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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78428 ***
+
+
+   This ebook was created in honour of Distributed Proofreaders’ 25th
+                               Anniversary.
+
+
+                         THE TORTOISESHELL CAT
+                       _by_ Naomi G. Royde-Smith
+
+   “What is most conspicuous in THE TORTOISESHELL CAT is its sunlit
+   humor. The book is more sparkling than brilliant, and quite as
+   gentle as it is shrewd. Describing the growth to maturity of a
+   charming girl who though adult in body has stayed adolescent in
+   mind, it successfully insinuates the atmosphere of a time when
+   everything is quaint and lovely and obscure, when all strangers
+   are delightful and all events are nice.”—_London Outlook._
+
+   “This is a modern novel of the deepest dye. THE TORTOISESHELL CAT
+   is very clever, very finished, very witty, very daring. ... So
+   entertaining that one feels, on turning the three hundredth and
+   tenth page, that our acquaintanceship with the queer,
+   sophisticated, cranky or merely charming people in the story has
+   been cut short too soon. Naughty perhaps, but nice.”—_London
+   Sketch._
+
+   “It must be said to be undeniably well done. Life is here touched
+   in with surety, candour and courage, and all through, the author
+   keeps on her style the charm with which she endows a variety of
+   characters.”—_Aberdeen Press and Journal._
+
+   “To come upon such a novel as Miss Naomi Royde-Smith’s THE
+   TORTOISESHELL CAT is, in comparison with the bulk of recent
+   fiction, like having a bath after a ball.... In the characters of
+   V. V. and Lady Winona Miss Smith has compassed successes we have
+   not recently seen equalled.”—_Liverpool Courier._
+
+   “An extremely entertaining and exciting story.”—_The New
+   Statesman._
+
+   “Its wit and humor, its pawky asides, its clever situations and
+   sparkling dialogue demand a large constituency for this story. It
+   is certainly the best novel we have read this year.”—_The Weekly
+   Westminster._
+
+   “She has the ease and decision in putting words and sentences
+   together that show the born storyteller. THE TORTOISESHELL CAT
+   will establish for her at once a host of readers clamouring for
+   more.”—_London Daily News._
+
+   “Miss Naomi Royde-Smith writes with a crisp touch and a kind of
+   friendly gaiety; it responds with a sparkle to the humor of life
+   but it is not afraid of the shadows. With an obvious relish for
+   character and the freshness of quite ordinary things.”—_London
+   Times Literary Supplement._
+
+   “What cool and deliberate skill, what mastery of sheer
+   craftsmanship.... Altogether one of the very best of recent
+   novels.”—_Bookman Journal._
+
+
+                         THE TORTOISESHELL CAT
+
+
+
+
+                                  The
+                           Tortoiseshell Cat
+
+
+                               A Novel By
+                           N. G. ROYDE-SMITH
+
+
+                 Back to Lesbos, back to the hills
+                    whereunder
+                     Shone Mitylene—
+                 Unbeloved, unseen in the ebb of twilight—
+                     Purged not in Lethe.
+
+                                              SWINBURNE.
+
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                            BONI & LIVERIGHT
+                                  1925
+
+
+                      COPYRIGHT 1925 · BY
+                      BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
+                      PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+
+                      First printing, November, 1925
+                      Second printing, November, 1925
+
+
+                                   TO
+                           WALTER DE LA MARE
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+                  CHAPTER                         PAGE
+                        I  VOWEL-SOUNDS             13
+                       II  LILAC                    47
+                      III  THE TORTOISESHELL CAT   120
+                       IV  LARRY BROWNE            155
+                        V  ILLUSION                202
+                       VI  AUNT ELIZABETH          236
+                      VII  THE FOURTH MOVEMENT     273
+
+
+
+
+                             AUTHOR’S NOTE
+
+
+              The action of this novel is set in London in
+             1912-13, but William is the only character in
+                    the tale who is drawn from life.
+
+
+                         THE TORTOISESHELL CAT
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER ONE.
+                              VOWEL-SOUNDS
+
+
+                                   I
+
+You could never be quite sure how Mrs. Lysaght would take anything. Even
+thin Miss Winter, the Secretary, who must have loved her or she could
+never have stood it, went about her duties murmuring, “I _hope_ I’ve
+done right....” And, as Miss Fairfax said, you could feel the pit of the
+poor thing’s stomach sink on _hope_. Miss Fairfax was a little coarse at
+times: like a man. It was the result of a classical tripos. Gillian had
+gathered this from Mrs. Lysaght on the bewildering occasion when she had
+first received the head mistress’s instructions, at tea. Mrs. Lysaght
+had been in bed that afternoon.
+
+“I seize every opportunity of rest—facing the light—so revealing—and
+thick bread and butter—you will not mind, dear.”
+
+Gillian did mind being called “dear,” and the bread and butter was
+certainly thick; but she was so much engrossed in wondering how Mrs.
+Lysaght either rested or enjoyed whatever revelation the faced light
+might bring (though quite in bed) while eating thick bread and butter,
+interviewing a junior mistress and writing what might be a diary and
+again might at the same time be a prospectus, with one of those
+collapsible gold pencils which requires to be un-collapsed every
+half-page or so, that she missed the next two hundred words—you couldn’t
+call any of Mrs. Lysaght’s utterances sentences—and only caught up with
+those on which she left Miss Fairfax.
+
+“Sound scholarship but coarseness—very sad—still the Greeks—_and_ the
+Romans—passages in the Epistles—and the Joint Board’s set-books this
+year—Satires, dear—Horace—_such_ a pity—English purity—French
+refinement—Yours so different.”
+
+Gillian, whose subjects were English and Foreign Literature (“foreign”
+being a term comprehending French and German only), found her mind
+rocketing between _Le Misanthrope_ and _Hamlet_, also “set-books” that
+year, with horrid memories of lines the full significance of which she
+had never quite explored herself, but which in her new capacity she was
+now about to purvey to the young and inquisitive. What, for example, was
+the grosser name that liberal shepherds gave...?
+
+“Correlate—always correlate.” Mrs. Lysaght was getting a little
+breathless and the lead had sunk below the rim of the gold case of her
+pencil. “References to History—dear Miss Parratt, so essentially
+refined—to Geography and Botany—the whole time-table—especially in the
+middle forms, and, whenever possible in _dramatic_ form. The teaching of
+the Church, dear, Miracle and Mystery Plays—on the chest of drawers,
+dear—a little red box. Thank you—the school motto—_our utmost for the
+highest_—once a week for five minutes in every subject—and _low_-heeled
+shoes—ah! no—that was little Miss Battinson—but Saint Paul—infallible—if
+only _all_ women—but you with such a father will know how right....”
+
+On the way home Gillian met Miss Fairfax.
+
+“Well, child,” said the classical mistress, “did you count the finite
+verbs? Parratt and I keep a book of them and the one who gets ten in one
+week wins. But she’s a great woman once you’ve got out of the mist.”
+
+But Gillian never got out of the mist; not quite. It is true that the
+improbable connexion between her father (dead long ago of black-water
+fever in Burma) and Saint Paul, turned out, like the low-heeled shoes,
+to be proper to little Miss Battinson whose heels were very high and
+whose father was a well-known Dissenting Minister. And, little by
+little, she learnt to follow, with surprising success, the flying leaps
+taken by Mrs. Lysaght’s conversation from branch to branch of the Tree
+of Life, as she passed in and out of the great old Georgian house and
+across the spreading lawns, in which her famous school was lodged.
+
+It was when the squirrel talk leapt—not only in the Tree of Life, but
+across the spaces which divide its branches from those of the Tree of
+Knowledge of Good and Evil that Gillian failed, and it was this failure
+which had brought her to the disaster she was now facing.
+
+There was, Gillian had gathered this from the conversation in the
+Assistant Mistresses’ Room, one week in the year when Mrs. Lysaght
+deserted her post to make a pilgrimage. Colonel Lysaght was buried in
+Jersey, where he had died, and his death had synchronized with the dates
+not only of his own, but of his mother’s birthday as well. Old Lady
+Alice Lysaght, who had married at seventeen, was a woman of indomitable
+sentimentality, and, as her widowed daughter-in-law was her only
+surviving relative, the celebration of this triple anniversary on the
+spot where a comprehensive monument had been erected to it, was an event
+before which even the routine of Pelham House broke down.
+
+In June, in the first week of June, Mrs. Lysaght always went to Jersey
+and left Miss Fairfax to rule in her stead. The one lesson a week which
+the head mistress gave in each form was distributed among the staff, and
+until you had occupied one of these forsaken posts during the annual
+retreat, you were not really established at Pelham House. It would
+generally take a new mistress eighteen months to attain what, in
+deference to the Colonel’s military shade, was called her majority,
+especially if, as Gillian had, she only joined the staff at the
+beginning of the summer term. But in Gillian’s case, the confirmation
+was swift and took place before she had been at Pelham House for more
+than six weeks.
+
+“I _hope_ I’m doing right in telling you, Miss Armstrong,” poor Miss
+Winter had said, “but Mrs. Lysaght wishes you to take the Scripture
+Class in V.B. next week while she is away.”
+
+“Me?” said Gillian, looking up from the French Composition she was
+correcting. “What book are they doing?”
+
+Miss Winter consulted her sheaf of notes.
+
+“Psalms,” she discovered; “but you are to do whatever you like. A single
+lesson is what Mrs. Lysaght always asks for. She prefers not to have her
+own treatment of the set-books interrupted. She thinks it might confuse
+the girls’ minds.” Miss Winter was incapable of disrespect and Gillian’s
+gurgle of delight died away in the long silence into which it travelled.
+
+“I’ll do Naaman the Syrian,” she said. “It’s the finest short story in
+the world. I always want to send it in for one of those competitions.”
+
+“You’ve got a horrid, secular mind, my girl,” said Miss Fairfax. “And
+you don’t seem to realize the signal honour bestowed on you.”
+
+“No,” said Gillian, “it doesn’t seem very honourable—extra work. That’s
+why I chose Naaman. I know him by heart. Besides, it’s so well done.”
+
+Miss Fairfax snorted.
+
+“The mind of your principal is still a sealed book to you,” and she left
+the room without further argument.
+
+On the following Tuesday, after Recreation, Gillian took V.B. through
+the finest short story in the world and felt her own enthusiasm merge in
+the collective excitement of the class as the drama turned on itself and
+worked back from healing to destruction in the great anticlimax:—
+
+   “Went not my heart with thee when the man turned again from his
+   chariot to meet thee?”
+
+Miss Parratt, whose subject was History, and whose essential refinement
+was a quality attributed to her by Mrs. Lysaght on account of her
+fretful manner rather than in consequence of any real knowledge of her
+character, complained about it at luncheon:
+
+“I took V.B. for the last lesson this morning, after you, Miss
+Armstrong. They were all quite excited. As though they’d been to the
+theatre.”
+
+“Well, it was rather like that,” Gillian admitted; “it was bound to be.
+I got terribly excited myself.”
+
+“It’s not at all the state I’m used to for that class,” said Miss
+Parratt.
+
+“Do you think they _ought_ to be excited after a Scripture lesson?”
+asked little Miss Battinson, not without malice.
+
+“Don’t be silly, Battinson,” said Miss Fairfax; “all Armstrong’s lessons
+are exciting. I can’t hear myself speak in the Shell when the Third
+Form’s singing French verbs at her next door. I’m going to bring it up
+at the next mistresses’ meeting.”
+
+Gillian apologized.
+
+“They do make a noise, I know. But it was the only way I could think of
+to keep them quiet.”
+
+“I do see what you mean, though I don’t think you put it very
+accurately; however, that is only a passing problem. What I really
+should like to know is why Mrs. Lysaght gave you, of all people, V.B.
+for her Scripture hour. The confirmation class. It was mine by right.
+You’ve cut me out. You’re a thruster. I’m now in the outer darkness with
+Science and Physical Exercise. Praise God!” and Miss Fairfax helped
+herself to a great deal of rather weak mustard which ran down into the
+gravy on her plate.
+
+Two days later, Mrs. Lysaght having returned to Pelham House, Miss
+Fairfax learned the truth.
+
+“It seems,” she told Gillian, “that she was looking in on your
+Literature lesson one day and found the Fourth Form standing in serried
+ranks saying as one girl:
+
+   “‘And so the whole round world in every way
+   Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.’
+
+She says the deep devotional note you had so patiently got out of that
+particularly callous set—what’s the matter?”
+
+“In the first place,” said Gillian, “how _do_ you understand all that
+from what she says?”
+
+“I’m used to it. How _did_ you get the Fourth Form...?”
+
+“But I was making them use their chest notes on all those o’s and ou’s,
+_whole_, _round_, _bound_, _gold_.”
+
+“You’d chosen a particularly high-class sentiment.”
+
+“Goodness!” Gillian was really alarmed. “But I’d just told them that the
+_meaning_ didn’t matter. I’d told them—oh, Miss Fairfax—but I’d told
+them—I felt they were young and must be told—that what the words said
+was just silly—an image of God like a convict with a weight chained to
+_both_ feet.... A God, a false image.”
+
+“Well, I don’t know. It must be rather like hard labour—being
+responsible for the lot of us.”
+
+“That isn’t how I think of God,” said Gillian; “and I don’t think it’s
+what Tennyson meant. He’d a silly mind. I was only using it as an
+exercise in vowel-sounds.”
+
+“Bless the child! And it got her the confirmation class!”
+
+“Anyhow they enjoyed it.”
+
+“The vowel-sounds, or the confirmation class?”
+
+“Both,” said Gillian and felt her cheeks burn again with the unfailing
+thrill of that tremendous tale.
+
+“Well, it’s the aim of all you very modern people to make the children
+enjoy. I was brought up to teach them facts and make them sit up and
+work.” Miss Fairfax was fifty and made no bones about it. She belonged
+to a generation which kept Kindergarten methods well inside the
+Kindergarten. “I don’t coddle my classes,” had been her much-quoted
+observation, so ran the legend, when she made her first appearance at
+Pelham House. An undertone of the disapproving surprise and pain which
+such a statement must have caused her, always ran through any reference
+to Miss Fairfax when Mrs. Lysaght discussed her staff. And yet——
+
+“Results, dear—scholarships—honours—even through the Universities.
+Classical tripos, every year since she has been with us.”
+
+Gillian’s own education was a picaresque affair consisting of all her
+father had ever told her to read and a panoramic memory of class-rooms
+and lecture-theatres, art-galleries and concert-halls in Dresden,
+Munich, Vienna, Lausanne and Bournemouth through which she had followed
+her young, eager, inconsequent mother for six years after her father’s
+death. She envied Miss Fairfax the solid weight of Cheltenham and
+Girton, confirmed by a London degree. Professor Fairfax had not grudged
+the extra years necessary for this. He was not minded to leave his only
+daughter without the outward and visible recognition of those erudite
+inheritances of gifts and environment which she derived from him, and
+which, as he was given to telling people, had she been a man, would have
+made her a Fellow of All Souls.
+
+Miss Fairfax, however, did not pity Gillian for her lack of these
+regularized advantages.
+
+“Your state is the more gracious,” she said when Gillian told her that
+she had not the ghost of a degree, not the half of a certificate to her
+name. “You’ll not stay here. How, with a face like the National Gallery
+Botticelli and the mind of a revolutionary baby, you ever got here I
+still wonder.”
+
+“I think,” said Gillian, “I must be cheap, and I do a great deal of work
+for the money.”
+
+“How much?” said Miss Fairfax.
+
+Gillian told her.
+
+“The sweater!” said Miss Fairfax.
+
+“But I get extra for French Conversation twice a week,” said Gillian.
+
+“So does she,” said Miss Fairfax.
+
+Miss Fairfax was right. Gillian was not staying. There had been a letter
+from a Parent. As a matter of fact there had been two, but the first was
+really Mrs. Lysaght’s own affair, though the complaint had been launched
+at Gillian by name.
+
+But it was not only the letters. Gillian had begun to lose ground on the
+very day of Mrs. Lysaght’s return. The head mistress had come back from
+Jersey invigorated by the journey and by the sense of duty done, and not
+at all chastened by memories of those humiliations inseparable from a
+Channel passage which affect less-balanced frames.
+
+It was in connexion with this immunity that Gillian had been made aware
+of an error in tact.
+
+“And, I suppose, as usual, you were quite well throughout both
+crossings.”
+
+This was poor Miss Winter saying the right thing at luncheon on the day
+of Mrs. Lysaght’s return.
+
+“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Lysaght. “Never on the horizon
+and—semi-horizontal—— But Dean Webster, so deplorable—the clergy—and on
+deck.”
+
+“Mrs. Lysaght always lies in a deck-chair lowered as much as possible
+and keeps her eyes off the horizon through the whole crossing,” Miss
+Winter explained.
+
+“Oh, Mrs. Lysaght, if you stood up suddenly and caught sight of the
+horizon, would you be sick?” asked Gillian, elated by the thought of a
+new and useful light on a problem, in which for the moment she was
+keenly interested.
+
+Mrs. Lysaght flushed a stormy red and bit her bottom lip. Miss Winter
+took off her thick eye-glasses for a moment, revealing the singular
+blackness all short-sighted people show when their eyes are uncovered,
+and Miss Fairfax drank half a tumblerful of water with rather more noise
+than anyone not supported by a Classical Tripos would be allowed to make
+without reproof in such company. The conversation at the other side of
+the table swooned into the silence that emanated from Mrs. Lysaght.
+Gradually and astonishingly Gillian knew that she was being isolated,
+put into a moral cell and that every mouthful she raised from her plate
+was now an infraction of some Code for the Guilty of which until that
+moment she had been unaware. It was clearly wrong to go on eating, and
+yet Gillian was conscious of the old childish sense of ostracism
+attached to the end of nursery dinner when you were left alone at table
+and everyone was forbidden to speak to you until you _had_ finished
+“every scrap of that good batter-pudding—and you eating all the raisins
+out of it first, you greedy little girl.”
+
+It was batter-pudding again. And she had eaten all the raisins; not from
+conscious greed, but because they came that way, and, automatically, she
+was clearing her plate of the yellow residue, shovelling a path back to
+society again. And now _this_ was wrong. Mrs. Lysaght’s mist was no
+longer an amusing vapour with image after image looming through; it had
+thickened and dulled into a fog in which Gillian had lost her way. But
+the old compulsion prevailed. Bad little girls redeemed themselves and
+became good little girls by swallowing mouthfuls of cold, displeasing
+food in spite of stiff throats and mounting nausea; the way to salvation
+lay through physical anguish. By that old beacon she must steer across
+these unfamiliar waters. The unknown offence she had done must be
+mitigated by the known correctness. Gillian ate on. Around her spoons
+were laid down, forks mutely aligned with them, and the silence was
+augmented by this unanimous and simultaneous discarding of the tools of
+nutrition. But Gillian still ate with conscientious deliberation. One
+more spoonful and her plate would be cleared. As she pushed the yellow
+stickiness over the brim of the spoon, Gillian became aware of a
+pressure on her foot, slight but intentional. She looked up from her
+plate. Miss Fairfax was glaring at her.
