wo
places had been the background of all her life.

She had never conceived of the kind of way that she now lived. Her
bedroom was so pretty that it made her almost cry to look at it: the
wall-paper scattered with little rosy trees, the soft pink cretonne on
the chairs, the old bureau with a sheet of glass covering its surface
that was her dressing-table, the old gold mirror--all these things were
wonders indeed. She was ordered to have breakfast in bed; servants
looked after her with a kindliness and ease and readiness to help that
she had never dreamed of as possible. The food was wonderful; there was
the motor ready to take her for a drive in the afternoon, and there was
the whole house at her service, soft and cosy and ordered so that it
seemed to roll along upon its own impulse without any human agency.

"I believe if every one went away and left it," she thought, "it would
go on in exactly the same way."

Figures gradually took their places in front of this background. The
principals at first were Katherine and Philip, Henry and Millicent,
Katherine's brother and sister, Mr. Trenchard senior, Katherine's
father, Lady Rachel Seddon, Katherine's best friend, and Mr. Faunder,
Katherine's uncle. She saw at once that they all revolved around
Katherine; if Katherine were not there they would not hold together at
all. They were all so different--so different and yet so strangely
alike. There was, for instance, Millicent Trenchard, whom Maggie liked
best of them all after Katherine. Millie was a young woman of
twenty-one, pretty, gay, ferociously independent, enthusiastic about
one thing after another, with hosts of friends, male and female, none
of whom she took very seriously. The love of her life, she told Maggie
almost at once, was Katherine. She would never love any one, man or
woman, so much again. She lived with her mother and father in an old
house in Westminster, and Maggie understood that there had been some
trouble about Katherine's marriage, so that, although it happened three
years ago, Mrs. Trenchard would not come to see Katherine and would not
allow Katherine to come and see her.

Then there was Henry, a very strange young man. He was at Cambridge and
said to be very clever. He did indeed seem to lead a mysterious life of
his own and paid very little attention to Maggie, asking her once
whether she did not think The Golden Ass wonderful, and what did she
think of Petronius; and when Maggie laughed and