graver, stronger, fuller of future power, something she had
hardly heeded in her first light rapture, but that always came
back and possessed her stilled soul when the rapture sank: the
deep disquieting sense of something that Nick and love had
taught her, but that reached out even beyond love and beyond
Nick.

Her nerves were racked by the ceaseless swish, swish of the rain
on the dirty panes and the smell of cabbage and coal that came
in under the door when she shut the window. This nauseating
foretaste of the luncheon she must presently go down to was more
than she could bear. It brought with it a vision of the dank
coffee-room below, the sooty Smyrna rug, the rain on the sky-
light, the listless waitresses handing about food that tasted as
if it had been rained on too. There was really no reason why
she should let such material miseries add to her depression ....

She sprang up, put on her hat and jacket, and calling for a taxi
drove to the London branch of the Nouveau Luxe hotel. It was
just one o'clock and she was sure to pick up a luncheon, for
though London was empty