+
+“Put it down, you fool.” She caught the undertone and dropped her spoon
+with a clatter. All the plates but hers had been cleared away. The
+youngest mistress was keeping the whole High Table waiting.
+
+Jessie, the waitress, was standing at Gillian’s elbow, and even as she
+whipped the plate away Mrs. Lysaght rose and pronounced an elaborate
+benediction on the meal her staff, with one exception, had only
+partially consumed.
+
+   “Gracious and most bountiful Father, we Thy most unworthy
+   servants render unto Thee thanksgiving and praise for these Thy
+   mercies vouchsafed so plenteously unto us alike both just and
+   unjust, and by us received in the name of and for the sake of Thy
+   dear Son our Lord. Amen.”
+
+“I’ve never heard that grace before,” said Gillian to Miss Fairfax as
+the school filed out of the dining-hall.
+
+“No,” said Miss Fairfax, “it’s the one used for criminals, and we’ve had
+very little crime this term, so far.”
+
+“But whose crime was she denouncing?”
+
+“Yours, my blue-eyed angel. Yours.”
+
+“I felt I’d done _some_thing. Do you know what it was?”
+
+“You asked Mrs. Lysaght at the top of your voice if she could be
+sea-sick—and at table. It isn’t done.”
+
+“Well,” said Gillian, “my sister wouldn’t go to Mentone when she was ill
+in the winter because she’s always so horribly sick crossing the
+Channel, and I thought if keeping your eyes off the horizon really
+did——”
+
+“You could have waited and asked the wretched Winter for details, and
+not suggested at the top of your voice that our august head could under
+any conditions whatever be sick in public. Didn’t you hear what she said
+about the Dean?”
+
+“Not exactly—it was Miss Winter said—and I _do_ think the punishment
+severe.”
+
+“That wasn’t the punishment, it was only the tocsin. Danger lies ahead.”
+
+
+                                   II
+
+Miss Fairfax was right. The staff took coffee in Mrs. Lysaght’s private
+room and melted away to their afternoon work or leisure. Gillian, who
+had Middle School preparation from 2:15 to 4 that day, was just about to
+leave when Mrs. Lysaght laid a white, detaining hand on her wrist.
+
+“A moment, dear. The hymn! So many hymn-books—Prayer should be elastic,
+spontaneous. I want it known by heart. On Friday. I shall give out this
+week’s hymn on Monday and each class will learn a verse each day. On
+Friday. _No_ hymn-books.”
+
+“But, Mrs. Lysaght, some hymns have more than five verses.”
+
+“That,” said Mrs. Lysaght with one of her astonishing lapses into
+clarity. “That will be your affair, dear. You will divide the hymn for
+me each week and repeat the day’s portion with the school in the Hall
+before Prayers.”
+
+Gillian accepted her added burden and by the end of the week was
+enjoying the five minutes before Prayers, even though it took ten
+minutes off her breakfast-time to encompass the earlier arrival and the
+rounding up of stragglers for rehearsal. On Friday the school did her
+credit. Two hundred hymn-books made a black pyramid outside the Hall
+door and, when the note was struck, two hundred voices raised as one,
+sang in the clear cold tones of early youth the heated words:
+
+   My God how wonderful Thou art!
+     Thy Majesty how bright!
+   How radiant Thy mercy-seat
+     In depths of burning light!
+
+In the second week, however, trouble came. Mrs. Lysaght, whose taste ran
+to sentiment, selected a fresh hymn, and the school did not take very
+kindly to it. There was trouble with the Fourth Form, headed by Madge
+Porter.
+
+Madge Porter was not a pleasant child. She was always asking the kind of
+question which arises not from a desire for knowledge but out of a
+determination to put teachers in holes. She had completely routed Miss
+Parratt during a lesson on the Reformation by asking that unfortunate
+lady whether she believed in the Thirty-Nine Articles. Miss Parratt
+having given an emphatic assent, Madge Porter had told her she was
+wrong, as her father, who was in a position to know because he had taken
+a degree in Science, said they were nothing but a farrago of
+superstition, and please would Miss Parratt tell her what “farrago”
+meant.
+
+And now Madge Porter was persuading the Middle School that this
+hymn-learning was extra-prep. So Gillian, on her own authority, took the
+ringleaders aside at Recreation on Wednesday and taught them their
+verses by rote. She sacrificed her own quarter of an hour to do it; but
+Madge Porter made her cross.
+
+On Thursday morning Madge arrived at Prayers with a note for Mrs.
+Lysaght. It was from the parent who was in a position to know the truth
+about the Thirty-Nine Articles, and it ran:
+
+                                                      DARWIN VILLA,
+                                                       PUTNEY HILL,
+                                                  _May 27th, 1912_.
+
+   DEAR MRS. LYSAGHT,
+
+   Kindly allow me to make a most emphatic protest against the
+   unwholesome restraint and unpedagogic waste of time at present
+   imposed on my young daughter Madge, by one of your junior
+   mistresses called, I understand, Miss Armstrong.
+
+   It appears that this Miss Armstrong has curtailed my daughter’s
+   recreation and interfered with the consumption of half a pint of
+   milk at 11 o’clock ordered by my doctor for her, by keeping her
+   in to commit to memory some highly reprehensible lines.
+
+   My daughter has been obliged to burden her mind with such an
+   incitement to laziness and lack of initiative as this:
+
+      O could we but relinquish all
+      Our earthly props and simply fall
+        On Thine almighty arms.
+
+   I make no complaint of the inculcation of Christian doctrine
+   which I am aware is inseparable from the curriculum of your
+   school, as I have taken due precaution to fortify Madge’s mind
+   against superstition by my own home teaching. But I do strongly
+   protest against the insidious inertia advocated in the passage I
+   have quoted and also against Miss Armstrong’s tyranny, and must
+   beg that Madge be removed from the classes in which she teaches.
+
+                                                   Yours sincerely,
+                                                JAMES PORTER, B.SC.
+
+   P.S. I shall be glad if, for the future, Madge may be excused
+   from Prayers.
+
+Mrs. Lysaght gave Gillian the letter to read.
+
+“Most unwise—most unwise,” she murmured and bit her lip as she waited
+for Gillian’s comment.
+
+“What a bad old man,” said Gillian. “No wonder Madge is such a terror.”
+
+Mrs. Lysaght blushed. She always blushed when you said the wrong thing.
+
+“Mr. Porter is a _parent_,” she said with heat; “a _parent_—he has every
+right—and the milk—never forget the means of health.”
+
+“But—you said ...” began Gillian.
+
+Mrs. Lysaght waved her hand, the hand with the gold pencil in it.
+
+“That has nothing to do with the question. Madge Porter does not take
+Scripture. You may go now, dear, but do not let it occur again.”
+
+Madge Porter’s rebellion blew over, but “It” occurred again. It, as Miss
+Fairfax explained when Gillian had exhausted herself in wondering what
+she was expected to avoid, being a letter from a parent.
+
+“You should never let it come to letters,” said Miss Fairfax. “A good
+assistant mistress consumes her own rows.”
+
+“That’s what I was trying to do,” Gillian protested, “and even if I’d
+known that Mr. Porter was such a bigoted free-thinker, I don’t feel that
+I should have let Madge off. I don’t like this hymn business myself, but
+if I’m to do it it shall be done properly.”
+
+“It won’t last,” Miss Fairfax promised her; “it’s your punishment for
+that impertinence of yours at luncheon last week. You’ll be let off if
+you’re properly good.”
+
+The difficulty, however, was to be properly good in a world where all
+the values were so different from her own.
+
+
+                                  III
+
+Gillian sat in the class-room after Mrs. Lysaght had left her. The three
+windows were wide open and the voices of the girls playing tennis in the
+courts beyond the lawn came up to her as they cried the score. It was
+after five o’clock and in half an hour the school-house would be closed.
+Already the sunlight was thrusting golden swords between the flat
+branches of the cedar-tree that darkened the window until evening, and
+the scent of the tobacco plants outside the Sixth Form Room was
+beginning to creep into the air which came in from the garden. And still
+she sat in the little chair on the teacher’s platform, her arms lying
+across the desk in front of her, her hands, smooth and beautiful and
+strange like the hands of some other woman, some woman whom she loved.
+
+In her lap she held a fat, blue leather manuscript book with double
+brass clasps, the book her father had given her on her ninth birthday
+into which she had copied prose and verse when she found it worthy, from
+the books she could not afford to buy. It lay in the green gingham
+valley of her dress, between her knees, and she had covered it with
+three rather fatigued roses and a bunch of pansies with black cotton
+round their brittle juicy stalks, the offerings of two of the class that
+afternoon. The pansies came from little Gertie Wentworth, a pink-faced,
+rather solemn child who made it her business to see that all the
+mistresses were supplied with flowers in turn, and who suited her
+offerings to the age and status of the recipient in a spirit of
+calculating frankness. The week usually opened or closed with fruit from
+the Wentworth hot-houses for Mrs. Lysaght. Miss Fairfax and Miss Parratt
+had hot-house flowers; so did Mademoiselle de Vanges, who had a tiny
+crown embroidered on her handkerchiefs. But, for Miss Winter and Miss
+Battinson, Gertie went into the open air and Fräulein Kühn had made a
+really dreadful scene on the morning on which the well-meaning Gertie
+brought her broad beans done up in brown paper. Pinks and lavender from
+the kitchen-garden borders, marsh-marigolds and scentless cabbage-roses
+did for Gillian; but they came more often than the nobler flowers, and
+Gertie, who had no veils over her heart, explained that she got them
+herself, the other flowers being her regular allowance for purposes of
+ingratiation ordered by her mother and supplied by the gardeners. In
+justice to Mrs. Wentworth it must be admitted that she had no idea of
+the scaling to which her daughter subjected the carrying out of her
+original half-shrewd half-kindly arrangement.
+
+“You see, Mrs. Armstrong,” said Gertie, apologizing for the pinks, “you
+are new and I only get one bunch a day from Jennings. So I went into the
+kitchen garden and got these myself as I always give the irises to Miss
+Battinson and Jennings sent irises this morning.”
+
+Gillian was so enchanted at this glimpse of a really ordered mind, as
+well as being glad to have the fragrant pinks, that she forebore to pick
+out Gertie’s “only” and replace it next the subject of this sentence as
+a good school-mistress is bound in duty to do. But she went about with a
+little grit in the wheels of her conscience for the rest of the day.
+“Why should I correct her grammar out of class?” she kept asking
+herself. “When she took all that trouble to be kind to me with flowers
+suitable to my station? I hope she’ll marry the Lord Mayor of London
+when she grows up, so as not to waste her instinct for suiting the gift
+to the taker.”
+
+So Gertie’s pansies lay like a funeral wreath on the cover of Gillian’s
+commonplace book, and beside them, Jane Bird’s roses.
+
+Jane Bird was one of Gillian’s problems. Jane Bird was really the only
+problem of which Gillian had been consciously aware at Pelham House. The
+intricacies of Mrs. Lysaght’s mind and conversation always presented
+themselves to her most junior mistress as amusements—labyrinths and
+jig-saws in which you wandered or which you took away with you to work
+out when you had time. But Jane Bird was a different, a rather
+frightening problem. She was also the only figure which stood out with
+any real distinction from the confused crowd of girls, mistresses,
+servants and visiting professors who surged on the attention of the
+dazed new-comer at Pelham House.
+
+She was a tall, gaunt Sixth Form girl with a high colour and steel-black
+hair parted in the middle and twisted into hard round knobs over each
+ear, and she made her one-piece frocks herself, usually out of bright
+blue casement cloth. She wore round-glassed spectacles and no stays and
+was known to the Middle School as the Dutch Doll. To her coevals and to
+the staff she was “Bird” without a Christian name, the only girl in the
+school to be distinguished in that particular way. There were two
+legends about her: one that she bathed naked in the sea in Cornwall
+every summer; the other, that she had killed a young man who had called
+her “Jinny” a third time, and had buried the remains in Richmond Park at
+midnight.
+
+Bird was known to take pride in both these legends and had illustrated
+them in a series of spirited drawings accompanied by a ballad. This work
+filled one of the Pelham House note-books, the red-covered kind issued
+from the Stationery Room for Greek and Latin only, and nobody quite knew
+how Bird came to possess it. Miss Fairfax, who had discovered its
+existence when correcting Latin Proses, always declared that Bird had
+stolen it and was daring the staff to denounce her to Mrs. Lysaght for
+theft. But nobody denounced Bird, and even if anybody had, it is more
+than likely that Miss Winter, who had charge of the Stationery Room,
+would have suffered alone. For, there was no doubt about it, the wretch
+was a marvel. “She drinks-in Greek like a sponge,” said Miss Fairfax,
+who was coaching her for Responsions much to the disgust of Mr.
+Reppington the Art Master who had never in all his experience had such a
+gift for drawing as Bird’s to develop. Bird’s name had headed every
+examination list in every subject as she passed up the school from the
+Lower Fourth Form, which she had entered at the age of twelve,
+positively smothered in scholarships; and it was to Jane Bird that Mrs.
+Lysaght looked during the next decade for the greatest glories ever
+earned for Pelham House.
+
+Until mid-term Gillian had only known this star of the Upper School by
+sight. But one rainy morning at Middle School Recreation Bird, being
+Chief Monitor, descended upon an over-noisy game in the Hall, and
+rescued Gillian from her single-handed combat against the forces of
+disorder by playing dance-music on the piano until the restless children
+were all waltzing happily together.
+
+“D’y recognize the tune?” said Bird over her shoulder to Gillian, who
+had gone up to the platform steps to thank her.
+
+“No,” said Gillian, “but it’s a very good waltz.”
+
+“It’s this week’s hymn,” said Bird. “_The day Thou gavest_, three-four
+time. _The two-three—Thou two-three, O Lor-three—is enDED._ Go and dance
+with Molly Carpenter—she’s perishing with love and lack of exercise. _To
+Thee-ee our mor-or-ning Son-ongs a-scend-ded_—You’ll enjoy it.”
+
+And Gillian had gone meekly up to the other monitor, a sickly girl in
+the Upper Fifth who used to waylay her in the mornings as she walked
+across the Heath from the 22-omnibus, and had danced with her till the
+bell for Fourth Lesson rang.
+
+Margaret Carpenter knew all about the origin of the swinging waltz.
+
+“She made a ripping two-step out of _Hark! the Herald Angels_, but Mrs.
+Lysaght won’t allow anything but waltzing in the school,” she complained
+to Gillian when the dance was over, “and Bird’s never played any of them
+at Recreation before.”
+
+Two days later the door of the class-room opened, ten minutes after
+Gillian had settled down to the afternoon French Conversation class by
+means of which she brought her salary up to a living wage, and in walked
+Bird.
+
+“Mrs. Lysaght has given me permission to change from Mademoiselle’s
+Senior French Conversation to yours, Miss Armstrong,” she explained in a
+loud, clear voice. “It is felt that one Englishwoman will be more ready
+to appreciate and to assist another Englishwoman in her difficulties
+with a foreign tongue than anyone to whom these difficulties are by
+nature non-existent.”
+
+She recited this speech in the manner of one having learnt the whole of
+it by heart, and then stalked down the class-room, only half-filled by
+the girls who took this extra subject, and settled herself in a desk by
+the window at the farther end of the room.
+
+Gillian’s oddly excited alarm at this apparition was not diminished when
+it became evident that Jane Bird was taking no active part in the
+conversation class. To all remarks addressed to her by name she replied
+with the same phrase delivered in a strong Britannic accent:
+
+“Mais-oui, mademoiselle, vous avez raison,” and then fell back into a
+concentrated silence so removed from inattention that it baffled Gillian
+as Bird clearly intended it to do.
+
+At her second appearance she took copious notes, and once questioned the
+construction of a line Gillian quoted; at her third she remained silent
+and intent on some drawing before her. When the class was dismissed
+Gillian had, her heart beating with fright, asked the Chief Monitor to
+remain behind. Bird, calm and still speechless, stood to attention,
+facing the light so that its reflection in her thick glasses completely
+hid her eyes from her terrified interlocutor.
+
+“I want to know,” said Gillian, her tongue thickening in her mouth as
+she spoke. “I want to know why you come to this class.”
+
+“But, Miss Armstrong,” Bird’s voice was silky with polite surprise, “to
+learn to speak French.”
+
+“But you never speak.”
+
+“I listen to you. That helps me enough.”
+
+Gillian changed her line.
+
+“What have you been drawing all this afternoon?”
+
+“Lit-tel Armstrongs,” said Bird, “dee-licious little Armstrongs
+backwards through the centuries. Some of them better than others. Look,”
+and she placed her sketch-book on the desk before Gillian.
+“Eighteen-eighty, bustle and fringe, Du Maurier—_not_ very
+good—but Cranford and a crinoline—delightful. First Empire—a
+failure—Elizabeth—too stiff and concealing. Medieval henna and veil much
+better. I shall do you Greek next week—and Egyptian—I’m strong on
+Egypt—and then—Eve in the Garden—oh, only the head and shoulders——”
+
+“How dare you?” said Gillian, breathless.
+
+“But they’re _very_ clever,” said Bird. “Of course, if you object, you
+can report me to Mrs. Lysaght. You can’t very well report me to myself,
+though if you’d like to do that—I—as Chief Monitor will naturally come
+to your aid—I am bound by the beautiful Pelham House Code of Honour to
+do so.”
+
+“Very well then,” said Gillian, “I _do_ report you to yourself. Go home
+now and bring yourself to me at Second Recreation to-morrow in the Third
+Form Room, and tell me what you’re going to do about it.”
+
+The next day at Second Recreation Gillian had found Jane Bird waiting
+for her in the empty class-room.
+
+“Well,” said Gillian.
+
+“I’ve thought over the case you reported to me yesterday, Miss
+Armstrong,” said Bird coldly, “and I have not only confiscated the
+drawings you complain of, but destroyed them.”
+
+“Destroyed the drawings,” Gillian gasped.
+
+“By fire. They _were_ very clever. I hope you are satisfied.” And with
+enormous dignity to which she contrived to add a touch of pathos as of
+some wounded giant, Bird had stalked away.
