She bent her head and touched her eyes furtively while her toilette was
completed.

Sir Nigel had retired from the scene, but he had done so feeling that he
had planted a seed and bestowed a practical lesson. He had, it is true,
bestowed one, but again she had not understood its significance and was
only left bewildered and unhappy. She began to be nervous and uncertain
about herself and about his moods and points of view. She had never been
made to feel so at home. Everyone had been kind to her and lenient to
her lack of brilliancy. No one had expected her to be brilliant, and she
had been quite sweet-temperedly resigned to the fact that she was not
the kind of girl who shone either in society or elsewhere. She did not
resent the fact that she knew people said of her, "She isn't in the
least bit bright, Rosy Vanderpoel, but she's a nice, sweet little
thing." She had tried to be nice and sweet and had aspired to nothing
higher.

But now that seemed so much less than enough. Perhaps Nigel ought to
have married one of the clever ones, someone who would have known how to
understand him and who would have been more entertaining than she could
be. Perhaps she was beginning to bore him, perhaps he was finding her
out and beginning to get tired. At this point the always too ready
tears would rise to her eyes and she would be overwhelmed by a sense of
homesickness. Often she cried herself silently to sleep, longing for
her mother--her nice, comfortable, ordinary mother, whom she had several
times felt Nigel had some difficulty in being unreservedly polite
to--though he had been polite on the surface.

By the time they landed she had been living under so much strain in her
effort to seem quite unchanged, that she had lost her nerve. She did not