It was known as 'the
second best bedroom'. As she was anxious not to behave as if she were a
guest, she used it as a kind of boudoir when she was not in attendance.
It was charmingly furnished in the prim Chippendale style, a style
dainty, but not luxurious, that seemed peculiarly suited to Dulcie.
She was in the window-seat--not with her feet up, no cushions behind
her. Unlike Edith, she was not the kind of woman who rested habitually;
she sat quite upright in the corner. A beautiful little mahogany table
was at her right, with a small electric lamp on it, and two books. One
of the books was her own choice, the other had been lent to her by
Aylmer. It was a volume of Bernard Shaw. She could make neither head nor
tail of it, and the prefaces, which she read with the greatest avidity,
perplexed her even more than the books themselves. Every now and then a
flash of lightning, in the form of some phrase she knew, illumined for a
second the darkness of the author's words. But soon she closed the thick
volume with the small print and returned to _The Daisy Chain_.
Dulcie was barely one-and-twenty. She carried everywhere in her trunk a
volume called _The Wide, Wide World_.
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