+
+She continued to come to French Conversation and Gillian grew to dread
+her speech more than her silence. For Bird now came armed with questions
+so subtly framed, so intelligently asked, that it was impossible to
+convict the questioner of any object in asking them other than the
+entirely laudable determination to make the best of her opportunities;
+and so searching, that, more than once, Gillian was obliged to confess
+her inability to deal with one or another of them.
+
+Then, to her own great relief and pleasure, Gillian found that Bird was
+as keenly eager for the beauty of words as she was herself, and on the
+last afternoon but one before the Midsummer Examination set in, she had
+had what she called a miracle hour—one of those moments when Beauty
+slips away from all the obscuring considerations which hide her from
+busy people and they pause from their blinding pursuits while the vision
+is granted. It was part of the puzzle that she could sometimes take a
+class with her into the revelation—but not always. That day they had
+come—all of them—but it was Bird, Jane Bird, who had been filled with
+the glory, who had pursued each lovely line with Gillian, who had from
+her own reading, caught gleaming syllables herself and had added them to
+the jewelled minutes of that shared excitement.
+
+And it was out of this glow, this splendour, that the thunderbolt had
+fallen!
+
+The second French Conversation class in the week was held on Friday
+afternoon, and for it Gillian, still in the haze of heavenly sounds
+which had enclosed her consciousness ever since the Tuesday class, had
+brought with her the fat, blue commonplace book, because, after the
+flowing of verse she had been constrained to hear the march of prose,
+and there were passages copied out there which she must let forth to
+fill the channels freshly made in the minds of the girls she taught, and
+most of all (she knew this with a deep satisfaction) in Jane Bird’s
+mind, by the poetry she had made them all hear.
+
+All the morning long she had gone about her other duties waiting until
+the hour when, in the class-room overlooking the lawn, in the shade of
+the great cedar-tree outside, she could take her own class—and oh! most
+specially Jane Bird—back into the enchanted country. _Mon âme est un
+colombier_, how the molten phrases flowed!—_Presse le pas, ô mon
+rêve_—she could hear the quickened breathing, see the flush which burned
+her own cheeks flame in the faces before her, as the spirit quickened
+within each one of them.
+
+And it had been almost as good to do as to dream of, this sharing of her
+private hoard. As she read the passages aloud, the voice, the level,
+grave and beautiful voice of her father reading them to her in the
+larch-woods above Sils-Maria, seemed to be leading her own. She could
+see his small, fine features, his soft, blue, very clear eyes, his thin
+hands, holding the yellow-paper book, the great length of him, six long
+feet and more, stretched in the grass, almost on the edge of the rock
+above the lake. The breeze seemed to sigh around them again with faint
+icy breath from the glaciers behind; and all the light and colour and
+love of that last summer before he died gathered and increased in her as
+she read, and drove through her, and reached the listening girls.
+
+When the singing phrases were finished, Gillian looked across the wide
+room to Jane Bird sitting erect and motionless at the far end of the
+aisle of desks. And Jane Bird’s eyes were welling over with great
+glistening tears which ran down her flat, red cheek and fell on the
+flat, blue bosom of her home-made frock, unheeded.
+
+Bird, the arrogant, contemptuous, terrible Bird was crying! Gillian
+looked at the roses on her desk with changed eyes. When Bird, following
+Gertie Wentworth with her pansies, had laid the three heavy Frau Karl
+Droushkys across the pen-tray on the reading-desk as the rest of the
+class took their seats, Gillian had hardly been able to thank the girl
+for them. Her action had been abrupt, slightly mocking. She suggested
+more than so simple a gift need imply.
+
+“They’re like pale girls with red rims to their eyes,” she’d said, and
+Gillian had felt caricatured. But the faint resentment Bird had aroused
+was gone now, washed away by those heavy, silent tears.
+
+And then, suddenly, the whole class had risen to its feet. Mrs. Lysaght
+was in the room. How long she had been there Gillian did not know. The
+door had been left open because of the heat.
+
+“Who is the author?” Mrs. Lysaght was flustered, displeased.
+
+“Théophile Gautier,” said Gillian. “It’s a famous passage from
+_Mademoiselle de Maupin_.”
+
+“Go!” Mrs. Lysaght had dismissed the class, but Gillian had remained
+reading the letter the head mistress had thrust into her hand. It was
+from the Bishop of Putney whose twin daughters were salient features of
+the Upper Fifth and of Gillian’s conversation class.
+
+   MY DEAR MRS. LYSAGHT,
+
+   Doris and Daphne have come home in a great state of enthusiasm
+   from their French lesson this afternoon, and have somewhat
+   gravely disturbed their mother by assuring her that the most
+   beautiful line in French poetry is one taken from Racine’s
+   _Phèdre_. It runs thus:
+
+      “La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë.”
+
+   They have been asking me to elucidate the text. While agreeing
+   with the young lady who has evidently stimulated my daughter’s
+   appreciation of verbal beauty, may I venture, quite tentatively,
+   to suggest that it would be wiser in future to seek examples in
+   the works of Corneille, or if Racine be more fertile in melodious
+   passages (I am myself a little rusty in these matters), to select
+   passages from _Esther_ or from _Athalie_ rather than from those
+   plays which are not usually read in English schools.
+
+   Please do not allow this mild suggestion to assume an unduly
+   critical weight in your consideration and above all, dear lady,
+   do not for one moment accuse me of wishing to interfere with the
+   more than admirable conduct of your own high mission at Pelham
+   House.
+
+                                      Yours, always most cordially,
+                                                   VINCENT PUNCTUS.
+
+“But,” said Gillian, “Corneille doesn’t——”
+
+“Out of the question,” said Mrs. Lysaght. She was quivering with passion
+and the lace which fell from the wrists of her grey silk-muslin gown
+shook about her hands as she gesticulated between each fragment of a
+phrase.
+
+“Gross indecency—corruption—and now Gautier—nothing but his
+verse—selections of course—_Perles de la Poésie Française_—in the
+Library—I must see what else——” and she took the manuscript book from
+the reading-stand.
+
+“Oh, but Mrs. Lysaght,” protested Gillian, “nobody ever—not even my
+mother—it’s quite a private book——”
+
+“Anatole France—_Le Lys Rouge_—monstrous—Gabriele d’Annunzio—steeped in
+vice—Swinburne—Rossetti—The Ballad of Hell—my dear Miss Armstrong—how
+mistaken—Hugo von Hofmannsthal—unknown to me—Maeterlinck—_Serres
+Chaudes_—but this is nauseating—a contamination—confiscate——”
+
+“Give me back my book,” said Gillian, “you are not fit to look at it. It
+is full of loveliness you’ll never see.”
+
+“I have been completely deceived in you,” said Mrs. Lysaght,
+“completely. This one term of probation will end at the end of this
+month. I must ask you to set and correct your own examination papers in
+the office—not mix with the school again.” And with this lapse into
+lucidity, Mrs. Lysaght trembled out of the room, carrying the Bishop’s
+letter reverently folded in her right hand, the left being crammed as
+usual with note-book, pencil and a floating supplement of extra
+documents which varied in number and intensity with the time of term.
+
+Mrs. Lysaght’s crash into Gillian’s paradisic hour seemed like a
+thunderclap in a sunlit garden. It shattered the peace, but only for a
+moment. As she sat on, a little stunned by the force of the anger which
+had been spent upon her, the waves of beauty began to creep up once
+more—the flood of sound to rise in her ears again, drowning the sense of
+disaster which had only partially reached her comprehension through the
+violence of its onset.
+
+Then another presence made itself vehement. Rigid against the panelled
+wall at the back of the room Jane Bird sat, black and white, crimson and
+royal blue, hardened again behind her convex glasses as though she never
+had, never could have wept.
+
+“Jane, Jane Bird—how did you get there?”
+
+“I didn’t go.”
+
+“But—Mrs. Lysaght——”
+
+“I know. Neither of you saw me. It’s a trick.”
+
+“Do you mean you’ve been there all the time?”
+
+“All the time. Yes. It’s been a great help to me. I shan’t be going to
+Oxford after all.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“Well, you won’t be here to coach me in French for one thing. I shan’t
+tell you the other.”
+
+“Oh, very well.” Gillian began to gather her books and flowers together
+standing up rather wearily to do so. Jane was beside her, below the
+platform, looking up at her with yellow eyes out of the deep lenses of
+her spectacles.
+
+“The matter with you is that you don’t see face values,” said the Chief
+Monitor. “You won’t in the least know what this would mean to anyone
+else. For you it’ll just be new words I’ve written to an old tune. As
+you told me to,” and she placed on the desk a sheet of thin blue paper
+on which in her clear, delicate writing, she had set down some verses.
+
+“Good afternoon, Miss Armstrong,” said Jane Bird, and walked out of the
+room.
+
+Gillian picked up the paper she had left behind her.
+
+
+                      AN OLD SONG RESUNG—she read—
+
+   If every tree and every flower
+       And every star of night
+   Could join their beauties for an hour
+       To make one pure delight;
+
+   The grace thus formed would cease to be
+       To nature’s marvel true,
+   Would lack the mystic unity
+       For which I worship you.
+
+“I suppose it’s _Songs of Araby_,” said Gillian, humming the lines
+through after a second reading, “and you repeat the last two lines. Not
+at all bad, but it isn’t really a lyric,” and she slipped the sheet of
+paper into her commonplace book and snapped the clasps upon it.
+
+Downstairs in the cloak-room she was confronted by Miss Fairfax.
+
+“Will nothing wake you from your dream?” said she. “I’ve watched you
+coming along the gallery and down the stairs, looking as though you’d
+been in Heaven.”
+
+“So I have,” said Gillian, “but I believe I’ve been excommunicated all
+the same.”
+
+“That’s what I mean. Mrs. Lysaght came rushing by as I came out of the
+Extra Matriculation Coaching half an hour ago and said something about
+the Bishop and the French tongue. What have you been telling the twins?”
+
+“Only about vowel-sounds,” said Gillian.
+
+“What? Again? And not lucky this time.”
+
+Gillian explained.
+
+“Well, all I can say,” said Miss Fairfax, when the facts were before
+her, “is that I wonder, with your genius for missing the real point of a
+quotation, all I wonder is that you didn’t administer ‘_Vénus toute
+entière à sa proie attachée_’ to the whole class. It’s quite as good in
+its way.”
+
+“No, it’s not,” said Gillian, “it’s all t’s and hissing and it’s like
+‘our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence.’ She
+told the school that was the finest line in Wordsworth the other day,
+and it’s two lines, and it’s horrid, and she might just as well have
+said, ‘though inland far we be’ or ‘old forgotten far-off things’ or ‘I
+feel the weight of chance desires.’” And much to Miss Fairfax’s
+distress, Gillian sat down on the boot-rack and began to cry.
+
+“If these tears,” said Miss Fairfax, “are shed for the æsthetic
+misdirections of our Head, they are wasted; if they bedew the close of
+your own career as an instructress of youth they are silly, because,”
+Miss Fairfax sat down beside her young colleague and blew her nose with
+decision, “because you have not the kind of outlook which fits you for
+the career of instructress.”
+
+“Don’t say ‘instructress,’ dear, darling Miss Fairfax,” said Gillian, “I
+can’t bear it.”
+
+
+                                   IV
+
+And now she was going home to tell Lilac. She had walked down West Hill
+and taken the tram to Clapham Junction so as to go the longest way round
+and have the bit across the Bridge before she went in. It would be seven
+o’clock before she got to the river, and the tide would be full. Over in
+the rose-and-lavender distance the flattened bubble of the Lambeth
+gas-vat, like some pearly white moon would be rising from the stuff of
+the Earth ready to detach itself to soar up, up, into the highways where
+satellites travel the sky. The window-boxes and painted tubs along
+Cheyne Walk would make a bright mosaic against the shadow beneath the
+sunset, and all the sparrows in the garden in Chancery would be
+chirruping over their evening crumbs. And Lilac would be laying the
+table for supper and wondering why Gillian was late. Gillian was not at
+all sure how Lilac would take the news.
+
+Lilac took it very well. She had finished laying the table when Gillian
+got in and was sewing two enormous mauve satin ribbons on to a white
+crinoline hat.
+
+“I’ve washed them,” she said as Gillian opened the door which led
+straight off the top-floor landing into their little sitting-room. “I’ve
+washed them in cold water with salt in it, and they’re as good as new.
+Sophie does get the best of everything.”
+
+“Was it one of Sophie’s hats?” asked Gillian.
+
+“No. I bought the hat myself, but the strings come off that orchid-mauve
+frock Sophie gave me at Easter and the rose was in a hat of hers. I’ve
+put them all together and they’re exactly like a model I saw in Sloane
+Street last week.”
+
+“Lilac,” said Gillian, “I’ve been excommunicated. Mrs. Lysaght and the
+Bishop have turned me out of Pelham House.”
+
+“The beetles!” said Lilac. “The black beetles!—the cockroaches! And
+you’ve worked for them like a steam-engine. Go and get into your white
+muslin and we’ll have _all_ the butter with the green peas. I’ve put an
+onion and some mint to boil with them as you told me.”
+
+Friday was the night the Armstrongs cooked their own supper on a Primus.
+On other evenings they had what was called the House dinner sent up from
+the Club kitchen.
+
+Over the late strawberries which followed the green peas (not that the
+Armstrongs were vegetarians, but you can’t cook meat on a Primus in the
+scullery), Lilac pronounced herself on Mrs. Lysaght’s side.
+
+“It’s a mercy,” said Lilac severely, “that I kept _The Garden of Karma_
+locked up in my side of the wardrobe or you’d have given them ‘Pale
+hands I love’ for daily bread.”
+
+“No, I shouldn’t. It’s slip-slop.”
+
+“It’s luscious,” said Lilac; “besides, how do you know, when I haven’t
+let you read it?”
+
+“I read it in Brussels last year when I was staying with Henriette,”
+said Gillian. “I wouldn’t give it to a railway porter.”
+
+“Well, a railway porter wouldn’t want a book of poetry,” said Lilac with
+that sententious, definitive air which characterized the close of most
+of her arguments with her elder sister.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night, long after Gillian had supposed her to be asleep, Lilac
+called out in a soft little voice across the room from the bed under the
+window:
+
+“Jilly dear,” she said, “what _are_ you going to do?”
+
+“Pray,” said Gillian; “it’s the only thing I can do to-night.”
+
+“I suppose it is,” said Lilac. “I’ll say a threefold Ah-ah-men for you.”
+
+“Thank you, Laylock. I didn’t know you were awake——”
+
+“Oh, I just woke up. I suppose you were praying something fierce, and
+that always disturbs me.”
+
+“Sorry,” said Gillian.
+
+“Granted, Miss Armstrong, I’m sure,” said Lilac.
+
+And then they both fell asleep.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER TWO.
+                                 LILAC
+
+
+                                   I
+
+On the prospectus it was called _The Mordaunt Club_, but in practice no
+one ever thought of saying anything but “The Hen House” when speaking of
+the block of unselfcontained flats near the river in which Gillian and
+Lilac Armstrong had lived ever since their mother’s death.
+
+Sir John Mordaunt, its founder, had built it out of the remnants of
+Buckingham Palace. This material he had acquired at what a later age has
+called bargain prices, from one of the contractors when the Royal
+dwelling was finished and there were bricks and mortar and fine-faced
+stone to be had for the carting away. Being of the period, the Mordaunt
+Club building was rock-like in stolidity and forbidding of aspect.
+Framed to shelter poor spinsters of the governing-classes in their
+declining years, it consisted of two gaunt five-storied houses, one on
+each side of a courtyard graced by one plane-tree and a laburnum.
+Kindness without consideration had directed the scheme. The buildings
+faced due north and south. There were four flats, or sets of rooms on
+each floor into two of which the sun never shone; the other two from
+March to October being intolerable unless their occupants were able to
+obtain for themselves the sunblinds philanthropy had not provided. The
+flats consisted of two small intercommunicating rooms, the outer one
+opening on to a common hall out of which, on each floor, two bleak
+corridors with coal-bin, oil-tank, sink, cold-water tap and lavatory
+(also of the period) served the tenants of the four flats as joint
+domestic offices. Two members living together were allowed one extra and
+separate room, if they could get it. And the rent, which was small,
+included a certain amount of service.
+
+There was a communal kitchen in the basement of one of the buildings,
+from which, twice a day, at one o’clock and at half-past seven, the
+roast beef of old England or the boiled mutton of her Antipodean island,
+was sent up accompanied by potatoes, boiled, with turnips, carrots or
+cabbage according to their season, and followed by milk-pudding, and on
+Sundays by apple-pie. These viands, served between two hot plates, were
+placed on the table in each sitting-room, whether it were laid for a
+meal or spread, as the Armstrongs’ often was, with Gillian’s
+school-books or Lilac’s millinery, by small hard-working maids. They
+came from Battersea, these servers, and were ruled over by the janitor
+Mr. Gordon, and by his wife Mrs. Gordon, who roasted beef and boiled
+mutton for the “Ladies” (this was how the basement referred to the
+landings) and fried and grilled and souffléed choicer viands for her
+husband and the maids to consume at less conventional hours.
+
+Mr. Gordon was only parts of a man: he had a wooden leg, a glass eye and
+one other contrivance of the surgical-instrument maker, the precise
+nature and location of which was most decently unrevealed, though its
+existence was well known and always spoken of as “Mr. Gordon’s trouble.”
+For some time after they came to the Mordaunt Club the Armstrongs had
+supposed Mr. Gordon’s trouble to be the one which was always very
+troublesome on Saturday evenings and had caused him one night to make an
+earnest attempt at locking the courtyard gate with a tablespoon. This
+delusion, fostered by the constant references to it in Mrs. Gordon’s
+conversation, and by the frequency with which it was cited by the maids
+as a complete explanation for their lateness on any occasion, was
+dispelled, or rather was thrust further into mystery by Mrs. Gordon
+herself.
+
+“I wonder if you’d mind paying by cheque, miss,” said Mrs. Gordon on her
+weekly visit to collect the dinner-money. “If I take it all downstairs
+in cash, nothing’ll hold Mr. Gordon. They’ve told him at the Orspittle
+that he can have a new spring fitted to his trouble, and he’s that set
+on it—you know what men are, miss—that he can’t wait to find out whether
+it reely will do any good work or whether it’s just one of them try-ons.
+Larst year he had six little buttons put on, instead of the strap. And
+believe me, miss, there ’asn’t been a week since when one or other of
+them buttons ’asn’t popped off. And he won’t have boot-buttons sewed on
+at home instead. Not he. You know what men are, miss. Back to the shop
+it must go—and a shillin’ a time unless I can find the button in his
+close. So I’ve took to keepin’ the buttons till four’s off at a time.
