"I do try, Sylvia, not to mope all the time. I keep on telling myself that, if I really loved Dorothy, I should be glad for her to be Countess of Clarehaven, with everything that she wants. She was always a good girl. I lived with her more than two years and she was _frightfully_ strict about men. She deserved to be a countess. And I'm sure she's quite right in wanting to cut herself off altogether from the theater. I think, you know, she may have meant to be kind in telling me at once like that, instead of gradually dropping me, which would have been worse, wouldn't it? Only I do miss her so. She was such a lovely thing to look at." "So are you," Sylvia said. "Ah, but I'm dark, dear, and a dark girl never has that almost unearthly beauty that Dolly had." "Dark girls have often something better than unearthly and seraphic beauty," Sylvia said. "They often have a gloriously earthly and human faithfulness." "Ah, you need to tease me about being romantic, but I think it's you that's being romantic now. You were quite right, dear; I used to be stupidly romantic over foolish little things without any importance, and now it all seems such a waste of time. That's really what I feel most of all, now that I've lost my friend. It seems to me that every time I patted a dog I was wasting time." Sylvia had a fleeting thought that perhaps Gladys and Enid Worsley might have felt like that about her, but in a moment she quenched the fire it kindled in her heart. She was not going to bask in the warmth of self-pity like a spoiled little girl that hopes she may die to punish her brother for teasing her. "I think, you know," Olive went on, "that girls like us aren't prepared to stand sorrow. We've absolutely nothing to fall back upon. I've been thinking all these days what an utterly unsatisfactory thing lunch at Romano's really is. The only thing in my life that I can look back to for comfort is summer at the convent in Belgium. Of course we giggled all the time; but all the noise of talking has died away, and I can only see a most extraordinary peacefulness. I wonder if the nuns would have me as a boarder for a little while this summer. I feel I absolutely must go there. It isn't being sentimental, because I never knew Dorothy in those days."