After all, there was the sun in her window, there was the triangular glimpse of blue wind-bitten sea between the roofs, and a new day beginning, and hot chocolate coming, and a new hat to try on at the milliner’s, and-- “_Aline!_” She had come to this cheap hotel just in order to keep her maid. One couldn’t afford everything, especially since the war, and she preferred veal for dinner every night to having to do her own mending and dress her hair: the unmanageable abundant hair which had so uncannily survived her youth, and sometimes, in her happier moods, made her feel that perhaps, after all, in the eyes of her friends, other of its attributes survived also. And besides, it looked better for a lone woman who, after having been thirty-nine for a number of years, had suddenly become forty-four, to have a respectable-looking servant in the background; to be able, for instance, when one arrived in new places, to say to supercilious hotel-clerks: “My maid is following with the luggage.” “_Aline!_” Aline, ugly, neat and enigmatic, appeared with the breakfast-tray. A delicious scent preceded her. Mrs. Clephane raised herself on a pink elbow, shook her hair over her shoulders, and exclaimed: “Violets?” Aline permitted herself her dry smile. “From a gentleman.” Colour flooded her mistress’s face. Hadn’t she known that something good was going to happen to her that morning--hadn’t she felt it in every touch of the sunshine, as its golden finger-tips pressed her lids open and wound their way through her hair? She supposed she was superstitious. She laughed expectantly. “A gentleman?” “The little lame boy with the newspapers that Madame was kind to,” the maid continued, arranging the tray with her spare Taylorized gestures. “Oh, poor child!” Mrs. Clephane’s voice had a quaver which she tried to deflect to the lame boy, though she knew how impossible it was to deceive Aline. Of course Aline knew everything--well, yes, that was the other side of the medal. She often said to her mistress: “Madame is too much alone--Madame ought to make some new friends--” and what did that mean, except that Aline knew she had lost the old ones? But it was characteristic of Kate that, after a moment, the quaver in her voice did instinctively tilt in the direction of the lame boy who sold newspapers; and when the tears reached her eyes it was over his wistful image, and not her own, that they flowed. She had a way of getting desperately fond of people she had been kind to, and exaggeratedly touched by the least sign of their appreciation. It was her weakness--or her strength: she wondered which? “Poor, poor little chap. But his mother’ll beat him if she finds out. Aline, you must hunt him up this very day and pay back what the flowers must have cost him.” She lifted the violets and pressed them to her face. As she did so she caught sight of a telegram beneath them.