The Blue Rose by Esther Wyndham

it with apparent sincerity. She must be very careful to find out whether he liked it or not before she expressed her own opinion. After what Clare had said to her at lunch the day before she couldn’t be too careful.
    “Now tell me the truth.” Clare said. “Do you really like it?”
    Stephen looked inquiringly at Rose and she smiled at him. “Yes, we certainly do,” he answered for them. “It’s a most original present and we can’t thank you enough for it.”
    “Good. I’m delighted. Then I’ll get it sent round to you in the morning.”
    The rest of the evening passed very pleasantly listening to gramophone records and they were able to leave soon after eleven. “I’m so delighted you like that screen,” Stephen said as they drove off in his car. “I know Clare has taken so much trouble to choose it—to get us something she thought we would really like.”
    Rose’s heart sank. She would never now be able to say what she really thought of it. She would have to put up with that dreadful thing in the drawing-room for the rest of her life. But perhaps she was wrong not to like it. If Clare and Stephen liked it there must be something in it which she hadn’t understood. She must try and get to understand modern art. Perhaps it would grow on her.
    “It was wonderful of her to take so much trouble,” she said. “I would like to see some more of that artist’s work.”
    “Yes,” Stephen replied, “so should I.”
    They did not seem altogether at ease with each other that evening. What was the matter? It was almost as if there was a screen between them. Perhaps it was the screen.

 
    CHAPTER TEN
    ROSE hardly seemed to see Stephen alone during those next few days until the wedding—but she comforted herself by ticking off the days in her mind. An engagement wasn’t nearly as happy a time as she had imagined. It was wonderful at the beginning but later something seemed to go wrong with it, though no doubt if one had to be engaged for years one would adjust oneself to it. When two people fall passionately in love it is unnatural for them to be parted. Their longing to be together all the time makes them resentful of convention, and the very necessity of parting puts a tremendous physical and emotional strain on them. Stephen perhaps felt it even more than Rose — he was very impatient by nature—and those last few days were not altogether happy ones. At moments Rose felt that he no longer loved her quite so much, and that made her more than ever ill at ease with him. Since her lunch with Clare she had been afraid of his getting bored with her, of his beginning already to find her “insipid”, so she strove to be bright and gay and succeeded merely in being brittle.
    Their last Sunday, when they might have spent a happy day alone together, Robin Johnson and the girl he was courting, Gai Spalding, went with them into the country. They had been going in separate cars but Robin’s car broke down at the last moment so they all went in Stephen’s. It was a wet day and they had a rather dismal lunch at an inn on the river and played darts afterwards.
    And then during those last few days Rose had the unhappiness of witnessing a quarrel between Francie and Derek. The coffee bar was going well, at any rate for the moment, but they had both been overworking and were terribly on edge from fatigue and nervous strain. Rose couldn’t say afterwards how the quarrel had started—it was some little thing that twanged jarringly on over-taut nerves — but in a moment they were slanging each other, saying things deliberately to hurt each other. You have to be lovers to know each other well enough to say those little things that can hurt most. Rose was deeply shocked. She knew that she herself would never be able to quarrel with anybody in that way—it was not in her nature—and she was terribly distressed to find how Francie could let herself go in the heat of the moment. While the quarrel was still smouldering after