+And wot it’ll be like if he gets a spring put on as well you can guess
+for yourself, miss. It’s cost us a pretty penny has Mr. Gordon’s
+trouble, miss; not but wot her ladyship didn’t come down very handsome
+at first, but Mr. Gordon never was one to let well alone. And he _will_
+read the papers. You know what men are, miss. All them nasty
+advertisements putting ideas into his head. So, if you don’t mind, miss,
+I’ll take a cheque, and give you all the cash I’ve collected from Number
+Six and Number Nine—Eight’s out—and that’ll leave me just enough to do
+the shoppin’ meself this morning, and Mr. Gordon won’t be tempted even
+if he does get hold of my clean apron.”
+
+Mrs. Gordon’s clean apron, a highly starched affair, was remarkable for
+two pockets, in one of which she kept change, in the other a photograph
+of Miss Gordon, Mr. Gordon’s daughter by an earlier and evidently
+ill-judged union. Gillian was, from the first, at a loss to account for
+the frequency with which Mrs. Gordon, diving for change, would put her
+hand in the wrong pocket and withdraw the picture exclaiming:
+
+“There now! if I haven’t gone and got out Miss Gordon’s photograph
+instead of arf a crown. P’r’aps, as I have got it out, you’d like to
+look at it, miss. It’s a new one. She brought it in the other day when
+she come to see me and Mr. Gordon.”
+
+And it very often was a new one. Miss Gordon seemed to be able to afford
+a great many very new photographs, many of them taken in deep evening
+dress, though the first one that had emerged from the housekeeper’s
+pocket was a tinted affair on a thick bevelled card and represented Miss
+Gordon in tennis clothes, “pure white to her feet” as Mrs. Gordon
+pointed out, with racket in hand and balls on the ground, and a
+tennis-net faintly sketched in on the blank background.
+
+“It’s more than her own mother ever saw,” had been Mrs. Gordon’s cryptic
+reply to Gillian’s congratulations on the handsome effect produced by
+this effigy, “nor deserved to,” she had added as one who could, if
+encouraged, expatiate on a rich theme.
+
+Gillian would have liked to know more, but Lilac had discouraged this
+curiosity in her sister as being not only vulgar but idle.
+
+“For goodness’ sake, Gillian,” she said, “don’t let the woman talk more
+than she must. She’ll stay here all day if you listen to her with both
+eyes like that.”
+
+“But I think she’s wonderful,” said Gillian, “and such a rest from Mrs.
+Lysaght. She talks about real things and makes them deep and funny.”
+
+Lilac snorted, “Rather a good description of her apple-pies. The crust
+had sunk in deep enough last Sunday and there was a bit of carrot in the
+apple when I got to it. Besides, she isn’t here to amuse you—and she
+doesn’t amuse me. Go and talk to Mrs. Barraclough if you must be amused
+in the Club. She’ll tell you things that are some use and she might get
+old Lady Mordaunt to let me sell roses on Alexandra Day.”
+
+Mrs. Barraclough was the Club treasurer. She lived in the flat at the
+top of the kitchen stairs, and every Monday from 4 to 6, she sat at the
+receipt of custom. The members—it was understood that they should not be
+known as “tenants,” lest the Club lose caste—called on her to gossip, or
+left their rent on the first Friday of the month in notes in her
+letter-box according to their dispositions, some ladies being far more
+delicate over finance than others. So delicate indeed was Miss Parsons
+who lived in the flat immediately opposite Lilac and Gillian, that she
+always paid her rent anonymously and late at night, stealing down to
+slip a sealed envelope into Mrs. Barraclough’s letter-box, after Mr.
+Gordon had gone his rounds at ten o’clock, when he put out the
+landing-lights and locked the Club up till morning.
+
+Mrs. Barraclough was the widow of a Yorkshire squire—but Mr.
+Barraclough’s passage through her life had been so short and so sudden
+that if it had ever mitigated her essential qualities, the change had
+long been rectified. She was one of seven Irish daughters, all reckless,
+as only the children of a Resident Magistrate in the eighteen-eighties
+could be; and, after a youth of hard riding to and after hounds, had
+eloped from the hunting-field with Tom Barraclough, and had seen him
+drown before her eyes six months later, when their wild, protracted
+honeymoon ended in the Aran Islands.
+
+The child, which was born the following year, was a girl, and her mother
+had never forgiven her for it. In consequence of the child’s failure to
+be a man she had seen the small estate pass to a cousin, from whom her
+tiny jointure had to be wrung year by year by a solicitor whose charges
+for obtaining it halved, and in very bad years, quartered the total
+which eventually reached the widow’s pocket.
+
+Mrs. Barraclough’s life had been one long scrimmage and the training
+served her well. For none but a woman inured to battle could hope to
+keep the semblance of peace and order in such a hornet’s nest as the
+Club was framed to become in any of those emergencies to which communal
+life is liable. She had obtained the post by nepotism of the frankest
+kind. Lilias her daughter had escaped early from the chronic friction of
+home, by way of marriage with a naval lieutenant, a grandson of the
+Club’s founder; and the present Sir John Mordaunt, a man of affairs and
+used to cutting knots, had solved the problem of his daughter-in-law’s
+relations with her mother by pulling such strings as were necessary to
+get his son appointed to a ship in the China Seas. Having done this he
+set Lilias up in a flat in Yokohama and, by himself, appointed Mrs.
+Barraclough to the post of Treasurer of the Club. Mrs. Barraclough’s
+book-keeping was entirely her own affair, but it was sufficient, and she
+was in Debrett. To be in Debrett had originally been the first
+qualification for membership of the Mordaunt. Lilac and Gillian were not
+there. They had figured in _Who’s Who_ as “_2 daughters_” until Gerald
+Armstrong’s death and that was all. But, as Mrs. Barraclough explained
+when interviewing them, things had slackened terribly since the War. She
+was referring to the Boer War which had filled the two years immediately
+following her appointment to the Club.
+
+“It is now enough to be the widow, or the orphan of any officer,” said
+Mrs. Barraclough, “or of a missionary, and I understand that your aunt
+was a missionary.”
+
+Gillian was indignant.
+
+“Aunt Elizabeth was nothing of the kind,” she protested. “She was
+engaged for many years to a celibate clergyman in Rhodesia—who died two
+years after their marriage—and neither Lilac nor I is her, or his,
+orphan.”
+
+“That’s what I was just saying,” said Mrs. Barraclough who, being Irish,
+always knew what she meant, and knew it most especially clearly when her
+hearers were most confused by what she actually said.
+
+“Wasn’t it because Miss Armstrong was so well known to Mrs. Middleton
+that you ever came to hear of the Club yourselves? And she’s a
+missionary born and bred, though how she came by such a daughter as
+Jessie is one of those things I’d like to ask someone who knows.”
+
+“Well, anyway,” Gillian insisted, “we’re not missionaries.”
+
+“No,” said Mrs. Barraclough, “you’re not, neither of you. Though if one
+of you was it wouldn’t be that fluffy little sister of yours. I saw her
+going out in a frill of muslin yesterday, which had no missionary in its
+pedigree.”
+
+“Lilac won’t ever be a missionary, even though she wants to go to India
+more than anything in this world.”
+
+“Then to India she’ll go,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “Lilac is the kind of
+girl that gets what she wants, and sooner than late. But I’ll tell you,”
+she went on with one of those sudden changes of theme which made her
+conversation so stimulating, “I’ll tell you who is. The new tenant at
+44. Miss Victoria Vanderleyden—she’s a missionary.”
+
+“She sounds much more like an American,” said Gillian.
+
+“She’s that too,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “American on one side and
+missionary on the other—I forget which is which—and a manicurist by
+profession.”
+
+“I thought you said she was a missionary.”
+
+“By birth, yes. But now that she’s got in on the strength of having been
+born in Java or some such outlandish place, I find that she works in one
+of those sinks of iniquity in Bond Street where you get your face ironed
+out and your finger-nails made to look as though you’d been eating hot
+muffins and got melted butter all over ’em. You ring the bell before you
+can get in, and you pay a guinea before you can get out, and it mostly
+goes in curtains and cushions.”
+
+“Not a shop?” asked Gillian.
+
+“No,” Mrs. Barraclough snorted, “a parlour. The Spider and the Fly it
+should be called. I went there once to see.”
+
+“Did you pay a guinea?” asked Gillian.
+
+“I did not. I rang the bell and asked for a price-list. I might have
+dropped an ‘h’ with a crash by the horrors they had. They don’t have a
+price-list. It’s called a ‘brochure,’ and it says very little about
+prices. It isn’t exactly a shop, but it’s so nearly one that I’d never
+have let that young woman in if I’d known about it before she was in. I
+must wink at it now.”
+
+Mrs. Barraclough spent a good deal of time in winking at things which
+were not strictly within the order of the Club, but which did not
+disturb its peace. It was this capacity to wink with discretion that,
+more than anything else in her methods, had established her power over
+the members and also over the Committee which loomed behind her
+administration.
+
+“She’s a nice creature to look at and very quiet.”
+
+“She’s young then?” Gillian was interested.
+
+“She seems young to me, but she’s not a baby. You two are all I want in
+the infant line at present.”
+
+At one time the Club took no one under forty; but that meant separating
+mother from daughters. At first they had excluded widows. That was in
+old Sir John’s time. The idea of a man who didn’t provide for his wife
+made the philanthropist so angry that he refused to do anything for the
+consequences.
+
+“The Club’s full of widows now,” said Gillian. “There’s the Countess.”
+
+“There is,” said Mrs. Barraclough, “and it’s about the Countess I’ve got
+to talk to you, Miss Armstrong. I’ve had a letter of complaint from
+her.”
+
+“She’s a terrible complainer,” said Gillian. “I suppose it’s her
+nationality. Poles do have a greater sensibility to grievances than
+other people.”
+
+“Oh, well, so do the Irish,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “But the Countess
+has complained of you.”
+
+“Of me? But I never do anything but say good-morning, and take in her
+parcels if I’m in and she’s out. I don’t share her scullery. She’s on
+Miss Parsons’ side.”
+
+“That is the trouble. She says she’s timed the maids and that it took
+Beatrice twice as long to empty your slops last week when your sister
+was away as it did Gladys to deal with hers and Miss Parsons’.”
+
+“Well, so long as it didn’t interfere with Gladys I don’t see that it
+matters. Beatrice is on our side and she never complains.”
+
+“You don’t understand. It’s the principle of the thing. You are getting
+twice as much service as she is whoever serves you. She says, in the
+postscript, that she cannot avoid the suspicion that you have a hot bath
+every morning.”
+
+“But of course.”
+
+“That’s what she supposes, she says, ‘as a matter of course.’”
+
+“What have you said to her?”
+
+“I’ve written to say that I am speaking to you on the subject, Miss
+Armstrong, and I’ve pointed out that the remedy lies in her own hands.
+But being a Papist I doubt if she is allowed to bathe at all during
+Lent.”
+
+“Did you put that last bit in your letter?”
+
+“I did not. I’m warning you that whatever you do, whether it’s washing
+yourself as a Christian should, or having tea-parties on Sunday will be
+used against you and reported to me—and now you may go, I’ve got to see
+Mrs. Middleton about the new fireplace she’s putting into No. 6.”
+
+“I shall complain about the Countess and her piano,” said Gillian from
+the threshold, “and that’ll be cutting off my nose to spite her face,
+because she plays gorgeously. It will be a terrible pity, but perhaps it
+will all be for the best, because if she thinks I don’t like her playing
+she’ll play much more than she does now. I think I shall complain
+chiefly about the Debussy and the Folk-Songs and then she’ll be put off
+Rachmaninoff and Liszt.”
+
+“Go away, you chatterbox,” said Mrs. Barraclough, throwing a stone out
+of her own glass house with vigour and conviction.
+
+This conversation had taken place soon after Gillian had made her entry
+into the Club, having walked to Chelsea from Wimbledon beside the
+greengrocer’s van in which the Armstrong furniture was piled, because
+the greengrocer and his boy, who were officiating, had refused to start
+unless William’s voice were stilled and their own safety insured.
+William was a sulphur-crested cockatoo who could, and did, sing “God
+save the King” as far as the syllable “Gra——” and no further, whenever
+in his opinion things had gone far enough. He sang very loud and harsh,
+and danced as he sang, accompanying himself with crest outspread and
+great beating of wings. Having his cage tied on to the top of a
+greengrocer’s wagon full of furniture on a cold-hearted day in December,
+was one of the things no cockatoo could be expected to encourage, and
+William had burst into the National Anthem before he had been actually
+roped on as the finishing touch to the already overloaded cart. Several
+repetitions of this fragment having collected a crowd, William had grown
+emphatic and reaching a loud “Gray” for the sixth time, stayed there
+shrieking “Gray—Gray—Gray” and shaking his cage with a furious dance of
+protest. So Gillian, who had intended to make the journey by omnibus,
+was obliged to go with William who would listen to her and to nobody
+else. And William, once he had been persuaded that she was not going to
+desert him, folded wings and crest, and cocking his head on one side
+kept one bright, round eye fixed on his mistress as she walked on the
+pavement beside him and occasionally calling “Puss, Puss” to a passing
+horse, arrived at the Club at nightfall and was carried into the little
+flat before anyone quite realized his nature. William had fallen into
+the category of the things Mrs. Barraclough winked at, partly because
+she liked Gillian and also because William had remarked, “Good day—what
+weather!” and had offered her his claw to shake when, quite by chance,
+she had met him, for the first time, alone on the staircase below the
+landing where he lived. William lived out of his cage as much as he
+could, and had a passion for visiting those he liked. William was no
+respecter of persons. If he liked you he liked you, if he did not there
+was no persuading him. He liked Mrs. Barraclough and he adored the
+postman, and for the time that was enough.
+
+It was Mrs. Barraclough who came to the rescue in the matter of what
+Lilac called “carving Gillian’s career.” Lilac had £100 a year of her
+own, as well as the £50 a year with which she and Gillian were each left
+when Mrs. Armstrong’s annuity perished with her. So Lilac stayed at home
+and devoted the considerable leisure left her when the domestic
+arrangements of life in the Mordaunt Club had been disposed of for the
+day, to the management of her toilet and wardrobe, while Gillian went
+forth to carve her career with what had so far proved the worst possible
+incompetence. Carving a career, as Lilac pointed out, demanded common
+sense, and of common sense Gillian had no grasp.
+
+“You might have known that stuff about Venus was no use in a school,”
+said Lilac. “I suppose you think that any word beginning with a ‘v’ is
+beautiful because of violet. The _violet_, the _viol_ and the _vine_ and
+all that nonsense.”
+
+“But it wasn’t Venus. I didn’t give them that line. It was the one about
+Minos et Pasiphaë,” Gillian protested.
+
+“It’s the same thing, only worse. I shall ask Mrs. Barraclough if she
+knows of any safe job for a mild lunatic who knows three languages and a
+lot of poetry.”
+
+Mrs. Barraclough did not endorse Lilac’s estimate of her sister.
+
+“Gillian’s all right,” she said, “only a little unprejudiced. I’ll go
+and see if old Winona wants another secretary.”
+
+Old Winona, or Winona Lady Bottomley as she was described on her large
+glazed and gilt-edged visiting-cards, was out of a secretary when Mrs.
+Barraclough called. Old Winona seldom kept a secretary for more than a
+few weeks at a time. They either left of their own accord or were sent
+away in a great hurry laden with compensatory gold. Some of them took
+prolonged sick-leave, and to these Old Winona was very kind.
+
+“She’s the second wife and first widow of Bottomley’s Bicycles,” said
+Mrs. Barraclough, “and she doesn’t know how rich she is. The lawyers
+don’t tell her—they think her reason might give way. But she keeps three
+secretaries, one in Belfast and one in London and one to travel up and
+down with her, and they’re never the same secretary except the one in
+Belfast, who’s a man. The others are girls. Poor things. You’re to go to
+see her at twenty minutes past eleven to-morrow morning, and to take a
+signed photograph of your father with you.”
+
+“But I haven’t got one,” said Gillian, “my father never signed a
+photograph in his life.”
+
+“Then take any photograph you’ve got and say it’s your father’s,” said
+Mrs. Barraclough, who had no use for purely academic scruples in
+business.
+
+“The only signed photograph she’s got,” said Lilac, “is one of William
+Gillette as Sherlock Holmes, and that’s a picture post-card. And it’s so
+worn out with being hidden by me when I had good reason for worrying
+Gillian that it’s no use for carving and careering. But I’ll lend
+Gillian a black hat and my good umbrella and see her to the top of
+Sloane Street by 11:15 myself. I’ll watch her across the road and we
+must leave the rest to God.”
+
+“Do I call her ‘Winona Lady,’ as they do Adeline Duchess?” asked
+Gillian.
+
+“No; you don’t know her well enough to make game of her title,” said
+Mrs. Barraclough, “and you must be very careful about it. There _is_ a
+Lady Bottomley, Toby’s wife, but she’s never mentioned, she’s one of the
+Oh No’s.”
+
+“What are they?” asked Lilac, who knew the importance of social
+distinctions and the wisdom of not being too proud to ask questions.
+
+“It’s poetry,” said Mrs. Barraclough, as one who had very little use for
+the article. “‘Oh no, we never mention him, his name is never heard,’ a
+famous poem, ‘my lips are now forbid to speak that once familiar word.’”
+
+“I know,” said Gillian.
+
+   “‘From sport to sport they hurry me
+     To banish my regret
+   And when they only worry me——’”
+
+“I don’t think it ends like that,” said Mrs. Barraclough.
+
+“That was Andrew Lang,” said Gillian, “he didn’t like Haynes Bayley—he
+was quite right. He wrote ‘O think not Heleena of leaving us yet,’ when
+it might just as well have been ‘O, Helena, think not——’”
+
+“For William’s sake, my poor idiot, if not for your own and mine, try to
+forget about how things sound for the next twenty-four hours. It’s far
+more important to find out how things are. I’ve met Toby Bottomley,”
+Lilac went on, turning to Mrs. Barraclough, “but I didn’t know he’d a
+wife.”
+
+“She’s not noticeable, I grant you that. Not where Toby is. She’s on the
+stage, in America. There was a rumour that Toby was divorcing her, but
+Old Winona don’t believe in divorce. Her own two husbands died. And Toby
+only gets an allowance while she lives, so I dare say it’s all hanging
+fire.”
