reveal its outstanding features, and even suggest its hidden
places, but because she might have dimly recognised that her
drawing-room was her soul.

Francesca was one of those women towards whom Fate appears to have
the best intentions and never to carry them into practice. With
the advantages put at her disposal she might have been expected to
command a more than average share of feminine happiness. So many
of the things that make for fretfulness, disappointment and
discouragement in a woman's life were removed from her path that
she might well have been considered the fortunate Miss Greech, or
later, lucky Francesca Bassington. And she was not of the perverse
band of those who make a rock-garden of their souls by dragging
into them all the stoney griefs and unclaimed troubles they can
find lying around them. Francesca loved the smooth ways and
pleasant places of life; she liked not merely to look on the bright
side of things but to live there and stay there. And the fact that
things had, at one time and another, gone badly with her and
cheated her of some of her early illusions made her cling the
closer to such good fortune as remained to her now that she seemed
to have reached a calmer period of her life. To undiscriminating
friends she appeared in the guise of a rather selfish woman, but it
was merely the selfishness of one who had seen the happy and
unhappy sides of life and wished to enjoy to the utmost what was
left to her of the former. The vicissitudes of fortune had not
soured her, but they had perhaps narrowed her in the sense of
making her concentrate much of her sympathies on things that
immediately pleased and amused her, or that recalled and
perpetuated the pleasing and successful incidents of other days.
And it was her drawing-room in particular that enshrined the