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She richly embroidered the themes, now so remote, that had once occupied poor Althea's imagination house-parties at Merriston; hostess-ship on a large scale in London; Gerald's seat in Parliament taken as a matter-of-course.
Sitting in the drawing-room at Merriston and thinking it all over, Althea asked herself the question while her heart sank to a deeper dejection. Not only had she lost Franklin; she had lost herself. She embarked on the dangerous and often demoralising search for a definite, recognisable personality something to lean on with security, a standard and a prop.
And Helen wouldn't do this unless she had come to see something more than drab-colour and oddity, and whatever the more might be it was not the millions. No, sitting in the drawing-room at Merriston, with its memories of the two emotional climaxes of her life, Althea, with a sinking heart, felt sure that she had lost something, and that she only knew it lost from seeing that Helen had found it.
She couldn't not at first lucidly articulate to herself any marked divergence between her wants and Gerald's; she, too, wanted to see Merriston House restored and made again into a home for Digbys; but Merriston House had been seen by her as a means, not as an end. She had seen it as a centre to a larger life; he saw it as a boundary beyond which they could not care to stray.
Gerald had remarked that it might be tiresome if she hated Merriston, and he were there to see that she hated it; but Althea was so sure of liking it that her conviction imposed itself. Mr.
She didn't feel that she much cared, and yet it was all that there was left to care about, for Aunt Grizel's sake if not for her own, and she felt only fit to rest from the pressure of the question. To-night, as she turned and wandered among the trees, she said to herself that it hadn't been a propitious time to come for rest to Merriston House.
'It's pretty country, I think, said Helen, 'and I'm sure the drainage and the beds are all right. But Althea must certainly see it first. It was settled, however, quite settled in Althea's mind that she was to take Merriston House. She bade Helen farewell three days later, and they had arranged that they were, within a fortnight, to meet in London, and go together to look at it.
Althea went down to Merriston House in the middle of July. Helen accompanied her to see her safely installed and to set the very torpid social ball rolling. There were not many neighbours, but Helen assembled them all. She herself could stay only a few days.
And the fact that a third postcard from Helen expressed even further vagueness as to the chance of Gerald's being able to be with them that autumn at Merriston, added to the sense of inevitability. Althea had been for this time so absorbed in Franklin, his effect on others and on herself, that she had not felt, as she would otherwise have done, Helen's unsatisfactory attitude.
How can one keep in touch with what is going on in a week? Can't we take a little house there? One of those nice little old houses in Westminster, for example? 'A house, my dear! Why, you don't want to leave Merriston, do you? What would become of Merriston if we had a house in London and of all our plans? We really couldn't manage that, dear we really couldn't afford it.
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