Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/160

152 the top of his bent. A woman's vanity takes many lives to feed it. So much I guess randomly as I sit and watch her.

"Little devil!" says Lady Flytton, softly. On turning to look at the old woman, I find that she has come out of her sleep as suddenly as she entered it, and is surveying the couple yonder with an expression of countenance, that is, to say the least of it, vicious.

"Good afternoon, Captain Chichester!" she remarks austerely.

The young man looks round with an astonishment that is ludicrous, rises and comes toward the old lady. Silvia, I observe, does not move an inch.

"I did not know any one was here," he says, holding out a hand that Lady Flytton altogether overlooks.

"I dare say you did not," she says, frostily; and he goes back to his charmer, looking somewhat red, and decidedly snubbed Tea is brought in and we partake of it apart. Oh, it is dull! If the little woman does not like her company, why does she not leave it? Anon Captain Chichester takes his departure, and it being near the dinner hour, I am shown to my room, where I array myself in my little all, and modestly habited in the same, descend to the drawing-room. Silvia Fleming is there, and she speaks some half-words of greeting, giving me the contemptuous, indifferent regard that apparently she always bestows on her own sex. Mrs. Fleming comes in, fat and kind (I like her better than her daughter) and last of all, Lady Flytton. We go in to dinner, where there is next to no conversation, for the hostess devotes herself to her knife and fork with the assiduity of a woman who knows her time for wielding the same is short, and the other two have little conversation. In the drawing-room later the two elders sit together, knitting and talking, while Silvia's restless figure paces up and down, up and down, the terraced walk outside, and I sit at a table, turning over a photograph book, and pitying myself from the very bottom of my soul.