hands fiercely to her breast. "And there is no birth without pain."




Chapter IV


A few days after her arrival, Delia woke up in the early dawn in the
large room that had been her grandmother's. She sat up in the broad
white bed with its dimity curtains, her hands round her knees, peering
into the half darkened room, where, however, she had thrown the windows
wide open, behind the curtains, before going to sleep. On the opposite
wall she saw an indifferent picture of her father as a boy of twelve on
his pony; beside it a faded photograph of her mother, her beautiful
mother, in her wedding dress. There had never been any real sympathy
between her mother and her grandmother. Old Lady Blanchflower had
resented her son's marriage with a foreign woman, with a Greek, in
particular. The Greeks were not at that moment of much account in the
political world, and Lady Blanchflower thought of them as a nation of
shams, trading on a great past which did not belong to them. Her secret
idea was that out of their own country they grew rich in disreputable
ways, and while at home, where only the stupid ones stayed, they were a
shabby, half-civilised people, mostly bankrupt. She could not imagine
how a girl got any bringing up at Athens, and believed nothing that her
son told her. So that when the young Mrs. Blanchflower arrived, there
were jars in the household, and it was not long before the spoilt and
handsome bride went to her husband in tears, and asked to be taken
away. Delia was surprised and touched, therefore, to find her mother's
portrait in her grandmother's room, where nothing clearly had been