She felt small and dreadfully alone. She felt uncovered and
defenceless. Instinctively she pulled her wrap closer. With this
thing of chiffon she tired to protect herself from the eternities.
"I suppose," whispered Lotty, "Rose's husband seems to you just
an ordinary, good-natured, middle-aged man."
Scrap brought her gaze down from the stars and looked at Lotty a
moment while she focused her mind again.
"Just a rather red, rather round man," whispered Lotty.
Scrap bowed her head.
"He isn't," whispered Lotty. "Rose sees through all that.
That's mere trimmings. She sees what we can't see, because she loves
him."
Always love.
Scrap got up, and winding herself very tightly in her wrap moved
away to her day corner, and sat down there alone on the wall and looked
out across the other sea, the sea where the sun had gone down, the sea
with the far-away dim shadow stretching into it which was France.
Yes, love worked wonders, and Mr. Arundel--she couldn't at once
get used to his other name--was to Rose Love itself; but it also worked
inverted wonders, it didn't invariably, as she well knew, transfigure
people into saints and angels. Grievously indeed did it sometimes do
the opposite. She had had it in her life applied to her to excess. If
it had let her alone, if it had at least been moderate and infrequent,
she might, she thought, have turned out a quite decent, generous-minded,
kindly, human being.
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