For Wark's characteristic retort had been to pack her box and go to spend sixteen months among her kinsfolk, where energy was accounted a virtue, and smooth ways held in suspicion. At the end of that time, seeming to judge the lesson she wished to impart had been sufficiently digested, Wark wrote to Miss Vida proposing to come back. For some months she waited for the answer. It came at last from Biarritz, where it appeared the young lady was spending the winter with her father. After an exchange of letters Wark joined them there. In the twelve years since her return to the family, she had by degrees adapted herself to the task of looking after her young lady. The adaptation was not all on one side. Many of Vida's friends wondered that she could put up with a lady's maid who could do so few of the things commonly expected of that accomplished class.
'I don't want dressmaking going on in the house,' contentedly Vida told off her maid's negative qualifications, 'and I hate having anybody do my hair for me. Wark packs quite beautifully, and then I _do_ like some one about me--that I like.'
In the early days what she had 'liked' most about the woman was that Wark had known and been attached to Lady Levering. There was no one else with whom Vida could talk about her mother.
By the time death overtook Sir Hervey two winters ago in Rome, Wark had become so essential a part of Vida's little entourage, that one of the excuses offered by that lady for not going to live with her half-sister in London had been--'Wark doesn't always get on with other servants.' For several years Miss Levering's friends had been speaking of her as one fallen a victim to that passion for Italy that makes it an abiding place dearer than home to so many English-born. But the half-sister, Mrs. Fox-Moore, had not been misled either by that theory or by the difficulty as to pleasing Wark with the Queen Anne's Gate servants. 'It's not that Vida loves Italy so much as that, for some reason, she doesn't love England at all.' Nevertheless, Mrs. Fox-Moore after some months had persuaded her to 'bring Wark and try us.'
The experiment, now over a year old, seemed to have turned out well. If Vida really did not love her native land, she seemed to enjoy well enough what she called smiling 'the St. Martin's Summer' of her success in London society.