' It's highly inconsistent as it stands."
"'Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,'" she quoted.
"Inconsistency goes as far toward making life attractive as its
pleasures do toward spoiling it."
"What do you call pleasure?" queried Allison.
"The unsought joy. If you go out to hunt for it, you don't often get it.
When you do, you've earned it and are entitled to it. True pleasure is a
free gift of the gods, like a sense of humour."
By some oblique and unsuspected way, the words brought a certain comfort
to Rose. Without bitterness, she remembered that Allison had once said:
"In any true mating, they both know." Over and over again she said to
herself, stubbornly: "I will have nothing that is not true--nothing that
is not true."
It was a wise hostess who discovered the fact that changing rooms may
change moods; that many a successful dinner has an aftermath in the
drawing-room as cold and dismal as a party call. Madame Francesca had
once characterised the hour after dinner as "the stick of a sky-rocket,
which never fails to return and bring disillusion with it.
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