Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/132



ND at the same moment in the house at Cypress Hill, Julia Shane lay propped up in her bed reading a French novel. It was an enormous bed with a vast dusty canopy supported by two ironical wood-gilt cupids who hung suspended from the ceiling; and Julia Shane, reading by the light of her night lamp, appeared lost in it like a woman tossing on the waves of the sea. To-night, feeling more ill than usual, she had her dinner in bed, wrapped in a peignoir of mauve ribbon and valenciennes, her bony neck exposed above the linen of her night dress.

She read, as usual, with the aid of a silver mounted reading glass which tossed the sentences in enormous capitals well into the range of her fading vision. On the table beside her stood one of the gilt coffee cups, a mute witness to the old woman's disobedience of the doctor's orders. Beside it lay two paper backed French novels and on the floor in the shadow of the table a half dozen more tossed aside carelessly, some lying properly, others open and sprawled, exposing the ragged edges of the hastily cut pages.

In the fashion of the ill and aging, she lived nowadays in memories. . . memories of her girlhood when she had ridden John Shane's wildest mare Doña Rita recklessly about the paddock of the farm, memories of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux and the picnics with French and English girls in a neatly kept wood at Sèvres, memories of Cypress Hill in the days immediately after her return when John Shane was still more the passionate lover than the husband. As she grew older, the memories became clearer and more vivid, but they were neither vivid nor diverse enough to occupy all her time. What remained she divided between the game of patience and the French novels which Lily supplied faithfully, shipping them from Paris in lots of a dozen at, a time.