No doubt she should be grateful for this refuge, and now that
the war was over it might be possible to buy petrol for an oil stove.
Then she became aware that it was not only the cold that made her restless.
The rigidly enforced calm of her inner life had received a shock to-night
and not from the imagined assassination of a king.
She went suddenly to her mirror and looked at herself intently...shook her
head with a frown. She had always been slim; she was now very thin. The
roundness and color had left her cheeks. They were pale--almost hollow.
Janet and Alice had rejoiced in the lack of fats and sweets, both having
a tendency to plumpness had achieved without effort the most fashionable
slenderness that anxious woman could wish. But she had not had a pound to
lose. It seemed to her that she was almost plain. Her eyes retained their
dazzling brilliancy, a trick of nature that old age alone no doubt could
conquer, but there were dark stains beneath the lower lashes.
She let down her hair. It was the same soft dusky mass as ever. Her teeth
were as even and bright; her lips had not lost their curves, but they were
pink, not red. She was anaemic, no doubt. Why, in heaven's name, shouldn't
she be? Even Olive, whose major domo, driving a Ford, had paid daily visits
to the farms and brought back what eggs, chickens and other succulences the
peasants would part with for coin, had lost her brilliant color and the
full lines of her beautiful figure.
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