Robin Linnet by E.F. Benson — Read

Aline Gurtner had been more than pleased when she received Lady Grote's telegram proposing a visit: she was entranced, for this was precisely the sort of person whom she most wanted in her house just now. During the past fortnight she had been trying to secure a gentle, cheerful trickle of visitors there, but refusals had come in rather disconcerting numbers. She could not get the tap to run. It was quite true, of course, that everyone was very busy, and that such an allegation as reason for regret might very likely be true, but she had begun to be vaguely uneasy that it was not going to be reserved for her to declare her sympathies and show an adoring England how intensely pro-English she was, but that her English friends were proceeding to demonstrate their own sympathies by omitting to flock to her biddings.

As a matter of fact, her apprehensions were entirely ill-founded; such people as she had asked -- they included members of the Government who really were not completely at leisure just now -- had merely been too much occupied to spend perfectly idle days in the country. But the sequence of regrets had made her a little nervous. It was also unkind of people, who should have realized how beautifully she was behaving and how she felt the war, not to crowd round her and comfort her and praise her and admire her.