She looked back with a kind of wonder to her old happy, satisfied, and yes, unawakened life. She had believed herself to be a woman of many friends, and yet there was now not one human being to whom she felt even tempted to tell her wonderful secret.
Busily occupied with the hundred and one trifles, and the eager, generally successful little excursions into philanthropy--for she was an exceptionally kind, warm-hearted woman--which had filled her placid widowhood, she had yet never made any real intimate. The only exception had been Major Guthrie; it was he who had drawn her into what had seemed for so long their pleasant, quiet garden of friendship.
And now she realised that were she to tell any of the people about her of the marvellous change which had taken place in her heart, they would regard her with great surprise, and yes, even with amusement. All the world loves a young lover, but there is not much sympathy to spare in the kind of world to which Mary Otway belonged by birth, position, and long association, for the love which appears, and sometimes only attains full fruition, later in life.
As the days went on, each bringing its tale of exciting and momentous events, there came over Mrs. Otway a curious apathy with regard to the war, for to her the one figure which had counted in the awful drama now being enacted in France and Flanders had disappeared from the vast stage where, as she now recognised, she had seen only him. True, she glanced over a paper each day, but she only sufficiently mastered its contents to be able to reply intelligently to those with whom her daily round brought her in contact.
And soon, to her surprise, and ever-growing discomfort, Anna Bauer--her good, faithful old Anna, for whom she had always had such feelings of affection, and yes, of gratitude--began to get on her nerves. It was not that she associated Anna with the War, and with all that the War had brought to her personally of joy and of grief. Rather was it the sudden perception that her own secret ideals of life and those of the woman near whom she had lived for close on eighteen years, were utterly different, and, in a deep sense, irreconcilable.
Mrs. Otway grew to dislike, with a nervous, sharp distaste, the very sight of Anna's favourite motto, "_Arbeit macht das Leben süss, und die Welt zum Paradies_" ("Work makes life sweet and the world a paradise"). Was it possible that in the old days she had admired that lying sentiment? Lying? Yes, indeed! Work did _not_ make life sweet, or she, Mary Otway, would now be happier than ever, for she had never worked as hard as she was now working--working to destroy thought--working to dull the dreadful aching at her heart, throwing herself, with a feverish eagerness which surprised those about her, into the various war activities which were now, largely owing to the intelligence and thoroughness of Miss Forsyth, being organised in Witanbury.