This was the second occasion on which Millie lost her temper that morning.
"Thank you," she said. "Now I know where I stand. But you'll apologize please for that last insult before you leave this room."
"Oh dear, what shall I do?" interrupted Victoria. "I knew this was going to be a terrible day the moment I got out of bed this morning. Clarice, you really shouldn't say such things."
"I should! I should!" cried Clarice, stamping her foot. "She's ruined everything since she came into the house. No one knows how I worked at that horrible play and Bunny Baxter was beginning to be so good, most amusing and knowing his part perfectly until she came along. And then she turned his head and he fancies he's in love with her and the whole thing goes to pieces. And I always said, right away from the beginning, that we oughtn't to have Cissie Marrow as prompter, she always loses her head and turns over two pages at once--and now I've gone and made myself the laughing-stock of London and shall never be able to act in public again!"
The sight of Clarice's despair touched Millie, and when the poor woman turned from them and stood, facing the window, snuffling into a handkerchief, her anger vanished as swiftly as it had come.
Besides what _were_ they quarrelling about, three grown women? Here was life passing and so much to be done and they could stand and scream at one another like children in the nursery. Millie's subconscious self seemed to be saying to her: "I stand outside you. I obscure you. This is not real, but I am real and something behind life is real. Laugh at this. It vanishes like smoke. _This_ is not life." She suddenly smiled; laughter irradiated all her face, shining in her eyes, colouring her cheek.
"Clarice, I'm sorry. If I've been a pig to you all these weeks I surely didn't mean to be. It hasn't been very easy--not through anybody's fault but simply because I'm so inexperienced. I'm sure that I've been very trying to all of you. But why should we squabble like this? I don't know what's happened to all of us this year. We stood far worse times during the War without losing our tempers, and we all of us put up with one another. But now we all seem to get angry at the slightest thing. I've noticed it everywhere. The little things now are much harder to bear than the big things were in the War. Please be friends, Clarice, and believe me that I didn't mean to hurt you."