It was very becoming, but Valeda hardly looked in the mirror before she left her bedroom.
Now she decided she would go riding again a little later in the afternoon and wondered why she had bothered to take off her worn riding habit.
‘There is no one to see me and no one to care,’ she said to the lilac as she put it into the vase.
Then she told herself dryly that she would not allow herself to indulge in self-pity, nor would she lower the standards that her mother had set for her and which she had always kept up in her father’s time.
‘I must behave as if they were still alive,’ she told herself. ‘And wherever they are they will know and be proud of me.’
The vase was finished and the scent of the white lilac was sweet and seductive.
Valeda bent forward and inadvertently touched with he
