Mrs. Arbuthnot, coming out of her room, found her there like that, standing in the middle of the hall staring.
“Now what does she think she sees now?” thought Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“We are in God’s hands,” said Mrs. Wilkins, turning to her, speaking with extreme conviction.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Arbuthnot quickly, her face, which had been covered with smiles when she came out of her room, falling. “Why, what has happened?”
For Mrs. Arbuthnot had woken up with such a delightful feeling of security, of relief, and she did not want to find she had not after all escaped from the need of refuge. She had not even dreamed of Frederick. For the first time for years she had been spared the nightly dream that he was with her, that they were heart to heart, and its miserable awakening. She had slept like a baby, and had woken up confident; she had found there was nothing she wished to say in her morning prayer except Thank you. It was disconcerting to be told she was after all in God’s hands.
“I hope nothing has happened?” she asked anxiously.
Mrs. Wilkins looked at her a moment, and laughed. “How funny,” she said, kissing her.
“What is funny?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot, her face clearing because Mrs. Wilkins laughed.
“We are. This is. Everything. It’s all so wonderful. It’s so funny and so adorable that we should be in it. I daresay when we finally reach heaven—the one they talk about so much—we shan’t find it a bit more beautiful.”
Mrs. Arbuthnot relaxed to smiling security again. “Isn’t it divine?” she said.
“Were you ever, ever in your life so happy?” asked Mrs. Wilkins, catching her by the arm.
“No,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot. Nor had she been; not ever; not even in her first love-days with Frederick. Because always pain had been close at hand in that other happiness, ready to torture with doubts, to torture even with the very excess of her love; while this was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.
“Let’s go and look at that tree close,” said Mrs. Wilkins. “I don’t believe it can only be a tree.”
And arm in arm they went along the hall, and their husbands would not have known them their faces were so young with eagerness, and together they stood at the open window, and when their eyes, having feasted on the marvellous pink thing, wandered farther among the beauties of the garden, they saw sitting on the low wall at the east edge of it, gazing out over the bay, her feet in lilies, Lady Caroline.
They were astonished. They said nothing in their astonishment, but stood quite still, arm in arm, staring down at her.
She too had on a white frock, and her head was bare. They had had no idea that day in London, when her hat was down to her nose and her furs were up to her ears, that she was so pretty. They had merely thought her different from the other women in the club, and so had the other women themselves, and so had all the waitresses, eyeing her sideways and eyeing her again as they passed the corner where she sat talking; but they had had no idea she was so pretty. She was exceedingly pretty. Everything about her was very much that which it was. Her fair hair was very fair, her lovely grey eyes were very lovely and grey, her dark eyelashes were very dark, her white skin was very white, her red mouth was very red. She was extravagantly slender—the merest thread of a girl, though not without little curves beneath her thin frock where little curves should be. She was looking out across the bay, and was sharply defined against the background of empty blue. She was full in the sun. Her feet dangled among the leaves and flowers of the lilies just as if it did not matter that they should be bent or bruised.
“She ought to have a headache,” whispered Mrs. Arbuthnot at last, “sitting there in the sun like that.”
“She ought to have a hat,” whispered Mrs. Wilkins.
“She’s treading on lilies.”
“But they’re hers as much as ours.”
“Only one-fourth of them.”
Lady Caroline turned her head. She looked up at them a moment, surprised to see them so much younger than they had seemed that day at the club, and so much less unattractive. Indeed, they were really almost quite attractive, if anyone could ever be really quite attractive in the wrong clothes. Her eyes, swiftly glancing over them, took in every inch of each of them in the half second before she smiled and waved her hand and called out Good morning. There was nothing, she saw at once, to be hoped for in the way of interest from their clothes. She did not consciously think this, for she was having a violent reaction against beautiful clothes and the slavery they impose on one, her experience being that the instant one had got them they took one in hand and gave one no peace till they had been everywhere and been seen by everybody. You didn’t take your clothes to parties; they took you. It was quite a mistake to think that a woman, a really well-dressed woman, wore out her clothes; it was the clothes that wore out the woman—dragging her about at all hours of the day and night. No wonder men stayed young longer. Just new trousers couldn’t excite them. She couldn’t suppose that even the newest trousers ever behaved like that, taking the bit between
