in the study she found she was hungry. She ate some cold chicken and drank some wine. Then she went into her front room and sat down at her writing-table.
But she could not think of anything to say now. She stared at the beautiful Norman Lindsay drawing of Dane’s head that he had given her for his Christmas present, and it seemed to her that she had never before noticed how well the artist had reproduced the sensitiveness of that disturbing face. And she began to think that though she had lived with him for over a year, and loved him more it seemed to her every month, she understood him no better than she had done in the first week. It was strange to love a thing one could not understand.
She deliberately turned away from it trying to forget it, looked round her attractive study, and had a momentary delight in the peace she had in it. Her rooms were small and furnished plainly enough, except for the rugs and hangings that Dane insisted she have to provide warmth and colour. With the exception of her piano, she had brought up her own things from Auckland, and her own books and some of her own pictures were there against the tinted walls. But she had been amused to discover the changes that had come over her taste. No longer did her prints of popular Academy pictures please her. The Laughing Cavalier and her Watts and Rossetti things were stuck away in a drawer. Her bits of Crown Derby and Doulton looked merely pretty and feeble beside Dane’s porcelain and jade and ivory and enamel. So her rooms were bare of ornament, and she preferred to keep them so. She had plain and comfortable modern furniture that fitted well enough in the available space.
She had settled down to work here now, though so far she was struggling with large expanses of words which she had been unable to reduce to the form and shape that she