+
+Lilac was silent and Gillian noticed that her pretty face sharpened, the
+blue eyes narrowing and the soft mouth tightening to a hard, red line
+for a moment, as they did when Lilac was planning a move in the very
+successful game she was already playing with life.
+
+Gillian never understood the moves or the game, but she knew that Lilac
+played and won, and she was often a little uncomfortable about it. For
+Lilac had a way of letting her sister in at some advanced stage in an
+affair of the kind and expecting her to co-operate in the dark. A pang
+of suspicion thrust itself through her mind. It was Lilac who had gone
+to Mrs. Barraclough. Had Lilac a reason for wishing Gillian to work for
+Lady Bottomley? But, on the contrary, Lilac was rather annoyed about the
+prospect.
+
+“If I’d known,” said Lilac as soon as the door had closed behind Mrs.
+Barraclough. “If I’d had the slightest suspicion that Mrs. Barraclough
+knew the Bottomleys, I’d—I’d—well, Gillian, will you _promise_ me not to
+tell the old lady that I know Toby?”
+
+“Well,” said Gillian, “I won’t start off by saying, ‘Oh, dear Lady
+Bottomley, my sister knows your son,’ but if she asks me if I’m the Miss
+Armstrong her son knows....”
+
+“She won’t. She doesn’t know.”
+
+“Lilac,” said Gillian, “what is it?”
+
+“Oh, it’s quite all right. I met him at Glynde, at Sophie’s birthday
+revels, and he’s generally at Eaton Square on Sundays. Sophie knows all
+about it. It was Toby who gave that dinner at the Savoy last week.”
+
+“I thought it was Stephen and Sophie’s party. That was why I wondered
+why they didn’t ask me.”
+
+“Well, it wasn’t. It was Toby’s. Stephen and Sophie were asked—and
+me—and we went to _Kismet_ after dinner. In a box. There wouldn’t have
+been room for you.”
+
+“Oh, well, I’m glad it was Toby’s party. There isn’t nearly so much iron
+in my soul now that I know,” said Gillian, “and if Lady Bottomley
+doesn’t know about you she can’t suspect me of being your sister.
+Besides, it may not come to anything.”
+
+“No, p’r’aps it mayn’t,” said Lilac, “and, I forgot to tell you, I had a
+letter from Sophie this morning. They’re going to Glynde after Ascot,
+and they’ve asked me to go, and you. They’ll have a Goodwood Party, but
+you needn’t go to the races.”
+
+“If I become that old lady’s third secretary,” said Gillian, “I shan’t
+be able to go to Glynde at all, except perhaps for a week-end. I’ll
+write to Sophie myself.”
+
+“Oh, all right,” said Lilac; but she was not pleased.
+
+Sophie Glynde had originally been Gillian’s friend. She was German on
+her father’s side and had been at a school in Lausanne where Gillian had
+spent six months of her sixteenth year. Her English mother was a Glynde,
+and Sophie, who was startlingly pretty, had married her second cousin
+Stephen almost at sight the summer she came to England. She would, if
+Stephen’s elder brother went on being a bachelor until he died of
+riotous living, be the Mistress of Glynde Regis one day.
+
+Sophie had been very kind to the Armstrongs. But gradually her butterfly
+affections had settled on the younger sister who, not being under the
+pressing necessity of carving a career, was able to put herself more
+unreservedly at Mrs. Glynde’s disposition on those frequent occasions
+when that lovely being, who had a horror of solitude, was deprived of
+the solace of her husband’s company. Sophie was now Lilac’s friend. And
+Lilac, who took the same size in shoes, gloves and garments as Sophie
+did, inherited all the clothes of which Sophie grew tired before they
+were reduced to the condition in which they automatically passed into
+her maid’s possession. Lilac, who had a genius for dress, spent
+laborious days in achieving the raiment for triumphant nights from this
+spoil, and no one but Gillian, who pinned her into the never quite
+securely finished results, knew how precariously the lace from one gown,
+the satin from another, were held together to form a third more
+wonderful than either in its outward and dazzling effect.
+
+Lilac, naturally, met a great many people at the Glyndes’ of whom
+Gillian had no knowledge, or whose names she knew without importance;
+but Lilac’s reserve about this one person, this Toby Bottomley, was
+unusual and significant. Lilac, clearly, would prefer that Gillian
+should not become Toby’s mother’s secretary.
+
+But Lilac was to be disappointed.
+
+She fulfilled her promise, lent Gillian the black hat, completed the
+loan with a pair of grey suède gloves and took her to the top of Sloane
+Street the following morning. Her last words as she pushed her sister
+off the island were:
+
+“For Heaven’s sake, remember you’ve never heard of me.”
+
+
+                                   II
+
+Number 99 Knightsbridge was a conspicuous house. It rose a full story
+higher than its neighbours and spread a whole window wider than any
+other private dwelling from the Hyde Park Hotel to the Guards’ Barracks.
+You could see it half-way down Sloane Street, thrusting its crammed and
+costly window-boxes into the dimness of the London colour scheme. Each
+of the fifteen front window-frames had had the Georgian sashed panes
+removed and was now filled with a sheet of plate glass, bevelled into an
+ebony frame and veiled inside with curtains of the richest lace; each of
+the rust-brown bricks of which it was built was now surrounded with the
+best mortar, so white that Gillian felt it must be enamelled. The
+wrought-iron balconies which hung across the first and second floors
+were painted black and enhanced by a gilded boss wherever the pattern
+made it possible to apply one, and the tall black railings which fenced
+the ground floor from the street had their tips gilded to match the
+balconies. In the midst of them the decoration of an ornate gardendoor
+twisted and whirled around what was evidently a bicycle-wheel with a
+golden tyre, the hub of which was formed of the letters W. M. in
+monogram. Gillian had often rejoiced in the opulent charm of this
+exterior without supposing that the dwelling behind it would ever admit
+so plain a worm as herself to tremble at its more intimate
+magnificences. Now, as she pressed the amethystine button of the
+bell-push at the gate she felt like a goose-girl in a fairy-tale at the
+moment when she comes to the magician’s cave. It was rather a shock to
+find the door opened by a perfectly plain butler; a tall, grave,
+clean-shaven man who received her with a melancholy kindness which
+belonged to more anciently established, less insistently plutocratic
+surroundings. The pathway from the street to the house-door was flagged
+with porphyry and malachite under a glass roof supported on pillars up
+which crimson-ramblers, their roots in huge porcelain vases, were
+twined. Baskets of scented geraniums hung at intervals from the arches
+of this processional way, and tubs of blue and pink hydrangeas stood in
+the garden spaces on either side of the path. The hall into which she
+followed the butler up a flight of three marble steps, occupied the
+whole floor and was lit by two tall windows on the street side, and by
+glass doors opening on to the long garden which led down to the Park. It
+was full of very brightly burnished suits of armour each embowered in a
+separate grove of palm and fern. In the midst of these, enormous pink
+begonias trained round sticks in a barrel-shaped design, occupied the
+four corners of a sunken fountain which was playing above the rather
+agitated home-life of several corpulent goldfish. At each corner of the
+staircase there were life-size figures representing Nubian slaves (boy
+and girl alternating) in coloured raiment bearing trays in either hand.
+On one tray stood a vase of flowers, on the other a lamp. The cumulative
+effect of passing three of these chromatic statues after a glimpse of
+the suits of armour below, had stunned Gillian a little and, by the time
+the drawing-room door closed upon the butler, leaving her alone with its
+amazing splendours, she had ceased to be keenly receptive.
+
+But the drawing-room was worthy of the keenest appreciation. Like the
+hall it covered the whole floor. It had three windows looking on to
+Knightsbridge, and three on to the Park. Its walls were panelled in
+hand-cut velvet brocade, electric-blue on a mauve background: each of
+the two fireplaces was enriched by an overmantel, all-white balustrades
+and mirrors, supporting or reflecting innumerable shelves and brackets,
+no shelf without its flower-vase, no bracket without its statuette.
+Between the windows were more mirrors, framed in Dresden china frames
+from which candle-holders curved out like pink and gilded horns and bore
+not candles but china imitations carrying electric lights and silken
+shades which mirrored themselves again in the glass. The room was full
+of electric-light bulbs. From the heavily moulded ceiling mauve and blue
+ribbons hung in slings and from each sling a gilded Cupid stretched down
+a torch-filled hand, and in each torch a bulb. This amorous army of
+illumination circled round a very beautiful Venetian glass chandelier
+which, with the Aubusson carpet that spread its blue medallion and faint
+roses over the parquet-floor, seemed to indicate another mind feebly at
+work under the overmastering influence which had clearly directed the
+main ornamentation of the house.
+
+There was one book in the room: _The Golden Treasury_, bound in blue
+leather, with a wreath of purple violets encircling the name “Winona”
+tooled on the cover. On the top of the grand piano, a Broadwood in a
+painted case, there stood an army of photographs each in a silver frame.
+Most of these photographs were of the same person. These were all signed
+“Winona” in a flowing hand and showed the signer in various forms of
+evening dress from full panoply of Court train, veil and feathers, to a
+relatively simple gown of what was probably black velvet enhanced by
+ropes of pearls. Here and there the series was broken by portraits
+signed “Reginald”; but Gillian could not discern a “Toby” among them.
+
+As she waited and wondered if the personality of their owner were veiled
+or revealed by all these effigies, the door opened and the butler
+reappeared carrying a silver tray covered with an embroidered
+tray-cloth.
+
+“Her ladyship wishes you to take a glass of milk, miss,” he said,
+depositing his burden on an inlaid table, “and will be with you
+presently.”
+
+There certainly was a glass of milk, an engraved glass in a silver
+holder, on the tray before her, but it took Gillian some time to locate
+it among the dishes of fruit, sandwiches and cake with which it was
+surrounded. Winona, Lady Bottomley, was evidently kind to others as well
+as lavish to herself, though Gillian, who had not been brought up to eat
+between meals and was also a little nervous that morning, could not obey
+the command to drink. She was counting the layers of marzipan that
+separated the rich substance of an iced cake out of which one wedge had
+been hewn in evident consideration of her need when the door opened once
+more and Lady Bottomley stood revealed.
+
+“Good morning, Miss Macfarlane, pray be seated,” she said in a measured
+and stately voice as she seated herself in the exact centre of a
+slippery and magnificent settee.
+
+Gillian, a little surprised at the form of address, managed to control
+herself from correcting it by the thought that it would be time enough
+to do so if and when it turned out that she was to take up any duties
+for the lady.
+
+There was a pause. Gillian tried not to stare too hard at the marvellous
+auburn wig, the Roman nose, the small dim eyes, the imposing figure, the
+ringed hands folded over the plush of a lace-flounced gown which
+presented themselves to her consideration for some time before the
+spirit which informed them spoke again. When the silence was broken it
+was with another surprise.
+
+“My daughter-in-law, the future Marchioness of Fulham, has spoken to me
+of you,” said Lady Bottomley. “She assures me that, happily, most
+happily, you do not possess any shorthand.”
+
+Gillian, to whom the very existence of any such person as the future
+Marchioness of Fulham had, until that moment, been unknown, and who was,
+moreover, bewildered by the receding phantom of that “Toby” on whose
+account she was to conceal her own relationship to Lilac, murmured that
+unfortunately she did not practice shorthand.
+
+“Fortunately, Miss Macfarlane,” said Lady Bottomley, growing more
+imposing with each syllable, “I consider that a knowledge of shorthand
+renders its possessor unfit for the post of secretary to a lady of
+title. I shall require you to take all my letters down in your own
+handwriting, and to copy them out in an imitation of mine.”
+
+“Won’t that be like forgery?” asked Gillian, forgetting her nervousness
+in the novelty of the demand.
+
+“No,” said Lady Bottomley with slow decision, “it will not. It must be a
+poor imitation of my handwriting, and I shall sign the letter myself.
+The quotations from _The Times_ and _The Guardian_ with which I enliven
+my letters to those Abroad, you will add in your own handwriting; but I
+like my own remarks to appear in a style which will not clash with my
+signature.”
+
+Gillian remembered Mrs. Barraclough’s admission that old Winona seldom
+had the same secretary for many weeks at a time, and wondered whether a
+tendency in handwriting to clash with the august signature were
+responsible for the failure of the relationship, or if other and even
+more probable reasons were to be revealed.
+
+“You will also,” went on the lady, “you will also prepare lists of
+suitable concerts which on those afternoons when I am not accompanied by
+my daughter-in-law or my son Sir Reginald, the third baronet, you will
+attend with me. Concerts of classical music.”
+
+“And matinées?” said Gillian hopefully. This part of her duties sounded
+easier than imitation scripture.
+
+“No matinées,” said Lady Bottomley, “only bazaars. I disapprove of the
+stage.”
+
+“Not even charity matinées?” said Gillian.
+
+“Only those acted by amateurs in Halls. I do not ever go inside a
+theatre. When the cause is good I buy tickets and give them to others.”
+
+“Oh,” said Gillian, and wondered if she and Lilac would ever be counted
+as others.
+
+“How old are you?” Lady Bottomley was forsaking instruction for inquiry.
+
+“Twenty-three—that is I shall be twenty-four next birthday.”
+
+“And when is that?”
+
+“In April,” said Gillian, conscious that this was only July.
+
+“That’s very young. Still it may mean that you will prove more docile
+than those of riper years.”
+
+Gillian hoped she was docile.
+
+“We shall see. But if you come to me I must stipulate that you do not
+marry.”
+
+“Never?”
+
+“Not for three years. My last two secretaries—no, my last three,” Lady
+Bottomley checked them off on her fingers, “all married within a few
+months of joining my circle. I am now engaging only such as will take a
+vow not to marry for three years.”
+
+“But suppose I left you—or you sent me away for some other reason?”
+Gillian ventured.
+
+“In that case you would be free to marry. Not otherwise. Have you any
+intention of marrying?”
+
+“Well,” said Gillian with complete candour, “I’ve no intention of _not_
+marrying, but I don’t suppose I shall marry for a long time. I don’t
+feel old enough yet.”
+
+“You are quite old enough to marry,” said old Winona visibly annoyed,
+“twenty-four is amply old enough. I was married at twenty for the first
+time. Have you anybody in particular in view?”
+
+“To marry? Oh, no. They all want to marry Lilac, not me?”
+
+“And who is Lilac?”
+
+Gillian felt the hot blood creep up her neck, over her chin, into her
+face and fill her eyes with tears. This was exactly what Lilac had
+forbidden her to do.
+
+“Oh, just a sister of mine,” said she, trying to make as light of the
+matter as possible.
+
+To Gillian’s relief Miss Macfarlane’s sister was a person to whose
+identity Lady Bottomley attached no significance whatever, and, after a
+few more questions, they passed on to a mutual exhibition of
+handwriting, and an attempt on Gillian’s part at that not too faithful
+reproduction of the Bottomley script on which so much depended. Greatly
+to her own surprise she was able, by the simple device of using a broad
+J nib, to write a hand with which the signature “Winona Caroline
+Bottomley” did not clash, and before long she was walking down Sloane
+Street, a little unsteady in the knees, but with an odd new steadiness
+in her mind. Lady Bottomley had engaged her at what seemed to Gillian a
+fabulous salary, and unusual though the conditions of her new employment
+appeared to be, she had a premonitory feeling of security in them quite
+unlike the apprehensions which had filled her after her first interview
+with Mrs. Lysaght. Eccentricity was to Gerald Armstrong’s daughter far
+less terrifying than regulated convention.
+
+Not until she was opposite Cadogan Gardens did it occur to her that she
+had been engaged as Miss Macfarlane, a friend of the future Marchioness
+of Fulham: whereas, now that the gate of No. 99 Knightsbridge was closed
+behind her, she realized how completely she was nothing of more
+consequence than Gillian Armstrong, a tenant of the Mordaunt Club, on
+whom its secretary, plain Mrs. Barraclough, had taken pity.
+
+It was possible that even now Miss Macfarlane, bearing a coroneted
+introduction, was pressing the amethyst button of the electric bell, and
+that she, Gillian, would in a few moments be convicted of fraud and
+disgraced in a way which would annoy Lilac quite dreadfully. Should she
+go back and confess to old Winona, or forward and confess to Mrs.
+Barraclough. Both confessions would have to be made with as little delay
+as possible. But, seeing that by this time she was nearer home and Mrs.
+Barraclough than she was to Knightsbridge, Gillian, who usually took the
+more difficult alternative from a sense of self-discipline, hurried on
+and walked straight across the courtyard and knocked at Mrs.
+Barraclough’s door before going up to face Lilac in their own flat.
+
+“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” said Mrs. Barraclough. She was eating her
+luncheon with the _Morning Post_ propped up against a large
+Sheffield-plate cruet-stand which gave to the whole of her small and
+rather austerely furnished room that sense of having a storied past
+behind it which was so lacking in the Armstrongs’ flat.
+
+“It was Winnie Roehampton who told me that her late mother-in-law was
+out of secretaries again. She married Roehampton after she’d killed Jim
+Bottomley. He was her first husband and she made him hunt before he
+could ride. She’d always wanted Roehampton, but she couldn’t afford him,
+so she took Jim Bottomley first and married the other, six weeks after
+the accident, on her jointure.”
+
+“Well,” said Gillian, “if she’s that kind of person I shouldn’t think
+Lady Bottomley would engage a secretary who came through her.”
+
+“No, you wouldn’t, but Winnie’s a sensible girl. Her heart’s always in
+the rich place,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “She’s always kept friends with
+old Winona who’d never really cared for Jim. He was only her stepson,
+and she was delighted that her Toby could have it all. And when Winnie
+married into the peerage, well—wait and see. You’ll understand soon
+enough.”
+
+“Well, but what about Miss Macfarlane?”
+
+“That’s you, Miss Armstrong. All her secretaries are Macfarlanes. She’s
+very obstinate about names. Winnie Roehampton says she always calls Hyde
+Park Corner the Marble Arch.”
+
+“Goodness,” said Gillian. “Doesn’t it make it very difficult to know
+what she means?”
+
+“I dare say it does,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “But you may get used to
+it.”
+
+“And is ‘Toby’ the third baronet Sir Reginald?”
+
+“He is,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “Old Bottomley was the first, poor Jim
+was the second and Toby is the third—all in ten years. Old Bottomley was
+one of the Coronation honours. He did something very handsome for
+Belfast Harbour. You’ll hear all about that, too.”
+
+“Then you really think I am quite honestly engaged?”
+
+“Quite honestly,” said Mrs. Barraclough, “and I shouldn’t be at all
+surprised if you kept the job. Anyhow you have my blessing and I’ll tell
+Winnie Roehampton to tell her late mother-in-law you’re a treasure.”
