'But you'll come again?'

'Oh, yes, I'll come again.'

'You don't want to.'

'No, I don't want to.'

'But you're always riding over here, aren't you?'

'Nearly every day.'

'Oh, then--' The words lingered meaningly until Rose reached the door
and then Christabel said, 'I wish you'd ask your sisters to come and
see me. They would tell me all the news.'

Rose went downstairs laughing at Christabel's capacity for mingling
tragedy with the commonplace and sordid accusations with social
desires, but though she laughed she was strangely tired and,
stretching before her, she saw more weariness, more struggling, more
effort without result.

She stood in the masculine, matted hall, with the usual worn pair of
slippers in the corner, a stick lying across a chair, a collection of
coats and hats on the pegs, and she felt she would be glad if she were
never to see all this again, and for the first time she thought
seriously of desertion. She wished she could go to some unfamiliar
country where the people would all have new faces, where the language
would be strange, the sights different, the smells unlike those which
were wafted through the open door. She wanted a fresh body and a new