Nora pointed to the toilet-table and the bed.
Connie's expression showed an answering astonishment.
"I have had them all my life," she said stiffly. "We always took our own linen to hotels, and made our rooms nice."
"I should think you'd be afraid of their being stolen!" Nora took up one of the costly brushes, and examined it in wonder.
"Why should I be? They're nothing. They're just like other people's!" With a slight but haughty change of manner, the girl turned away, and began to talk Italian to her maid.
"I never saw anything like them!" said Nora stoutly.
Constance Bledlow took no notice. She and Annette were chattering fast, and Nora could not understand a word. She stood by awkward and superfluous, feeling certain that the maid who was gesticulating, now towards the ceiling, and now towards the floor, was complaining both of her own room and of the kitchen accommodation. Her mistress listened carelessly, occasionally trying to soothe her, and in the middle of the stream of talk, Nora slipped away.
"It's horrid!--spending all that money on yourself," thought the girl of seventeen indignantly. "And in Oxford too!--as if anybody wanted such things here."
Meanwhile, she was no sooner gone than her cousin sank down on the armchair, and broke into a slightly hysterical fit of laughter.
"Can we stand it, Annette? We've got to try. Of course you can leave me if you choose."
"And I should like to know how you'd get on then!" said Annette, grimly, beginning again upon the boxes.
"Well, of course, I shouldn't get on at all. But really we might give away a lot of these clothes! I shall never want them."
The speaker looked frowning at the stacks of dresses and lingerie. Annette made no reply; but went on busily with her unpacking. If the clothes were to be got rid of, they were her perquisites. She was devoted to Constance, but she stood on her rights.
Presently a little space was cleared on the floor, and Constance, seeing that it was nearly seven o'clock, and the Hoopers supped at half past, took off her black dress with its crape, and put on a white one, high to the throat and long-sleeved; a French demi-toilette, plain, and even severe in make, but cut by the best dressmaker in Nice. She looked extraordinarily tall and slim in it and very foreign. Her maid clasped a long string of opals, which was her only ornament, about her neck. She gave one look at herself in the glass, holding herself proudly, one might have said arrogantly. But as she turned away, and so that Annette could not see her, she raised the opals, and held them a moment softly to her lips. Her mother had habitually worn them. Then she moved to the window, and looked out over the Hoopers' private garden, to the spreading college lawns, and the grey front beyond.
"Am I really going to stay here a whole year--nearly?" she asked herself, half laughing, half rebellious.
Then her eye fell upon a medley of photographs; snaps from her own camera, which had tumbled out of her bag in unpacking. The topmost one represented a group of young men and maidens standing under a group of stone pines in a Riviera landscape. She herself was in front, with a tall youth beside her. She bent down to look at it.
"I shall come across him I suppose--before long." And raising herself, she stood awhile, thinking; her face alive with an excitement that was half expectation, and half angry recollection.
CHAPTER II
"My dear Ellen, I beg you will not interfere any more with Connie's riding. I have given leave, and that really must settle it. She tells me that her father always allowed her to ride alone--with a groom--in London and the Campagna; she will of course pay all the expenses of it out of her own income, and I see no object whatever in thwarting her. She is sure to find our life dull enough anyway, after the life she has been living."
"I don't know why you should call Oxford dull, Ewen!" said Mrs. Hooper resentfully. "I consider the society here much better than anything Connie was likely to see on the Riviera--much more respectable anyway. Well, of course, everybody will call her fast--but that's your affair. I can see already she won't be easily restrained. She's got an uncommonly strong will of her own."
"Well, don't try and restrain her, dear, too much," laughed her husband. "After all she's twenty, she'll be twenty-one directly. She may not be more than a twelvemonth with us. She need not be, as far as my functions are concerned. Let's make friends with her and make her happy."
"I don't want my girls talked about, thank you, Ewen!" His wife gave an angry dig to the word "my." "Everybody says what a nice ladylike girl Alice is. But Nora often gives me a deal of trouble--and if she takes to imitating Connie, and wanting to go about without a chaperon, I don't know what I shall do. My dear Ewen, do you know what I discovered last night?"
Mrs. Hooper rose and stood over her husband impressively.
"Well--what?"
"You remember Connie went to bed early. Well, when I came up, and passed her door, I noticed something--somebody in that room was--smoking! I could not be mistaken. And this morning I questioned the housemaid. 'Yes, ma'am,' she said, 'her ladyship smoked two cigarettes last night, and Mrs. Tinkler'--that's the maid--'says she always smokes two before she goes to bed.' Then I spoke to Tinkler--whose manner to me, I consider, is not at all what it should be--and she said that Connie smoked three cigarettes a day always--that Lady Risborough smoked--that all the ladies in Rome smoked--that Connie began it before her mother died--and her mother didn't mind--"
"Well then, my dear, you needn't mind," exclaimed Dr. Hooper.
"I always thought Ella Risborough went to pieces--rather--in that dreadful foreign life," said Mrs. Hooper firmly. "Everybody does--you can't help it."
"I don't know what you mean by going 'to pieces,'" said Ewen Hooper warmly. "I only know that when they came here ten years ago, I thought her one of the most attractive--one of the most charming women I had ever seen."
From where he stood, on the hearth-rug of his study, smoking an after-breakfast pipe, he looked down--frowning--upon his wife, and Mrs. Hooper felt that she had perhaps gone too far. Never had she forgotten, never had she ceased to resent her own sense of inferiority and disadvantage, beside her brilliant sister-in-law on the occasion of that long past visit. She could still see Ella Risborough at the All Souls' luncheon given to the newly made D.C.Ls, sitting on the right of the Vice-Chancellor, and holding a kind of court afterwards in the library; a hat that was little more than a wreath of forget-me-nots on her dark hair, and a long, lace cloak draping the still young and graceful figure. She remembered vividly the soft, responsive eyes and smile, and the court of male worshippers about them. Professors, tutors young and old, undergraduates and heads of houses, had crowded round the mother and the long-legged, distinguished-looking child, who clung so closely to her side; and if only she could have given Oxford a few more days, the whole place would have been at Ella Risborough's feet. "So intelligent too!" said the enthusiastic--"so learned even!" A member of the Roman "Accademia dei Lincei," with only one other woman to keep her company in that august band; and yet so modest, so unpretending, so full of laughter, and life, and sex! Mrs. Hooper, who generally found herself at these official luncheons in a place which her small egotism resented, had watched her sister-in-law from a distance, envying her dress, her title, her wealth, bitterly angry that Ewen's sister should have a place in the world that Ewen's wife could never hope to touch, and irrevocably deciding that Ella Risborough was "fast" and gave herself airs. Nor did the afternoon visit, when the Risboroughs, with great difficulty, had made time for the family call on the Hoopers, supply any more agreeable memories. Ella Risborough had been so rapturously glad to see her brother, and in spite of a real effort to be friendly had had so little attention to spare for his wife! It was true she had made much of the Hooper children, and had brought them all presents from Italy. But Mrs. Hooper had chosen to think the laughing