editing, who had not the gift of expression nor the capacity of appropriate words. She scrambled in and out of her bath, to Stevens's indignation, never waiting for the room to be warmed. She was impatient about her hair, would not sit still to have it properly brushed, but took the long strands in her own hands and "twisted them up anyhow." Stevens's description of the whole toilette would have been sorry reading in a dress magazine or ladies' paper.
"Give me anything," she says, "anything. What does it matter? He'll be here any minute now. The old dressing-gown, or a shirt and skirt. Whichever is quickest. What a slowcoach you're getting!"
"Slowcoach! She called me a slowcoach, and from first to last it hadn't been twenty minutes."
Margaret, sufficiently dressed, but without having breakfasted, very pale and impatient, was at the window of the music room when Peter came up the gravel path in his noisy motor, flung in the clutch with a grating sound, pulled the machine to a stand-still. There was no ceremony about showing him up. He was in the room before she had collected herself. He, too, was pale, his chin unshaved, his eyes a little wild; looking as if he, also, had not slept.
"You've heard what happened?" he began, abruptly. …" No, of course you haven't, how could
