Chapter 3

Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have
been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were
pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed
her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty,
so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income!
How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits
and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her
to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable
reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their
time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in
a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium
of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms
merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable.

But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements,
fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions,
anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time
for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose
staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of
crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased
to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining
as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London
gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social
ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost
startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted.
There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of
nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather
fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her
hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become
pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to
have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his
bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin
and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a
hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it.

Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible
that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself
up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and
draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might
who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she
began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with
sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week
after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver
but very few people had really come to see her