+
+Gillian left Mrs. Barraclough comforted and relieved. Odd though it all
+sounded, it was not a terrifying oddness. Winona, Lady Bottomley, was
+more like the first chapter in a new book than a problem of existence.
+You felt there were answers to all her sums. You were astonished at, not
+dismayed by her; and Gillian enjoyed astonishment.
+
+“Lilac,” she called, bursting into the outer of the two rooms they used
+as living-rooms.
+
+But the little room was empty. The black Cromwellian table that stood
+under the window was not laid for luncheon, and William had unfastened
+the latch of his cage and, perched on the back of one of the three
+chairs they had bought at Heal’s to match the table, was thoughtfully
+manicuring his claw with his beak.
+
+“Hillo!” said William. “Kiss cocky! Kiss cocky!”
+
+“Lilac! Lilac!” called Gillian and went through the door into the inner
+room which was lined with bookcases and furnished with an enormous
+red-leather chesterfield, Sophie’s gift to the young flat-holders, and
+so huge that there was hardly space for another seat in the room.
+
+But Lilac was not in the book-room, nor in the larger single room on the
+north side of the building looking into Gwynne Street which they used as
+a bedroom. Lilac had evidently gone on to some occasion of her own when
+she left Gillian at the top of Sloane Street, which was like Lilac, who
+had many private affairs to attend to though she usually kept Saturday
+morning free for flat-keeping and was in to lunch. And this was Saturday
+morning or Gillian would not have been free to go looking for work as
+she had done. Gillian, in solitary disgrace, was still correcting the
+July examination papers in the mistresses’ room at Pelham House all the
+other days of the week.
+
+So Gillian took off her hat and washed her hands and went and ate bread
+and cheese and lettuce with William and read _The Song of Honour_ in a
+little yellow-paper book with a rather smudgy woodcut on its cover which
+she had bought at the Poetry Bookshop the Saturday before. William, who
+adored crusts with butter, sat on one claw on the back of her chair and
+held the crusts she gave him in the other, occasionally dropping one
+while he stood on both feet in order to stretch a long neck to turn over
+a page for Gillian. He didn’t tear the page, but he often turned it
+before Gillian was quite ready, and she had to turn back while William
+was climbing down to pick up his crust from the floor. She did it as
+quietly as possible in order not to hurt his feelings. William was
+really tiresome when his feelings were hurt. He would chatter and scream
+and flap his wings and require whole-hearted, undivided attention for
+quite five minutes if he felt neglected or snubbed, and Gillian had to
+be very careful because the Countess had already complained of the noise
+he made.
+
+It was three o’clock when Lilac came in. She was flushed, but it was
+with excitement quite as much as with heat.
+
+“Have you got the job?” she asked from the doorway. Gillian felt she
+dared not have answered “No.”
+
+“Yes. I think so, though she wants someone at once,” she replied,
+wondering why Lilac’s eyes were so blue and her hair so curly at the
+sleepiest hour of the whole week.
+
+“That’s all right. You can go to her on Monday,” said Lilac, taking off
+her hat and pushing the damp curls from her forehead with the third
+finger of her left hand. “I’ve fixed it all up with Mrs. Lysaght.”
+
+“Lilac!”
+
+“Yes. I have. I took the Putney bus and I called on her.”
+
+“Goodness!” said Gillian.
+
+“And gracious!” said Lilac, “I do wish, dear Gillian, you would not
+swear so blasphemously.”
+
+“All right then. Damn!” said Gillian, “but hurry up.”
+
+“Yes, I did. I called at _Mon Repos_. What a woman! Does she always
+screw that little gold pencil in and out?”
+
+“Always!” said Gillian, “particularly when she’s angry. Was she angry
+with you?”
+
+“Oh, very.” Lilac sat on the table and swung her buckled shoes up and
+down in the sunlight that came through under the green rush sunblinds.
+“At first. But it’s all right. You’re to correct those abominable
+children’s papers at home till the end of the term, and she’ll pay you
+your full salary. A person, you really couldn’t call her a girl, called
+Jane Bird, who lives on the other side of the Albert Bridge, will
+collect and deliver them day by day.”
+
+“Bird,” said Gillian. “How on earth——”
+
+“She came here, while you were at school on Tuesday,” said Lilac, her
+eyes hard and her mouth narrow. “After what she said I arranged what I’d
+say.”
+
+“What did she say?”
+
+“She said—she stood in the doorway—she’s a great creature, Gillian—she
+said, ‘Your sister is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. She’s no
+good to Madame Bowdler.’ I asked her who Madame Bowdler was and she said
+that was Mrs. Lysaght’s spiritual title, and then she told me that the
+whole school was boiling over about your being in disgrace. You never
+told me that they sent up your lunch and tea.”
+
+“And it’s been Irish stew with the chill off all this week,” said
+Gillian. “I didn’t tell you because it is all so horrid I’d rather not
+talk about it.”
+
+“_I_ talked about it,” said Lilac. “I felt I must play a father’s part.”
+
+“But, Lilac, suppose Lady Bottomley hadn’t wanted me?”
+
+“You’d have had to find someone who did,” said Lilac. “You’d have had to
+do that in any case. I was determined you shouldn’t go back there any
+more. I told her you weren’t safe to associate with ordinary people
+because of the unfortunate purity of your mind. I admitted,” Lilac
+paused ruefully, “I admitted that it was a disadvantage, especially in
+school-work. I very nearly said that I supposed no head mistress could
+hope to see God.”
+
+“Oh, Lilac, you didn’t!”
+
+“No—only nearly. It was a thing I thought of saying. Jane Bird said it
+to me.”
+
+“How did she find you?”
+
+“She asked Miss Fairfax if you had any family, and Miss Fairfax told her
+there was a sister. She said she hadn’t supposed that anyone so
+wide-eyed as you could possibly be anything but the youngest of a
+family. I told her that to all intents and purposes you were.”
+
+“Well,” said Gillian, “nobody who saw you would suppose I was younger
+than you.”
+
+“Not until they knew us,” said Lilac darkly.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+So Gillian wrote to Lady Bottomley to say that she could begin work for
+her on Monday, and the sisters went out to post the letter in time to be
+delivered at 99 Knightsbridge that evening, and then walked along the
+Embankment to Chelsea Bridge and back by Battersea Park, and Gillian
+confessed to Lilac that she had told about her after all.
+
+“Did she take any notice?” asked Lilac.
+
+“Not the slightest.”
+
+“It’s all right then, for the present,” said Lilac. “It’s really Toby I
+mind. And he mayn’t find out just yet. Did you see him?”
+
+“No,” said Gillian, “only his photograph and that was called Reginald.”
+
+“Yes,” said Lilac. “I know. Isn’t it a pity?”
+
+
+                                  III
+
+“Will you,” said Lady Bottomley with majesty, “take down the following
+letter:
+
+“Winona, Lady Bottomley presents her compliments to Mrs. Archibald
+Anstruther, and regrets that she cannot become a subscriber to the
+Society for the Prevention of Photographing Private Persons in the Park
+as she is already so fully occupied in signing cheques for the Societies
+to which she belongs ... no, take out ‘already’ and put in ‘lately’ ...
+to which she already belongs, that she cannot take the exercise
+prescribed for her by her physician. They all tell me I ought to walk
+for at least one hour a day before luncheon and for half an hour after
+tea.”
+
+“Does that last bit go in the letter?” asked Gillian.
+
+“Surely, Miss Macfarlane,” said Lady Bottomley with a bitter smile, “you
+must have noticed that the letter ended with the closure of the third
+person.”
+
+“Shall I write that one in my own writing or in yours?” asked Gillian.
+
+“Third-person letters go in your own hand. It marks the distinction more
+clearly,” pronounced the lady.
+
+They were seated in the boudoir, an upholstered chamber overlooking the
+Park. In spite of the heat of a mid-July forenoon the French windows
+were closed and curtained as precaution against draughts, which, as Lady
+Bottomley explained, “not only give me a cold in the head, but blow down
+my precious photographs.”
+
+The precious photographs stood in ranks on slippery tables in front of
+the window and, in every variety of frame, clambered over the walls and
+up every tier of the ornate overmantel. Some of them were of people and
+were signed. Others were of places and were dated: none was without an
+inscription. One or two had little memorial wreaths affixed to their
+frames, and on a table placed before a life-size portrait in oils of the
+first baronet dressed for his first levee, stood an array of silver
+vases in which it was one of Gillian’s duties to arrange fresh flowers
+every morning. On her second day she had suggested filling a pair of
+very fine branched candlesticks which were doing nothing in the library
+where she sat when imitating her employer’s handwriting after lunch, and
+lighting candles to burn among the flowers.
+
+“It would be lovely to have them of different colours. I know where you
+can get green and red candles,” she urged.
+
+“A very Popish notion,” said old Winona. “I beg, Miss Macfarlane, that
+you will not speak of it again.”
+
+But she was not angry with Gillian, and she was pleased that the girl
+had noticed how fine the candlesticks were.
+
+“Museum-pieces,” Gillian had called them, and Lady Bottomley adopted the
+phrase and applied it indiscriminately to many of her treasures which
+Gillian herself would have catalogued as pure Waring and Gillow, or
+early _train-de-luxe_.
+
+Gillian had grown accustomed to the daily shock of leaving the
+colour-washed little flat in the Club with its open windows, plain
+curtains and rush-seated wooden chairs for the fringed and patterned
+seclusion of Knightsbridge, and had lost the inclination to giggle at
+each fresh revelation of what unbridled wealth could do in the way of
+making a house uninhabitable, before there was any sign that the third
+baronet lived there himself.
+
+One morning, however, she had nearly lost her self-control on
+discovering that Lady Bottomley’s dressing-room was enriched by a bath
+which was silver-plated and covered in by a padded lid of bright
+rose-coloured velvet, buttoned with porcelain upholstery buttons, each
+bearing the Bottomley crest in the proper heraldic colours with the
+baronet’s hand very bloody and the Saracen’s eye looking, with its
+spoked lashes quite like a bicycle-wheel, very blue, painted in the
+centre.
+
+“By hand, miss,” as Dashwood, Lady Bottomley’s obsequious and alarmingly
+golden-haired maid had insisted when asking Gillian to wait in the
+presence of this luxury while she ascertained whether her ladyship, who
+was keeping out of draughts in bed that morning, were quite ready to
+deal with her letters.
+
+One of these letters was a post-card dated “Newmarket, Tuesday,” and
+signed “Toby.” “Can you put up me and Stephen for Sandown?” it asked.
+
+“Now,” said Gillian, as she read this missive and realized that Stephen
+Glynde might come upon her any day, “I can’t possibly pretend to Stephen
+that he doesn’t know his own bridesmaid. I do hope Lilac will be equal
+to the crisis.”
+
+Lady Bottomley, who thought she might have caught cold while driving
+round Regent’s Park at Gillian’s instigation at six o’clock the previous
+evening, took an extra dose of ammoniated quinine and decided that at
+any risk she must entertain her son’s friend.
+
+“We must send telegrams,” she pronounced as soon as she had realized the
+import of her son’s request, “one to Sir Reginald Bottomley, Bart.,
+Newmarket. That is sufficient address; the other to the Honourable
+Stephen Glynde, who is, I presume, at Newmarket with my son.”
+
+Gillian, who remembered that Sophie was at Glynde and had been there
+since Ascot because the Eaton Square house was closed, bit the
+information off the tip of her tongue and took down in her own writing
+two long, delighted telegrams, one signed “Mother” and the other signed
+“Winona Bottomley” and copied them out in her imitation of their
+author’s writing without question, feeling that this attention was due
+to the family and its friends.
+
+Lilac was down at Glynde, so there was no need to disturb her with news
+which Sophie, who was extraordinarily uninformed of her husband’s
+movements for a quite reasonably happy wife, might very well not be able
+to pass on to her.
+
+Gillian was bidden to stay on and dine at Knightsbridge in order to help
+Lady Bottomley through the unwonted labour of choosing which of the two
+elaborate spare rooms should be filled with flowers and writing-paper
+and sticks of scented sealing-wax, and have bath-salts and shaving-soap
+disposed in its polished bathroom by the train of rubber-tyred
+housemaids who, shepherded by kind and melancholy Atkinson, trooped into
+the boudoir to receive her detailed instructions.
+
+It was extraordinary, thought Gillian, as she walked down Sloane Street
+and past the Guards’ Barracks to the Embankment in the moonlight,
+extraordinary and rather pathetic that this very kind and cumbered lady
+should not have troops of friends on whom to lavish the overflow of her
+incredible riches. She was, as her name suggested, Canadian by birth,
+and her family had long since faded out of communication with their
+relative who had married the first baronet in the days of his
+experimental and impecunious youth. Some of the wonderful letters
+Gillian was employed to transcribe, often from pencilled notes made in
+her absence, were to cousins in Montreal. These were only sent when some
+reference to the house of Bottomley appeared in the Press. Gillian had
+to go through the post for Press-cuttings very carefully every morning.
+On the days when any came in, Atkinson took a cab and went forth to buy
+twenty copies of every paper in which they occurred. After the orgies of
+the Bottomley Orphanage Bazaar at which Lady Bottomley had been
+photographed in the very act of receiving the Royal Princess who had
+opened it, the cab bearing the papers in which the picture appeared was
+so crammed that Atkinson had been obliged to come back sitting with the
+driver all the way from Fleet Street to Knightsbridge.
+
+Gillian had enjoyed that day. Two cuttings of each notice, two cuttings
+of every photograph (several versions had escaped into print) had to be
+made and pasted into the two great leather-bound Press-cutting albums in
+which the records of twenty years were garnered. The first baronet had
+kept one for his own reading and another for his wife’s, and the
+practice was continued in piety by his widow.
+
+“I shall of course,” she had told Gillian with an even more than usually
+majestic intonation, “I shall of course make over the late Sir John’s
+volume to his grandchildren when they come of age.”
+
+“I didn’t know he had any,” Gillian had spoken in the haste of surprise.
+
+“Not yet, Miss Armstrong.” Lady Bottomley had begun to make use of the
+right name from time to time, though still reverting to Macfarlane,
+especially in the early morning.
+
+And, then, when the cuttings had been pasted down, the crested
+address-book was opened, and its scantily filled pages were gone through
+until everybody named in it had been honoured with a copy of all the
+papers duly marked in red with “See Page 7.” Gillian addressed the
+wrappers in her own or her imitation writing according to old Winona’s
+direction, and Atkinson bore them away and applied and gummed them down
+to their contents in his pantry. It was all very ritualistic and unreal,
+but Gillian enjoyed it.
+
+“I suppose,” she went on, as she leaned over the parapet and watched the
+river flowing at low tide towards Lambeth with a silver, moonlit edge on
+the curve of each black ripple, “I suppose that’s why she’s so lonely.
+Real people couldn’t bear to be near her and she couldn’t bear it
+either. I can, because it keeps you far enough away from anyone to be
+paid by them. It doesn’t matter if I do laugh at her a little so long as
+I earn my wages. But you’d burst if you tried to be her friend.”
+
+She let her mind float away along the river till it took her to another
+summer night, six years ago, when she had watched another tide swim by
+under the same moon. Then she had been with her father at Altona on that
+sudden, miraculous journey he had taken, retracing some adventure of his
+youth, just before he set out for Burma and his death.
+
+The broad waters of the Elbe, brackish with the sea that moved within
+them, and spangled with the lights of travelling ships, had carried his
+memory back to a time in which she, who had been his friend ever since
+she could remember, had no slightest share. He had spoken to her as to a
+new-made friend, of a climax in his life to which no memory of hers
+could even dimly reach.
+
+“It was all over, the man to whom it happened was dead in me long before
+you were born, before even I so much as knew of your mother’s existence.
+The house behind the chestnut-tree in that lithograph we bought this
+morning might be the house I left twenty years back, Gillian. Sun on the
+yellow walls; closed white shutters, a flight of stone steps going up to
+a glass door, and inside—Illusion. And I sat under the shadow of that
+tree and looked up through the thick leaves and saw the tall spikes of
+chestnut-blossom flaming like white wax candles in the heat, and it was
+all no good. All that stillness and beauty were empty. I had come to the
+end of my own deception. All the time I had known. All the time I had
+heard the voice within saying, ‘This is not real. You are playing false
+with yourself. Take it if you must, but do not try to pay for it because
+you have not the coin in which such things are trafficked.’ And I had
+tried to coin their coinage, because I had to pay; and I couldn’t go on.
+I can’t tell you what it was. You need never know. I mean, child, it is
+not necessary to salvation for a girl to know all things. ‘Its shadow
+upon life enough for thee’—you remember Andromeda. But you’ll be safe so
+long as you remember to wait until the inner voice agrees _after_ you’ve
+tried. It’s no use hesitating before the Unknown. You must try for
+yourself, but you must not go along a road you know is not your road
+just because you’ve tried it. You must be able to turn back. You must be
+able to say, ‘This road is closed.’ Don’t pay tolls at the wrong bar
+twice. One day you’ll need all you’ve got. You’re the kind that pays for
+everything, overpays always, but I’ve taught you to look for the lasting
+values, and you’ll not pay for fakes without knowing what you’re about.
+It’s the people who bank on fakes who leave their souls in Hell. Lilac
+will pay for fakes in her time. But she’ll pay because she wants them,
+and she won’t pay a penny more than they’re worth. It’s you, Gillian,
+who may make bad bargains. Remember that, and wait till you’ve said,
+
+   “Das unbeschreibliche.
+     Hier ist’s gethan,”
+
+before you go bankrupt.”
+
+And then they had gone to supper with Hans Adler the painter, and had
+laughed and eaten and sung the Mörike-lieder till they cried, and had
+eaten again, and drunk extremely sweet and extremely luscious things,
+some iced and some buttered, and had had an utterly ridiculous, truly
+Germanic time.
+
+
+                                   IV
+
+Lilac had come back from Glynde.
+
+She stood in the open doorway of the bedroom as Gillian came up the
+stairs. Mr. Gordon had put out the landing-lights and Gillian had only
+just managed to get in before he locked the courtyard gates for the
+night.
+
+“How late you are,” said Lilac.
+
+She was in her nightgown, and her pretty hair was sticking out all round
+her head in a honey-coloured halo, as it did before she had brushed it
+and tied it into lilac ribbons at night.
+
+“Goodness,” said Gillian. “Have you had dinner?”
+
+“Bother dinner,” said Lilac. “I’ve had two eggs and all the milk. Where
+have you been till this hour?”
+
+“At 99,” said Gillian, “getting ready for Stephen. He’s going to be
+there for the night.”
