"I have made up my mind," she said--"at least, I have made up my mind not to make up my mind immediately. I suppose you don't expect me to decide at once?"
"No, dear, certainly not," said her mother; "though personally I cannot see why you should hesitate."
"Ideal, no! An ideal is realized about once every hundred years. There are disadvantages necessarily attaching to every step, however advantageous. But I consider it most eminently desirable."
"Did you never look out for what seemed to you ideal, mother?" she asked.
"Yes, dear, once. When I was exactly fifteen I fell passionately in love with the Emperor of Germany, whom I had once seen at a distance. To marry him seemed to me ideal. But whether it would have been or not I was never privileged to know. He and I both married some one else. I was acutely miserable for at least a fortnight. But during that fortnight I learned something, which was that your time can be fully occupied in getting what you can get, without wasting your energy in longing for what you can't."
"Poor mother!" said Maud gravely; and in her voice Mrs. Brereton thought she could detect more of irony than simplicity.
They had no further conversation on the subject for the present, since during the next couple of hours Mrs. Brereton successfully settled a hundred details and arrangements that would have taken a less quick woman half a day to grapple with. The house stood some quarter of a mile from the river-bank, on the reach between Maidenhead and Bray, red-bricked and creeper-covered, but picturesque in a haphazard, bungalow manner, intolerably dank in the winter, when languid, foggy water covered the lower lawn, but ideally adapted for summer Sunday parties. It had long been left to moulder and mildew, but some ten years ago, while the Thames was still only a geographical expression, Mrs. Brereton, in a hunt for some place of the kind near London, but sufficiently remote not to be overrun, had lighted on it, and with her quick eye had seen how admirably it would suit her wants. Inside there were not more than a dozen bedrooms and two or three adequate reception-rooms; but the garden was exquisite, and had now under her guiding hand fulfilled rare possibilities.