Ernestwas a difficult name to get used
to.
With one lash he curled to the ground the vase
ofchrysanthemums.
This, then, was the truffle he had routed out of
the earth!
For, he murmured, laying the palms of his hands
together, it is to bea long week-end. At lastshe turned on the light and looked at
Ernest lying beside her. And what, said Rosalind, on the last day of the honeymoon,
did theKing do to-day?
The shield of the Rashleighs crashed from the
wall.
Or was it a rat running behind the
plaster?
Old friend, he repeated, old friend, as if he
licked the words.
He straightened his tieat the looking-glass over
the mantelpiece.
Milly Masters in the still room, began old Miss
Rashleigh. The birds were dead now, their claws gripped tight,though they gripped
nothing.
Then, silently, the enormously high door opened. He
watched the clock in itsshagreen case. A whiteshawl, diamond fastened, clouded her
baldness. She looked at her father-in-law, a furtivelittle man with dyed moustaches.
He paused; struck a match, and twitchedagain.
Well, when he was eatingtoast he looked like a
rabbit.
It looked as if it had never twitched at
all.
Milly Masters grinned as the cart drove off. Their
eyes became like pebbles, taken fromwater; grey stones dulled and
dried.
Then Miss Antonia raised her glass to the mermaid.
Yes; thats what shes called, said Rosalind. She dipped her spoon in a plate of
cleargolden fluid.
Hammondflattened himself against the wall. Milly
Masters in the still room, began old Miss Rashleigh. She felt as if her body had
shrunk; it had grown small, and black andhard.
There they lay in the glow of the peach-blossom
taffeta.
Tufts ofwhite smoke held together for a moment;
then gently solved themselves,faded, and dispersed. There were the wood in which
they livedand the outlying prairies and the swamp. Caught in a trap, he said,
killed, and sat down and read thenewspaper. With her hands to her hair, her chestnut
coloured hair, she stoodin the yard, in the wind. The pheasants looked smaller now,
as if their bodies had shrunktogether.
Now he put on his spectacles and examined the
pictures.