Anna's mother and sister had come over from Ujlak. The mother was a hard woman, obviously selfish and unsympathetic. Her own grievances, the confiscation of a great deal of her property, seemed to have smothered every soft, womanly instinct in her. Apparently she knew nothing of the danger that hung over her daughter, and Rosemary had the feeling that if she had known she would not greatly have cared. Her eyes, which were dark and set very wide apart in a flat, colourless face, only softened once, and that was when she spoke about her husband, who had died just before the war.
As for persecutions, humiliations, petty tyrannies, she dismissed them with a shrug of the shoulders. "The Roumanians are the scum of the earth," she said in her quiet, unemotional manner, through her thin, colourless lips, "just a horde of uneducated peasantry; you can't expect anything from a pig but a grunt. I am only thankful that Béla is not here to see it all."
On the other hand, the young people who filled the stately château of Kis-Imre with their flutterings like an army of gaily-painted butterflies did not worry about political grievances. For them the Roumanian officers were just dancing-partners, and their worth was only measured by their proficiency in the latest steps. The mammas and papas either played bridge or sat on the chairs that were ranged against the walls all round the beautiful ballroom placidly admiring the evolutions of their own progeny.
Rosemary, not to be outdone in self-discipline, was outwardly as gay as any of them. She danced impartially with the Hungarians and the Roumanians, and talked cricket knowledgeably with the team. For her the atmosphere was electrical. At times it seemed to her over-strained senses as if she could hear the whir of the spinning-wheel driven by the Fates, the hum of the spindle, and the click of their scissors as they made ready to cut the thread of these people's destiny.
Just before midnight the young Roumanian officers who formed the cricket team left in the two motor-cars which were to take them direct to Hódmezö, a matter of ninety odd miles. Rosemary found herself saying good-bye to them like an automaton--counting them over as if they were ninepins. A kind of mist was before her eyes through which their good-looking faces seemed to be grinning at her, and their moustaches bristling like Alice's Cheshire cat.