" When Miss Bell lacked entertainment during the
weeks that followed she thought of these visits, and little
smiles chased each other round the corners of her mouth.
She wrote to Janet when she was in the mood--delicious
scraps of letters, broad-margined, fantastic, each, so
far as charm went, a little literary gem disguised in
wilfulness, in a picture, in a diamond-cut cynicism that
shone sharper and clearer for the "dainty affectation of
its setting." When she was not in the mood she did not
write at all. With an instinctive recognition of the
demands of any relation such as she felt her friendship
with Janet Cardiff to be, she simply refrained, from
imposing upon her anything that savored of dullness or
commonplaceness. So that sometimes she wrote three or
four times in a week and sometimes not at all for a
fortnight, sometimes covered pages and sometimes sent
three lines and a row of asterisks. There was a fancifulness
in the hour as well, that usually made itself felt all
through the letter--it was rainy twilight in her garret,
or a gray wideness was creeping up behind St Paul's,
which meant that it was morning. To what she herself was
actually doing, or to any material fact about her, they
made the very slightest reference.
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