Morres meanwhile sat and smiled to herself. She had given up the
crochet for point-lace, which, as it had more intricate stitches,
necessitated the more care. Sometimes she knitted and read with a book
in her lap. But when she was not reading, she smiled quietly to herself.
It was a curious smile, half-satisfied as one whose prognostications
have come true, half-dissatisfied as though there was no great cause for
congratulation.

Once Mary was curious enough to ask her why she smiled. Lady Agatha at
the piano was playing Wagner like a professional musician. Mrs. Morres's
smile grew more inscrutable.

"It amuses me," she said, talking loudly, so that her words might reach
Mary through the storm of the music, "to find that Agatha is just a
woman, after all. It amuses me--and yet--it had been happier for you and
me if she had contented herself with the unrealities of life a little
longer."

Mary did not understand at the moment. She began to understand a little
later when Mr. Jardine came. The novel, after all, had not been
finished. For the last week or so before the visitor arrived her
Ladyship had apparently lost interest in it.

"My brain has dried up, Mary," she said. "I should only spoil it if I
went on. Put it away in a drawer, and when I feel like it we can go on
again. You want a rest. I've over-tired you."

"I felt I couldn't rest till it was done," Mary said, with a little
sigh. "I wanted to know what became of them all. And it is such an
interesting point. Tell me, does Clotilde marry Mark, after all?"

"How should I know? I have nothing to do with what she does. Clotilde
knows her own mind. I do not. Wait till we get back to it."

"Ah! you should finish it--you should finish it. You'll never get that
young green world in it again. It was an inspiration. We should have
held on to it like Jacob to the angel's robe."

But for the time Lady Agatha's literary energy was exhausted.

"I daresay there's a deal of fustian in it. There's sure to be," she
said. "I don't think anything could be really good that was produced
with so little pain. I daresay I'll be for tearing it up, so you'd
better lock it away. Do you feel equal to walking ten miles? If not, get
your bicycle and I'll walk beside you. I've been cramped up too long."

This time it was a mood of physical restlessness. She walked and rode
and went out golfing, and played tennis, and rowed on the river, and did
a thousand things, while Mrs. Morres ma