Whatever could she say? She’d wanted then, as later, when she took Mrs. Vernon’s hands and kissed her, standing beneath the great glass chandelier in the drawing-room, to cry: Thank you, thank you—thank you for living in this house, for being so perfect. She would have liked to be absolutely schoolgirlish. But since she was grown-up and couldn’t, she put on her nicest dress, the pink and silver, hoping it would please them all.

And now, what was she going to say about all that to her aunt: in her diary? She gave it up. Tonight she was too tired. But she didn’t go to bed at once. She sat staring at herself in the mirror, silly with happiness, the jewel of her engagement ring against her lips.

*   *   *

“It scarcely seems possible that I have been here only a fortnight to-morrow,” Lily wrote in her diary later. “Drove up the village with Mamma and Papa in the morning.…”

They drove up the village most mornings. First they stopped at the grocer’s, then at the butcher’s, then at the fishmonger’s. The shopkeepers came running out and stood bowing at the brougham window. At the stationer’s, where Mr. Vernon got his tobacco and mystery novels, Mrs. Vernon and Lily were left to travel on alone, visiting various poor houses in the back streets behind the Wesleyan Chapel. Kent was sent indoors with parcels, and women came out to thank Mrs. Vernon, wiping their hands on their aprons. Lily wished that they would have curtsied, as she’d seen the villagers do in a village in Suffolk where she sometimes went to stay. It was the only thing she criticised about Chapel Bridge—the people seemed so very off-hand. Their bows were little more than nods. And the crowd of women in shawls and clogs whom one met trooping out of the mill at midday—they didn’t even nod, they simply looked at you, not unpleasantly, but rather as if you were something in a museum. They seemed to take everything for granted. Once, this had struck Lily so forcibly that she had exclaimed in generous indignation, as they drove away:

“I’m afraid you’re really too good to them, dearest Mamma. Unfortunately, that class can’t always appreciate what’s done for them.”

Mrs. Vernon had extraordinarily delicate, pale Grecian features. Lily often thought that she was one of the most beautiful people she’d ever seen. She half-closed her eyes when she spoke:

“In this part of the world, my dear, one has to supply the appreciation oneself.”

She lay, much of the afternoon and evening, on the sofa under the chandelier, in the drawing-room. Lily never heard what complaint she suffered from. She was simply fragile, as flawless china is fragile. Mary did all the housekeeping; Mr. Vernon brought her her books and papers from other rooms; she thanked them exquisitely by her mere gestures. She said:

“You all spoil me. I shall give you reason to regret it.”