If she had not everything she wanted in
this world, at least she was very well pleased with what she had got. She
was very well pleased, for instance, with the snuggery, which contrived
somehow to be cosy and dainty and expensive all at once. The porcelain
was rare and beautiful, the Chinese enamels took on wonderful tints in
the firelight, the rugs and hangings led the eye through sumptuous
harmonies of colouring. It was a room in which one might have suitably
entertained an ambassador or an archbishop, but it was also a room in
which one could cut out pictures for a scrap-book without feeling that
one was scandalising the deities of the place with one's litter. And as
with the snuggery, so with the rest of the house, and as with the house,
so with the other departments of Jocantha's life; she really had good
reason for being one of the most contented women in Chelsea.
From being in a mood of simmering satisfaction with her lot she passed to
the phase of being generously commiserating for those thousands around
her whose lives and circumstances were dull, cheap, pleasureless, and
empty. Work girls, shop assistants and so forth, the class that have
neither the happy-go-lucky freedom of the poor nor the leisured freedom
of the rich, came specially within the range of her sympathy. It was sad
to think that there were young people who, after a long day's work, had
to sit alone in chill, dreary bedrooms because they could not afford the
price of a cup of coffee and a sandwich in a restaurant, still less a
shilling for a theatre gallery.
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