dly. Delicious to be forgotten.

Still, she was hungry; and Mrs. Wilkins, after that excessive
friendliness the night before, might at least have told her lunch was
ready. And she had really been excessively friendly--so nice about
Mellersh's sleeping arrangements, wanting him to have the spare-room
and all. She wasn't usually interested in arrangements, in fact she
wasn't ever interested in them; so that Scrap considered she might be
said almost to have gone out of her way to be agreeable to Mrs.
Wilkins. And, in return, Mrs. Wilkins didn't even bother whether or
not she had any lunch.

Fortunately, though she was hungry, she didn't mind missing a
meal. Life was full of meals. They took up an enormous proportion of
one's time; and Mrs. Fisher was, she was afraid, one of those persons
who at meals linger. Twice now had she dined with Mrs. Fisher, and
each time she had been difficult at the end to dislodge, lingering on
slowly cracking innumerable nuts and slowly drinking a glass of wine
that seemed as if it would never be finished. Probably it would be a
good thing to make a habit of missing lunch, and as it was quite easy
to have tea brought out to her, and as she breakfasted in her room,
only once a day would she have to sit at the dining-room table and
endure the nuts.

Scrap burrowed her head comfortably in the cushions, and with her
feet crossed on the low parapet gave herself up to more thought. She
said to herself, as she had said at intervals throughout the morning:
Now I'm going to think. But, never having thought out anything in her
life, it was difficult. Extraordinary how one's attention wouldn't
stay fixed; extraordinary how one's mind slipped sideways. Settling
herself down to a review of her past as a preliminary to the
consideration of her future, and hunting in it to begin with for any
justification of that distressing word tawdry, the next thing she knew
was that she wasn't thinking about this at all, but had somehow
switched on to Mr. Wilkins.

Well, Mr. Wilkins was quite easy to think about, though not
pleasant. She viewed his approach with misgivings. For not only was
it a profound and unexpected bore to have a man added to the party, and
a man, too, of the kind she was sure Mr. Wilkins must be, but she was
afraid--and her fear was the result of a drearily unvarying experience
--that he might wish to hang about her.

This possibility had evidently not yet occurred to Mrs. Wilkins