+
+“I know,” said Lilac, “with Toby.”
+
+Gillian put her arm round Lilac and drew her inside the room. “Lilac,”
+she said, “are you in love with Toby?”
+
+“Yes,” said Lilac, “isn’t it damnable?”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+They lay awake talking until dawn. Lilac didn’t know how Toby really
+felt. She had known there was some hitch in his life but it was Mrs.
+Barraclough who had been the first to tell her about the wife in
+America.
+
+“Sophie and Stephen don’t know, at least if Stephen knows he never told
+Sophie, and I’ve not told her either,” said Lilac, “and Toby so
+helpless. He’s rather like you, Gillian. He misses the point. The first
+thing he ever said to me, I mean, the first thing to show he’d noticed,
+was, ‘What rippin’ teeth you’ve got,’ and you know, Jill, it isn’t my
+teeth at all, it’s my hair that most people like because of its colour,
+and the curls. But if he loves me at all it’s for my teeth, and,” said
+Lilac with wisdom and despair, “it isn’t enough. There are mountains to
+remove, and you don’t remove anything much because you like another
+person’s teeth.”
+
+“What made you come back, then?” said Gillian. “I thought it was always
+absence that made a man find out——”
+
+“Oh, Jilly darling, I know, and if it had been anyone else I’d have
+stayed away till he did. But that’s the worst of being in love one’s
+self—you simply _can’t_ be clever about it. It’s easy enough to be
+_l’autre qui se laisse aimer_. I can do that. Look at that horrid little
+Rollo, and Mr. Percival Grantham. Donkeys”—and Lilac sat up in bed, and
+waved her arms in the moonlight and shooed donkeys out of her life.
+
+“Well,” said Gillian, “he’ll have to know about me now. Do you think
+he’ll stop loving you for your teeth when he sees me pasting cuttings
+into the grandchild’s album?”
+
+“I just can’t think,” said Lilac, clasping her arms so tightly round her
+knees that she laid a hand over each elbow. “He might suddenly love you
+terribly, just because he’d loved me a little. He’s rather like you. He
+doesn’t see any harm in the most dreadful things.”
+
+“Goodness,” said Gillian, “what sort of things?”
+
+“Poetry,” said Lilac, “and pictures. He’s got that print of Father’s—the
+one Mother burnt, the Dürer. He took me to an exhibition of the most
+awful things, and bought it. It cost fifty pounds—no, guineas.”
+
+“Do you mean _Die grosse Fortuna_?”
+
+“Yes, the fat woman on a skipping-rope. And there were the most dearest
+little grey and blue pastels, ships that pass in the mist, in the next
+room for half the money.”
+
+“He sounds rather nice,” said Gillian. “I thought it was only horses.”
+
+“Oh, it’s horses as well. And Sophie’s been an angel. I’ve been riding
+every morning at Glynde. She’s given me a perfectly new habit of my own
+for my birthday. It’s much harder than riding-lessons in that dreadful
+_manège_ at Lausanne, with the tame horses and the smell of tan.”
+
+“And Monsieur Avranches—’_dans la main gauche, mademoiselle
+Arumstrongüe, dans la main_ GAUCHE’—oh, Lilac!”
+
+“Yes—and only half an hour at a time. But at Glynde it’s a groom who
+doesn’t say a word and humps you along—I’m so stiff and sore, Jilly.”
+
+“Lover’s pains,” said Gillian, “and learning to ride properly. I think
+you have a very good time.”
+
+“Gillian”—Lilac was very solemn—“will you promise me that you’ll never
+tell Toby that you cried when Mother burnt that dreadful engraving? I
+used to think you shammed liking it to curry favour with Father, and
+when I saw Toby buy it I told him my father had had it too, but I didn’t
+tell him what became of it, and he doesn’t know there’s you. Sophie
+didn’t tell him. Sophie doesn’t know that I meet him in town—at least,
+she didn’t till yesterday.”
+
+“You’re bang in the middle of the tangled web,” said Gillian, “and you
+know how bad I am at tangled webs. But I’ll try to say nothing but ‘Yes,
+Sir Reginald. No, Sir Reginald,’ like a parlourmaid. Perhaps if I did it
+with a lisp it would put him off so frightfully that there’d never be
+any chance of getting to pictures in our intercourse.”
+
+“Oh, Gillian, don’t do anything stupid. It would be no good for him to
+think I’d got a lisping idiot for my only family.”
+
+“I expect,” said Gillian, “that whatever I do’ll be wrong while you are
+in this state. But you know you can trust me not to compete.”
+
+“I know I can trust you not to _try_ to compete,” said Lilac; “but
+you’re so innocent you’ll probably think you’re doing putting-off things
+when really you’re doing the other kind.”
+
+“What kind?”
+
+“Oh, well, what had you done to set your Jane Bird blazing with
+adoration? I’ve never seen anyone in such a state. She couldn’t eat or
+sleep because you’d been wronged, and I met her in King’s Road every day
+last week; probably she hasn’t come round the other way home on the
+off-chance of meeting you that way.”
+
+“I met her on Friday,” said Gillian, “but I didn’t think it had anything
+to do with me. Besides, even if it had, Jane Bird’s quite a different
+matter.”
+
+“You wouldn’t, and it isn’t. And, you see, you don’t know a thing about
+it.”
+
+“I certainly don’t know much about Jane Bird,” said Gillian; “but she’s
+a strange person—exciting too. Almost the most exciting person I’ve ever
+known.”
+
+
+                                   V
+
+Lilac had forbidden Gillian to share her admiration of _Die grosse
+Fortuna_ with Sir Reginald Bottomley, but she did not know, she could
+not have known, that his august mother had gone through the complete
+works of Swinburne in the eight volumes which he had brought home from
+Oxford and had cut out, with a pair of nail-scissors, all the passages
+she considered unsuitable for a gentleman’s library. Nor could her worst
+nightmare have suggested to her that Toby would discover the mutilation
+of his property at the same moment as Gillian did. But this is what
+actually happened.
+
+Gerald Armstrong’s Swinburnes, the little red _Atalanta in Calydon_ and
+the little fat Moxon _Poems and Ballads_, had gone to Sotheby’s with his
+other first editions when his books were valued, and Gillian, who had
+nothing but the Tauchnitz _Selections_, had been bothered all morning
+because she could not remember how
+
+   “Some angel’s steady mouth and weight of wings
+     Shut to the side...”
+
+went on. So, just before tea, while Lady Bottomley was resting, she took
+the library-steps into the far corner where she had seen the tall, dark
+Chatto & Windus books standing on a high shelf, and was sitting on the
+top of them, one hand clasping the pole, and her mouth wide open in
+dismay at the ruin she had found, when a mild voice below her feet said:
+
+“How do you do?”
+
+Gillian put the book on her knee and looked over.
+
+“I’m terribly shocked,” she said. “Did you know that lots of _The
+Triumph of Time_ and most of _Before a Crucifix_ had been cut out of
+these?”
+
+“No—have they?—how annoying. May I look?”
+
+“But, of course. They’re yours. It’s a dreadful pity. And they’ve not
+been done at all neatly.” She handed the books to their short, pleasant,
+rather nervous owner, who took them from her and helped her down from
+the ladder, saying he supposed she was the latest Miss Macfarlane.
+
+“Well,” said Gillian, “I answer to the name. I’ve got another for
+holidays.”
+
+They took the remaining six volumes down and had made a list of
+dilapidation before the chimes rang for tea.
+
+“I wonder why some of them have been left in,” said Toby.
+
+“Well, if they’d all come out there’d have been no book left,” said
+Gillian.
+
+“Yes; but I don’t think that would have stopped whoever began to cut
+them up.”
+
+“Lots of people don’t understand the least little things,” said Gillian.
+
+Toby looked at her sharply.
+
+“No,” he said. “Perhaps it’s as well.”
+
+Gillian wondered if he suspected his mother, and was sure he did when he
+said nothing about the excisions when they joined her for tea.
+
+As they sat in an uneasy silence while Lady Bottomley poured out the
+scented Ceylon tea she always drank, Gillian let herself fall into the
+abyss of guilt that so often yawned for her after any completely
+self-forgetting hour. This quiet man with his large grey eyes and small
+brown moustache was so unlike the Toby she had imagined, and the
+discovery of what had been done to his books had so inflamed her mind
+that for the moment Lilac’s complicated affairs had faded from
+existence, and here she now was, his accomplice, almost his friend,
+before he even knew her name. Was this what Lilac called “doing the
+other things”? Gillian wondered. She had done things. She was certainly
+now, without knowing how she came to be doing it, standing between Sir
+Reginald and old Winona.
+
+And how dreadful it was to be so afraid of anyone you belonged to as the
+third baronet was of his mother. Was he afraid or ashamed? Weren’t they
+both the same thing? Why _would_ she use that large gold sugar-tongs?
+Why would she put two lumps of sugar and all those blobs of cream in
+Gillian’s tea? Why did neither of them say a word except in answer to
+her own remarks? Gillian felt herself growing more and more dreadfully
+bright as she babbled on. If the monosyllables continued much longer,
+she knew she would say something awful. She felt herself turning to poor
+Toby and saying:
+
+“Lady Bottomley tells me you were at Eton and Magdalen Colleges,” which
+was exactly what Lady Bottomley had told her in the expansions of
+yesterday. That would be a really putting-off thing. Wasn’t she the very
+worm of vulgarity for wanting, for not really wanting but for thinking
+of saying it? How dreadful to have crumpets for tea in July!
+
+And then Stephen came in. And Stephen, who was so dull, so solemn, so
+correct, Stephen whom she really hardly knew at all, changed everything
+back into the amusing, preposterous fun it had all been until these last
+ten minutes.
+
+“Hullo, Gillian!” Stephen said when he saw her, “why aren’t you down at
+Glynde with Sophie and Lilac? Is that confounded High School mewing you
+up in London through the dog-days?”
+
+And there were explanations and introductions, and Lady Bottomley,
+instead of being upset, was elated that Gillian had a sister whom her
+son had met at Glynde, and Stephen and Toby, who weren’t doing anything
+particular that evening, said they’d both come and see Lilac and hear
+news of Sophie after dinner, and Lady Bottomley said Miss Lilac must
+come to lunch with _her_ Miss Armstrong the next day, and they’d find
+some nice concert to go to in the afternoon. Gillian was so out of
+breath with it all that it took Lilac ten minutes to piece together a
+coherent story out of all the scraps and laughter she carried home with
+her, particularly as William caught the infection of excitement and sang
+“God Save our Gray” at the top of his voice until they covered his cage
+with Lilac’s Burberry. And that only made things worse, because, after a
+moment’s silence, William observed in a dulcet voice, “Toby—Toby—prritty
+Toby.” “Just as if,” said Lilac, pale and husky with rage, “just as if
+we’d said nothing else for months. I wish you’d kill that bird,
+Gillian.”
+
+And she meant it. Gillian was afraid of Lilac when she went white with
+passion like that. She carried William’s cage over to the Middletons’
+flat and asked the Mrs. Middleton who really was a missionary’s widow to
+take him in for the evening. Mrs. Middleton had “a way” with parrots,
+and, though it didn’t seem to work quite so well with cockatoos, she was
+always very kind about trying to soothe William’s song, when Gillian had
+other things to do. Lilac had once declared that she’d overheard Mrs.
+Middleton reading the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer to William
+just as she used to do to the heathen: but all William was ever heard to
+add to his vocabulary from the Middleton flat was Jessie Middleton’s
+drawl, “Oh, Mother, _must_ I?” followed by a prolonged imitation of
+Jessie Middleton’s yawn.
+
+Love, thought Gillian, as she knocked at Mrs. Middleton’s door, was
+doing rather horrid things to Lilac; it was making her cruel—Lilac who
+couldn’t bear even to kill clothes-moths—and suspicious and extravagant.
+And dishonourable. After all, there was Toby’s American wife—at least
+there might be, though, now she had seen him herself, Gillian was bound
+to admit Toby didn’t look in the least married to anybody.
+
+“Isn’t it damnable!” was what Lilac had said last night. And to-night
+she wanted to have William killed.
+
+
+                                   VI
+
+It was hot in the little book-lined room up under the roof of the
+Mordaunt Club. Gillian sat on the window-sill and leaned out over the
+dark well of the courtyard across which beams of light from the other
+open windows made slanting, transparent, misty bridges. She sat out of
+the circle of lamplight made by the painted shade over the oil-lamp
+which stood on a table in front of the largest bookcase.
+
+Stephen was in the light. It shone on his red, fine skin, on his smooth,
+shiny hair, on the patent leather of his shoes, on the shining curve of
+his dress-shirt that bulged, ever so little, over the dull repp of his
+white waistcoat. Gillian was liking Stephen more every minute. He was so
+comfortingly at his ease in life. Here, in their little book-room; that
+afternoon, before the appalling splendours of old Winona’s tea-table, he
+was just the same Stephen as he was at Glynde. He wasn’t like Toby, who
+had been nervous even though he chattered in his own library and sulky
+in his mother’s drawing-room, and who now sat in the corner of the
+red-leather chesterfield making jerks of speech and ruffling up the
+pink-and-blue Samarkand rug with his feet. Lilac sat in the other
+corner, quite in shadow, very slim in her thin white frock with its wide
+angel sleeves that hung down over her hands as they lay folded in her
+lap. Her eyes, dark with excitement, looked black in the shade, and the
+fluff of her fair hair seemed grey with no light to bring out its golden
+shimmer.
+
+“Been to the Russian Ballet?” jerked Toby.
+
+“Not again,” said Lilac.
+
+Money was sometimes a disadvantageous possession—sometimes. Stephen
+hadn’t half as much as Toby, but he had been born into his place in
+life, and it never occurred to him to doubt his perfect right to be
+wherever his life took him. You could see he never thought about paying
+for anything; he took it for granted that things were paid for! Stephen
+was free. Toby, who could buy real Dürers in St. James’s Street and have
+horses at Newmarket, was afraid. Money had robbed him of the place he
+was born into and he didn’t fit in the place it had bought for him. He
+was too nice to be apologetic, but he was always ready to be a little
+angry. He said “How annoying!” over everything that went at all wrong.
+He’d said it about his Swinburnes; and when Lady Bottomley had said that
+she’d promised he should open a bazaar in September; and when he’d
+dropped the spoon out of his coffee-cup saucer as he took it from Lilac
+just now.
+
+It was odd that Lilac, whose every movement was so finished and
+effectual, and who knew exactly not only what she wanted but how she was
+going to get it—it was perhaps not really odd that Lilac should want
+this gentle, undecided Toby. It was clear that he wanted her. Of that
+Gillian had been sure from the moment he had come into the flat. You
+could see that Toby saw, that he _could_ see nothing but Lilac. It was
+dreadful, Gillian felt, to have that feeling about another person,
+particularly if you had a wife in America and couldn’t have the person
+you wanted like that. It was rather dreadful of Lilac to let him want
+her when he couldn’t have her. Dreadfully cruel. Perhaps Lilac didn’t
+know. Perhaps Toby had never looked at her in this way before. Lilac
+couldn’t let him go on like that. She was keeping very still, almost as
+if she were half asleep. She must be making up her mind to put a stop to
+it; not to see Toby again. Nobody could bear to be wanted so badly, to
+be looked at with such unhappy eyes.
+
+Then, very quietly, and without looking at Toby, or at Gillian, or at
+Stephen, softly and slowly, but deliberately and not at all as if she
+were dreaming, Lilac raised one hand and smoothed back the long loose
+sleeve from the arm that still lay in her lap. Stephen was lighting a
+cigarette and didn’t notice. But Gillian saw. And she saw how Toby
+leaned forward a little and stopped in the middle of asking something
+quite dull to let his eyes drop from Lilac’s face to her hand. And Lilac
+raised her hand and pushed it along the top of the chesterfield, playing
+a little, light, slow five-finger exercise on the red leather until her
+bare arm up to the elbow, lay out beyond the shadow, cream-pale and
+soft, the skin taut and smooth over the wrist-joints, with tiny sparkles
+of gold hair catching the yellow lamplight as the round finger-tips
+tapped out their noiseless tune.
+
+“Guess what I’m playing,” said Lilac softly, in the voice of a young
+witch casting a spell. “It’s something you know,” and her two long front
+teeth gleamed in the shadow, breaking the rose of her mouth as she spoke
+and smiled.
+
+“I can’t guess,” said Toby hoarsely. “Tell me,” said Toby, as though his
+life depended on being told.
+
+“No—you must guess,” said Lilac, her voice shaking a little in her
+throat with laughter. “You know it quite well,” and she emphasized the
+“quite” delicately so that it rang in the air like a chiming bell.
+
+Toby bent on his elbows; his crimson hands clutched each other between
+his spread knees. His head, thrust into the circle of lamplight, showed
+his damp hair sticking to his brow.
+
+“Lilac, I _can’t_ guess. Not while you do that.”
+
+Gillian slipped down from the window-seat.
+
+“It’s _Ach du lieber Augustin_, the tune the pipkin sang when it boiled,
+in the story of the prince who went back into his kingdom and slammed
+the door,” she said.
+
+Lilac jumped up from her corner and the sleeve fell back again over her
+arm.
+
+“Oh, Gillian, how mean of you!” she cried. But her voice was happy and
+satisfied as it had not been before that day. And presently Stephen took
+Toby away. They were driving down to Esher that night, as Toby had
+horses arriving from Ireland with a new groom whom he didn’t quite
+trust, and he wanted to be on the spot himself first thing the next
+morning.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lilac went to lunch next day, and on to the nice concert with Lady
+Bottomley. She arrived, very pretty and rather pathetic in the large
+crinoline hat trimmed with the pink rose she’d bought in Sloane Street,
+and the mauve ribbon she’d salved from part of Sophie’s largesse, while
+Gillian was pumice-stoning the copying-ink from her fingers after her
+morning’s work. All old Winona’s letters were preserved in duplicate,
+even the third-person refusals to add to her cheque-signing toil.
+Gillian had already traced the original hands and the varying imitations
+of six of her predecessors through the flimsy pages of the copy-files
+which, also bound into crested volumes, filled a shelf below the
+newspaper-cutting tomes in the library at 99. Gillian had been taught by
+her father to burn all letters, even his own lively, brilliant letters
+written when she stayed behind at school and he sent her his diaries
+with their little pen and pencil drawings on every page. So she added
+her daily sheaf to this unvaluable collection, consoling herself with
+the quotation from La Rochefoucauld, which she could never quite get by
+heart, about considering the kind of people to whom He gave the most of
+it when you wanted to know what God really thought of money.
