Though she had seen
little of England, except for occasional visits on leave, she had become
English in tastes and at heart. For a year after Gerald's death she
lived with his family at Silchester, in preference to going to her own.
After that she settled in the small house at Southsea, where from time
to time she had her girlhood's companion, Olivia Guion, as a guest.
"Perhaps that'll do us good," Miss Guion ventured, in reply to
Drusilla's observations at her expense. "To see ourselves as others see
us must be much like looking at one's face in a spoon."
"That doesn't do us any good," Rodney Temple corrected, "because we
always blame the spoon."
"Don't you mind them, dear," Mrs. Temple cooed. She was a little,
apple-faced woman, with a figure suggestive of a tea-cozy, and a voice
with a gurgle in it, like a dove's. A nervous, convulsive moment of her
pursed-up little mouth made that organ an uncertain element in her
physiognomy, shifting as it did from one side of her face to the other
with the rapidity of an aurora borealis. "Don't mind them, dear. A woman
can never do more than reflect 'broken lights' of her husband, when she
has a good one. Don't you love that expression?--'broken lights'? 'We
are but broken lights of Thee!' Dear Tennyson! And no word yet from
Madame de Melcourt.
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