Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/235

Rh not,” he assented thoughtfully. “But suppose we go in before they join us? I want to show you a set of Ming I picked up the other day for Bessy. I ﬂatter myself I do understand Ming.”

XIV

USTINE, her household duties discharged, had gone upstairs to her room, a little turret chamber projecting above the wide terrace below, from which the sounds of lively intercourse now rose increasingly to her window.

Bessy, she knew, would have preferred to have her remain with the party from whom these evidences of gaiety proceeded. Mrs. Amherst had grown to depend on her friend’s nearness. She liked to feel that Justine’s quick hand and eye were always in waiting on her impulses, prompt to interpret and execute them without any exertion of her own. Bessy combined great zeal in the pursuit of sport—a tireless passion for the saddle, the golf-course, the tennis-court—with an almost oriental inertia within doors, an indolence of body and brain that made her shrink from the active obligations of hospitality, though she had grown to depend more and more on the distractions of a crowded house.

But Justine, though grateful, and anxious to show her gratitude, was unwilling to add to her other duties [ 219 ]