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8

For some moments Rosamund and Lesley sat in silence. Then the girl said, "Mother always makes me feel more stupid than I really am."

"She's rather frightening, isn't she?"

"It isn't that she frightens me," said Lesley, knotting her hands together under her chin and speaking in the solemn, careful voice of one analyzing an obscure problem, "so much as she somehow puts me off my mental stroke. You see, she doesn't really like me. My father didn't either, but then he didn't live more than a few months after I was born. He didn't like me because I wasn't a boy. Mother doesn't like me because I can't bear her sort of life and don't know how to dress and haven't got married. I can't bear her friends, either."

"Then it's just as well that you aren't together much. She lives mostly in town, doesn't she?"

She thought to herself: It would be nicer for me if they lived the other way round.

"Yes. She doesn't come down here very often, though the house is hers. She's only come this time because the Vines want to buy their farm. Of course I knew she'd want to see Cousin Nicholas about it, but I thought she'd go and see him at his office instead of asking him and Cousin Anne to come in after dinner like this. So when she said they were coming in I thought it was something quite different. That's what I mean by putting me off my mental stroke."