She leaned forward, clasping her knees with her hands, and with her eyes fixed on the distant heathland. She spoke without a trace of bitterness. "One day, it is very long ago now, but I have not forgotten, I happened to overhear a conversation which was not intended for my ears. I heard my name mentioned, and I heard some one answer, 'Isabella! Oh, we all love old Isabella--she is just like a nice sandy cat.' And the person who said that was the one whose opinion I valued more than anything else in the wide world. That remark showed me exactly where I stood, it left no loophole for self-deception. A man does not want to marry a sandy cat."
Philippa could not help smiling at Isabella's tone. "A very pleasant companion for the fireside," she said decidedly.
"That may be; but who thinks of the fireside when the sun is shining, and spring is in the air and in the blood? Not a bit of it. It is human nature--beauty rules the world, and it does not matter whether the particular world she rules over is large or small, her dominion is the same. Beauty is queen, and although her reign may be short it is absolute. The queen can do no wrong."
Isabella spoke half jestingly, and Philippa thought of her conversation with the doctor and his judgment, or rather his vindication, of a beautiful woman. It seemed a proof in favour of the argument.
"And so," continued the other, "like the fool I was, instead of proving that I was something more than a hearthrug ornament, I shut up at that remark, and retired still further into my shell. I stayed there for a long time. The years passed, and youth with them, and then, one day, when I had learned quite a few lessons, I realised that the years which rob us so in passing throw us a few compensations in return for all the wealth they steal, and that although the pattern had all gone wrong, still, there was no sense in leaving my particular square of the patchwork with the edges all frayed. So I took my brains off the shelf and dusted them, with a very fair result on the whole. If I had been a man in a novel I should of course have gone to the New Forest, and lived the simple life in sandals and few clothes, subsisting mainly on nuts; but as I was a woman in real life, with an honest contempt for what some one has called the widowhood of the unsatisfied, I settled down here. For reasons of my own I wanted to be in this part of the world. To me there is ever a healing strength in wide spaces, and Bessmoor has been my best friend. And if the leaves of memory make a rustling at times, I am glad of it. I do not want to forget. By this I do not mean I spend my time in weaving withered wreaths for the past--I don't; but I do not forget. And I sit here, writing very busily, secure in the sheltering personality of the mythical Ian Verity, firing broadsides at a patient public, giving them the truth as I see it, whether they want it or not. They don't want it, but most of the things we don't want are good for us, which is one of the disagreeable axioms of nursery days. I disguise it sometimes, just as my old nurse wrapped the powder in a spoonful of raspberry jam out of the pot which was kept for the purpose on the right-hand corner of the mantelpiece in the night nursery--I can see it now. But sometimes they have got to swallow it pur et simple, just as it is."