The Story of It

CHAPTER I

The weather had turned so much worse that the rest of the day was
certainly lost. The wind had risen and the storm gathered force;
they gave from time to time a thump at the firm windows and dashed
even against those protected by the verandah their vicious
splotches of rain. Beyond the lawn, beyond the cliff, the great
wet brush of the sky dipped deep into the sea. But the lawn,
already vivid with the touch of May, showed a violence of watered
green; the budding shrubs and trees repeated the note as they
tossed their thick masses, and the cold troubled light, filling the
pretty saloon, marked the spring afternoon as sufficiently young.
The two ladies seated there in silence could pursue without
difficulty--as well as, clearly, without interruption--their
respective tasks; a confidence expressed, when the noise of the
wind allowed it to be heard, by the sharp scratch of Mrs. Dyott's
pen at the table where she was busy with letters.

Her visitor, settled on a small sofa that, with a palm-tree, a
screen, a stool, a stand, a bowl of flowers and three photographs
in silver frames, had been arranged near the light wood-fire as a
choice "corner"--Maud Blessingbourne, her guest, turned audibly,
though at intervals neither brief nor regular, the leaves of a book
covered in lemon-coloured paper and not yet despoiled of a certain
fresh crispness. This effect of the volume, for the eye, would
have made it, as presumably the newest French novel--and evidently,
from the attitude of the reader, "good"--consort happily with the
special tone of the room, a consistent air of selection and
suppression, one of the finer aesthetic evolutions. If Mrs. Dyott
was fond of ancient French furniture and distinctly difficult about
it, her inmates could be fond--with whatever critical cocks of
charming dark-braided heads over slender sloping shoulders--of
modern French authors. Nothing bad passed for half an hour--
nothing at least, to be exact, but that each of the companions
occasionally and covertly intermitted her pursuit in such a manner
as to ascertain the degree of absorption of the other without
turning round. What their silence was charged with therefore was
not only a sense of the weather, but a sense, so to speak, of its
own nature. Maud Blessingbourne, when she lowered her book into
her lap, closed her eyes with a conscious patience that seemed to
say she waited; but it was nevertheless she who at last made the
movement representing a snap of their tension. She got up and
stood by the fire, into which she looked a minute; then came round
and approached the window as if to see what was really going on.
At this Mrs. Dyott wrote with refreshed intensity. Her little pile
of