Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/176

 choice that prevailed; Will has a weakness for these revues—“you can at least smoke there,” he says—; Phyllida seemed to have developed into a remorseless blue-stocking. By day she wore him out at exhibitions. . . When he was not cooling his heels in a shop. . . At night he was expected to stay up till all hours to bring her home from dances. And so forth and so on. ..

Perhaps she tried us all rather hard. Money seemed to melt in her hands; and, though I did not grudge her my last penny if it was going to turn her thoughts, I am not ashamed to confess that I have reached an age where I set great store by my personal comfort. When you have lived for thirty years under the same vine and fig-tree, you begin to regard your home as a frame and setting which you are not too anxious to share with any one; hitherto my guests, when any have done me the honour to make my house their own, have recognized that the hostess has the first claim on their consideration. Not so Phyllida, who seems to have been brought up in a very different school. She was ruthless in her unpunctuality at meals and in her general disregard of every one else’s convenience; plans were chopped and changed up to the last moment, and there were times when I felt that she was deliberately making