She Came Back by Patricia Wentworth Page B

whom she was lunching on her way through London.
    “Couldn’t lift it, my dear. But someone ought to. Every time I go there I make up my mind to tell her she’s a selfish slave-driver, and that Olive is simply going down the drain, but I don’t do it.”
    “Why don’t you?”
    “Olive wouldn’t thank me, for one thing. That’s the awful part of that kind of slave-driving—in the worst cases the victim doesn’t even want to be free. Olive’s like that. You know, Lyndall only just got away in time. She was two years with Cotty after her father and mother died. They were killed together in a motor accident when she was nine and it nearly did her in. She’s sensitive, you know—no armour-plating. Things aren’t awfully easy for people like that. You’re an angel to have her, Lilla.”
    “I love having her, Aunt Milly.”
    Milly Armitage crumbled her bread in a wasteful manner. Lord Woolton would not have approved, nor would Milly herself if she had noticed what she was doing, but she did not. She wanted to say something to Lilla, but she didn’t know how to set about it. She could be warm, generous, and endlessly kind, but she couldn’t be tactful. She sat there in her baggy mustard tweeds with her hair rather wild and her hat at a rollicking angle and crumbled her bread.
    Lilla, in a yellow jumper and a short brown skirt, had that air of having just come out of a bandbox which seems to be the birthright of American women. Her dark curls shone. Everything about her was just right both for herself and the occasion. There was a perfect ordered elegance which appeared as natural as it is in a hummingbird or a flower. Through it all, like the scent of the flower and the song of the bird, there came that friendly warmth which was all her own. She laughed a little now.
    “Why don’t you just say it, Aunt Milly, without bothering how?”
    Milly Armitage’s frown relaxed. A wide rueful smile showed her excellent teeth.
    “I might as well, mightn’t I? I can’t see any good in beating about the bush myself, but people seem to expect it somehow. My mother always said I just blurted things out, and so I do. If they’re pleasant, what’s the good of wrapping them up? And if they’re not, well, it’s a good thing to get them off your chest and out of the way. So there it is—Philip and Anne are coming up to town. It’s too much for him going up and down every day. He said so at dinner one evening, and Anne went up to town next day and took a flat. If you ask me, that wasn’t at all what he meant, but he couldn’t very well say anything. She did it in the most tactful way of course. Not being built that way myself, I don’t awfully admire people being tactful—there’s something soapy about it. You know— voice well kept down—gentle—hesitating. She hoped he’d be pleased. She’d been thinking what a bore that going up and down would be in the winter, and when she heard of this flat it seemed too good a chance to lose. They wouldn’t hold it open—someone else was after it—all that kind of thing.” She screwed up her face in an apologetic way. “There—I’ve no business to talk about her like that, have I? But I never did like her, and I never shall.”
    Lilla sat with her chin in her hand looking across the table, her puzzled brown eyes just touched with a smile.
    “Why don’t you like her, Aunt Milly?”
    “I don’t know—-I just don’t. She’s a disaster for Philip— she always was—but they might have shaken down together if there hadn’t been this break. But when a man has just begun to realize that he’s made the wrong marriage, and then for three and a half years he thinks he’s got free of it, what do you imagine he’s going to feel like when he finds he’s up to his neck in it again. Even without his having got so fond of Lyn.”
    “Is he fond of Lyn?” The brown eyes were very deeply troubled.
    Milly Armitage nodded.
    “I suppose that’s one of the things I oughtn’t