"So what?" said Mrs. Friend, after a moment, nervously. Lost in the big
white arm-chair, her small hand propping her small face and head, she
looked even frailer than she had looked in the library.

"Well, nobody would ever take you for my jailer, would they?" said
Helena, surveying her.

Mrs. Friend laughed--a ghost of a laugh, which yet seemed to have some
fun in it, far away.

"Does this seem to you like prison?"

"This house? Oh, no. Of course I shall do just as I like in it. I have
only come because--well, my poor Mummy made a great point of it when she
was ill, and I couldn't be a brute to her, so I promised. But I wonder
whether I ought to have promised. It is a great tyranny, you know--the
tyranny of sick people. I wonder whether one ought to give in to her?"

The girl looked up coolly. Mrs. Friend felt as though she had been
struck.

"But your _mother_!" she said involuntarily.

"Oh, I know, that's what most people would say. But the question is,
what's reasonable. Well, I wasn't reasonable, and here I am. But I make
my conditions. We are not to be more than four months in the year in this
old hole"--she looked round her in not unkindly amusement at the bare
old-fashioned room; "we are to have four or five months in London, _at
least_; and when travelling abroad gets decent again, we are to go
abroad--Rome, perhaps, next winter. And I am jolly well to ask my friends