Dora had no desire to pursue this train of thought, for there was something vaguely uncomfortable at the back of it at which she did not wish to look closer. So she mentally brushed it aside, and, a thing that was a daily if not an hourly habit of hers, took her mind back to the first days in which they had been together, and let it float her slowly down the enchanted weeks that had followed till it landed her at the present day again. Such retrospect had, indeed, passed out of the range of voluntary thought: it was like the pillow on which her mind, when at rest, instinctively reposed itself. After Venice they had wandered a week or two longer in North Italy, until toward the end of October a foretaste of winter caught them on the Italian lakes, and they had started for home, arriving there at the beginning of November. They had but passed through London, spending a couple of days at Claude’s little flat in Mount Street, and had then gone down to Grote for the first big pheasant shoot of the year. She found both her mother and Austell there.
Dora was essentially appreciative of all the delightful things in life which can only be obtained by abundant money, and hitherto very few of these had been within her reach. True, she was sensible enough to enjoy pictures that were not hers, to look at beautiful things exposed for the public in museums and art collections; but she did not belong to that slightly unreal class of enthusiasts who say that as long as they are able to see fine pictures and fine statues they get from them all the pleasure which such things are capable of giving. Nor again was she deficient in her appreciation of comfort, and she knew that it was infinitely nicer to telephone from the flat at Mount Street, as they had done on the two evenings they were there, and get a box at the theatre, than getting seats at the back of the dress circle, or, if times were exceptionally bad, having an egg with her tea and taking her humble place in the _queue_ for the pit. She was humorist enough and of a sufficiently observant type to find entertainment of a kind while waiting in the _queue_, but it seemed to her insincere to say that you preferred going to a theatre in such mode. Similarly, though you had such a beautiful view and got so much air on the top of a motor bus that such a mode of progression along the London streets was quite enjoyable, it was really far more enjoyable to have your own motor, though your outlook was not from so elevated a perch and there was probably not quite so much air. And she was perfectly aware that she took the keenest pleasure in all the ease and comfort with which she had been surrounded since her engagement. Pierre Loti, as she had once quoted to May Franklin, had said that it was exquisite to be poor, but for herself she found it (having had long experience of poverty) much more exquisite to be rich. But there were things about that shooting week, in spite of her newly awakened love and her newly found opulence, which was in such resounding evidence there, which gave her bad moments: moments when she was between bitterness and laughter, nearer perhaps to laughter than the other, but to laughter in which bitterness would have found the reflection, at any rate, of itself.