+
+“And, of course,” said Gillian, being honest with herself as she
+scrubbed her inky hands, “it wasn’t God who gave old Winona money to
+spend on having a quite young crest put on everything she possesses, but
+John Bottomley who did make the best bicycles that ever spun and
+deserved to be ‘a perfect Crocus’; and Toby will do beautiful things
+with it when old Winona dies. I wonder if she’ll have a tomb all made of
+precious stones. I do hope she will. I do wish she would. And order it
+now, while I’m with her like the Bishop, at St. Praxed’s.”
+
+But there wouldn’t be any ordering of jewelled monuments for a day or
+two at any rate, for by the time Gillian came into the drawing-room
+Lilac had made such headway with Toby’s mother that that lady was
+insisting that Gillian must take the week-end until Tuesday and go with
+her sister to Glynde.
+
+“And, of course,” said Lilac, “if Gillian is not quite rested by
+Tuesday, I can come back and do your letters myself for a day or two. I
+don’t pretend to be as clever as Gillian, but I’m _very_ industrious,
+and I’d try not to let you miss her too dreadfully, Lady Bottomley,
+indeed I would.”
+
+Lady Bottomley was archly playful.
+
+“I am sure, Miss Lilac, that you would be a delightful secretary, but I
+always spend August in Ireland, where my male secretary attends to all
+my requirements, and _my_ Miss Armstrong will only have to look in for
+an hour or two in the mornings when she gets back from Glynde. I should
+be sorry,” and she tapped Lilac’s cheek with the whole bunch of her
+fingers, “for such a pretty little person as yourself to leave her
+friends on my account. Mr. and Mrs. Glynde would never forgive me for
+robbing them of such bright eyes.”
+
+So Gillian went to Glynde with Lilac by the five-o’clock train out of
+Victoria on Friday afternoon. And when they got there, there was no
+Toby.
+
+Stephen met them with the car at Lewes.
+
+“Toby’s gone to America,” he told them. “He was very bored at Sandown
+and didn’t seem to care whether the Buster won or not. I think he’s gone
+after that wife of his.”
+
+“Oh,” said Lilac. “You don’t think he’ll bring her back, do you?”
+
+“Alive or dead,” said Stephen. “Dead, possibly. I dare say he’s gone out
+to murder her. There’s sure to be one of the properly free states where
+a decent fellow like Toby can kill a wife from time to time! How long
+have you known about her?”
+
+“Only since I went to Lady Bottomley,” said Gillian. “I thought you and
+Sophie didn’t.”
+
+“Sophie don’t,” said Stephen; “but Toby told me the whole story, and he
+says he told Lilac.”
+
+“Yes,” said Lilac, “he wrote to me about it, yesterday. But I’d known
+for some time. And I told Sophie.”
+
+“You did, did you?” said Stephen. “That’s all to the good,” and he
+changed the subject.
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+Lilac did not marry Toby till the spring. And Toby did not murder his
+wife, though old Winona went into deep mourning on the receipt of a
+cable from San Francisco one day in the following October. The cable was
+duly filed. It ran:
+
+   “Millicent is no more. Do not announce it in _The
+   Times_.—REGINALD.”
+
+“I quite feel with my son,” said old Winona. “The death of so unworthy a
+woman as the late Lady Bottomley is not a matter we, as a family, can
+publicly countenance. But my own change of title must be announced. Will
+you look up in Kelly, my dear, for the form in which a dowager announces
+the resumption of her original title?”
+
+But Gillian could find nothing helpful in Kelly or even in Whitaker,
+and, after an afternoon’s research, was told to telegraph for the lady
+whom Mrs. Barraclough called Winnie Roehampton.
+
+“My daughter-in-law knows by experience how to deal with knotty points
+in the social code,” said the ex-dowager.
+
+Lady Roehampton discouraged the attempt at a public resumption of her
+ex-mother-in-law’s rights. She was an elegant and vivacious creature
+with very flaxen hair and a complexion so brilliant that, though
+actually the work of nature, it laid her under the constant suspicion of
+resorting to art. Her manner, which at first seemed friendly, was on
+closer acquaintance seen to be the outward expression of an
+undiscriminating candour. She had no reticences, and also no rancours.
+To her things and people just were. She neither classified nor blamed.
+But she lacked the philosophic detachment which enables others who share
+her outlook to stand aside and watch their fellow creatures commit the
+follies they themselves are too balanced to stigmatize, too interested
+to prevent. Life was not pure spectacle to Winnie Roehampton. She knew
+what drama meant to the actors and she was a shade too unintelligent to
+remain passively unkind in circumstances over which she could have any
+possible control.
+
+“My child,” she said, drawing Gillian into the shelter of one of the
+palm-groves in the hall after telling Atkinson to call off that powdered
+menial as she would let herself out, “take her to Jay’s. Let her buy up
+the whole shop. They’ll tell her to an inch how much crêpe indicates the
+resumption of whatever a baronet’s widow resumes when her son has been
+divorced by his wife. Oh, yes! That’s what’s happened. Didn’t you know?
+Let her get new visiting-cards—she might have a little black arrow put
+through ‘Winona.’ I wish I’d thought of that before. Never mind. You can
+tell her I thought of it on the way down. But keep her out of _The
+Times_. You needn’t tell her Millicent isn’t dead—after all, I _may_ be
+doing Toby an injustice—unless you can’t restrain her any other way. But
+you might suggest that she’d better wait till Toby gets back, as it’s
+quite on the cards that he’s bringing a perfectly good new wife of his
+own with him.”
+
+“I think,” said Gillian, “the little black arrow is quite enough for me
+to suggest. I’ve seen the cable, you know.”
+
+“So have I. That’s what convinces me. Millicent isn’t the kind of woman
+who dies of anything but extreme antiquity or violence. And she’s now
+about thirty, and you don’t suppose Toby has done anything violent.”
+
+“No, of course not,” said Gillian faintly, seeing again Toby’s bent head
+and strangling hands thrust forward into the lamplight as Lilac’s arm
+slid along the top of the couch behind him.
+
+Her hesitation was misunderstood.
+
+“Oh,” said the Countess of Roehampton, without a trace of
+self-consciousness or embarrassment, “Dora Barraclough has told you
+about Jim Bottomley’s accident? She’d exaggerate, of course; I’ve always
+said it was my fault. But I didn’t plan it. I was quite sorry when it
+happened. And you can see how I’ve been forgiven. Call me in again if
+she gets difficult. One of Roehampton’s aunts is a lady-in-waiting, and
+I’ll get her trained intellect to bear on the situation.”
+
+“Thank you so much, Lady Roehampton,” said Gillian from the doorstep,
+ignoring the more sensational aspects of the lady’s Parthian speech.
+“I’ll get Dashwood to take her to Jay’s this very afternoon.”
+
+
+                                  VIII
+
+The only person who made any difficulty about Lilac’s marriage was Aunt
+Elizabeth Armstrong, whose real name was Mrs. Mortimer. She was what
+Toby called a reinforced relation. Toby could be quite amusing if you
+gave him time. Mrs. Mortimer had been a Miss Armstrong, Gerald
+Armstrong’s only aunt, and had taken him after his mother’s death when
+he was quite a child with her at such times as he was not at school.
+When he grew up and went to Oxford, and not till then, Aunt Elizabeth
+had bestowed her hand on the West African clergyman to whom she had
+plighted her troth in early life. Mr. Mortimer did not long survive his
+marriage, and little Ellen Mortimer, a young half-sister who was
+semi-dependent on him, came to live in England with his widow, and, much
+to her indignation, married Gerald Armstrong quite quietly one afternoon
+when he was home on leave, going out to do so at a registrar’s office in
+an old hat, and coming back with him to tea as though nothing had
+happened.
+
+There was something of the born supplanter in little Ellen Mortimer, so
+it seemed to Aunt Elizabeth, who did not greatly care for women. And it
+was like little Ellen to have two daughters and no son. Aunt Elizabeth,
+who filled the office of grandmother on both sides to Gerald’s and
+Ellen’s children, made the best of Gillian, whose second name was
+Elizabeth. But Lilac was a thorn in her flesh. Little Ellen had been
+sly, but demure and quiet in her dress, as became a Christian lady. But
+Lilac only resorted to slyness when overt methods failed and her taste
+in dress was what Aunt Elizabeth called “shouting,” which wasn’t in the
+least what other people mean by “loud,” but indicated a general effect
+calculated to make the casual observer look twice and look approvingly.
+
+Aunt Elizabeth lived at Highgate in a little bow-windowed house at the
+top of the hill which you entered from the road, thinking it quite an
+ordinary house, only to discover that the parlour-window at the back
+hung over a precipice dizzying down through tree-tops, and smoke-wreaths
+and chimney-stacks to the great lake of the city out of which the dome
+of St. Paul’s rose, a small round island in the east, and the four
+chimneys of the Chelsea power-house stood against the far horizon in the
+west like the masts of a sailing-ship with all its canvas furled.
+
+Aunt Elizabeth set no store by the view from her parlour-window. She did
+not obscure it, as she obscured that of the road in the front of the
+house, by strong, white Nottingham lace curtains; but her motives were
+not æsthetic motives.
+
+“No need to curtain these windows,” she said. “Only the birds of the air
+can see into them from the outside, and the fewer the curtains the
+better the dusting.” Aunt Elizabeth’s house was very well dusted. It was
+also quite reasonably comfortable. Its furniture belonged to the
+mahogany age, but there was no horse-hair left, though you could feel
+that Aunt Elizabeth had lived with horse-hair in her time. Also, it was
+quite surprisingly free from any traces of Mr. Mortimer’s vocation. None
+of the African mats, beads and other devices which filled Mrs.
+Middleton’s flat in the Club, had its counterpart in Aunt Elizabeth’s
+parlour. “Heathen rubbish,” she called them all, “and some of it worse.
+How Agneta Middleton can bring herself to set up that shameless idol she
+has on the mantelpiece in a Christian land I cannot conceive, and if,”
+said Aunt Elizabeth, “that Mrs. Barrymore of yours wasn’t a poor thing,
+she’d have had it taken away and burnt.”
+
+“But Mrs. Barraclough thinks it is an ornament. She doesn’t feel about
+it as you do. It doesn’t seem to her to be a god as it does to you,”
+Gillian had protested.
+
+“God, indeed,” said Aunt Elizabeth; “devil, my girl, that’s what they
+are, however your Mrs. Barrington makes excuses for them.”
+
+Aunt Elizabeth always got the names of the people she called “poor
+things” just a little wrong. It made them seem even poorer than she said
+they were, and was a deliberate classification, not in the least akin to
+old Winona’s large confusions. She had never once stumbled, as a person
+liable to true confusion might well have done, over the name or names of
+her prospective great-nephew-in-law. “Poor Reginald” she called him from
+the first, and she withheld her blessing on the match for some days
+under the impression that, being Irish, he must necessarily be a Roman,
+and so worse than the heathen of whose conversion it was always possible
+to entertain an active hope.
+
+Lilac made it quite clear to Gillian, without any direct reference to
+the subject, that Aunt Elizabeth was to be allowed to understand that
+Toby was the bachelor he appeared to be.
+
+“If she can be brought to approve of my marriage,” was what Lilac had
+said, “she’ll forgive me for not going to live at Highgate.”
+
+Mrs. Mortimer had been quite willing for Gillian to go to the Mordaunt
+Club, and be under Mrs. Middleton’s eye when Ellen died. The Club was
+within an hour’s journey of Pelham House. But she had quite supposed
+that Lilac would sojourn with her at Highgate. That neither she nor
+Lilac really liked one another was no reason, in Mrs. Mortimer’s
+self-disciplining view of life for them, as widow and orphan of the same
+blood, to live apart.
+
+But Lilac had been firm. Gillian was not fit to live alone. All she’d
+got to furnish the flat with was a ton of books, a cast of the Winged
+Victory, and an old brass toasting-fork which, said Lilac, just showed.
+Besides, Lilac couldn’t live out so far as Highgate herself. And Aunt
+Elizabeth saw to it, as Lilac very well knew she would when it came to
+the point, that all the lacunæ made by the sale of her nephew’s really
+valuable things and the habit of living in semi-furnished houses which
+little Ellen had contracted in the course of their nomadic married life,
+were properly filled with good cutlery and fine linen sheets to go with
+the outlandish curtains and wild cups and saucers Gillian herself had
+bought at strange shops of post-Maple ideas.
+
+“And how is Gillian any fitter to live alone now?” asked Aunt Elizabeth,
+when she had been made aware of Lilac’s engagement. “Is she going to
+share your home?”
+
+“No! How could she, dearest Aunt Eliza? Toby and I aren’t going to have
+a home for ever such a long time. We’re going round the world for our
+honeymoon, and that’ll take almost a year.”
+
+“And where will you be if the Lord should send you a child? Gadding
+about on the face of the waters, I dare say.”
+
+“Oh,” said Lilac, blushing, but defiant, “He won’t send one till we get
+back. Toby and I have decided that.”
+
+“Wicked, impious creatures!” said Aunt Elizabeth, shaking her head, on
+which, in spite of Lilac’s efforts, she wore just the same kind of cap,
+three rows of Brussels lace frilled on to a high-crowned ‘shape,’ as her
+mother had worn before her. “I shall pray without ceasing that the Lord
+may see fit to defeat your ungodly purpose.”
+
+“Well, don’t say anything to Toby about it, or to Lady Bottomley,”
+begged Lilac.
+
+“I shall do the Lord’s bidding,” was Aunt Elizabeth’s reply. “If He bids
+me to speak, it will not be for you to prevent me, my girl.”
+
+So Lilac took good care that Toby was not left alone at any time when
+the Lord might be likely to move Aunt Elizabeth to declare His views;
+and by the exercise of that secret diplomacy which always
+baffled Gillian to detect in the working, managed to keep her
+quasi-grandmaternal relation and her prospective mother-in-law apart.
+
+“I dare say you would enjoy seeing them meet,” she retorted when Gillian
+pointed out how fine a conflict might arise between two such autocrats,
+“but it’s my wedding and I’m not going to have it spoilt.”
+
+“I’m sure they’d not spoil it,” said Gillian. “Aunt Elizabeth is so
+relieved that you’re going to be married in a Protestant church that she
+doesn’t mind its being a fashionable one, and she won’t know how like a
+pantomime it’s going to be till she’s there. And you know she won’t
+brawl in church.”
+
+“No. Not _in_ church. But she might persuade Toby and his mother to have
+the horrid bits left in. She thinks her Prayer-Book was just as much
+given by inspiration of God as the Bible.”
+
+“Are there any horrid bits?” said Gillian.
+
+“Gillian, you idiot. You’ve read the Service, haven’t you?”
+
+“Lots of times,” said Gillian. “I think those vows are rather
+terrifying. It’s such a long promise—forsaking all other, too—you can’t
+know who’s coming—but I like it because of the ‘so’—‘as.’ I can’t think
+why people will say ‘as long as.’ It’s no easier.”
+
+“Oh, _that_,” said Lilac. “That’s all right, and I’m not going to be
+common and suffragetty about ‘obey.’ It’s the other bits. Even you, my
+poor Jill, wouldn’t want to be mixed up in a remedy against sin.”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Gillian slowly; “if it were a remedy, it would be
+rather beautiful to be part of it—_against_ sin.”
+
+“There are times,” said Lilac with bitter incisiveness, “when I think
+you can’t be quite right in your head.”
+
+They were on their way to Dover Street to try on the bridesmaids’
+dresses. There were to be six bridesmaids—two little Glyndes, the two
+small Roehampton children, a stout but very rich friend of whom Lilac
+had not lost sight since the Lausanne days, and Gillian herself. And
+they were to be all dressed as Dresden china shepherdesses in dresses
+copied from a complete half-dozen originals that figured among the many
+presents from the bridegroom’s mother. For old Winona, who was coming
+out of her black garments and going into maroon with feathers on the
+resumption of her dowagership, had insisted on giving and choosing the
+bridesmaids’ dresses herself. It wasn’t regular, but still, as Lilac
+said, this was a subscription wedding in which Glyndes and Armstrongs
+and Mortimers all had stakes, so why shouldn’t everybody have a share?
+And, having once allowed the prospective dowager to take a hand in the
+preparations, it was useless to attempt to stay that hand from
+munificence. Besides, she was already very fond of Lilac. Their ideas
+were seldom in conflict. In the matter of abridging the wedding-service,
+for example, she was entirely of Lilac’s mind. There was nothing
+Calvinistic or Biblical about old Winona.
+
+“She really is very nice and refined about some things,” said Lilac.
+“Much better than Toby is. Did you know that she’d snipped the worst
+bits out of his Swinburnes when they moved from Blackheath to
+Knightsbridge after he’d left Oxford?”
+
+“I knew someone had chopped up the books dreadfully,” said Gillian. “I
+shall give Toby a new unbarbered set for his wedding-present.”
+
+Toby gave Gillian _Die grosse Fortuna_ and the large _Saint Eustace_ two
+days before the wedding. Lilac had come upon the print when they were
+looking through Toby’s things together one day, and had told him that
+Gillian liked it. She was taking her own pictures, a large coloured
+reproduction of Greiffenhagen’s _Idyll_ and a photogravure of
+Balestieri’s _Beethoven_ away with her in the small case of her own
+personal possessions which was being stored at Knightsbridge, and Toby,
+very modestly, proffered his two Dürers to fill their places on either
+side of the tall bookcase in the little room.
+
+Gillian accepted them in speechless content.
+
+“And I suppose,” said Lilac, “that you’ll hang them there, both of them,
+and tell me they’re both beautiful.”
+
+“So they are,” said Gillian.
+
+“The one with the dogs is amusing, and I like the little hill with the
+castle on it behind,” Lilac conceded. “But as for the other—well, all I
+can say is that you’d better not let Mrs. Gordon see it if you want to
+stay on at the Club without me. She’d think it was a caricature of
+herself. Which it might very well be.”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The wedding took place on the 25th of April at Holy Trinity, Sloane
+Square. Aunt Elizabeth did not attend. The date coincided with some
+mysterious anniversary in her own life which she always kept in prayer
+and fasting. Neither Lilac nor Gillian could ever be quite sure when
+this penitential festival would fall, for it came round, not as a day in
+the month, but as the third or fourth Monday in April, which might be
+any day between the 15th and the 27th. She had presented Lilac with
+travelling trunks and cases and a dressing-bag of the finest quality and
+a length of black satin brocade which would stand by itself. To Toby she
+sent two copies of what she called “The Scriptures,” one in the
+Authorized the other in the Revised Version, replete with Notes, Maps,
+References, Concordances and Subject-Indexes printed in large type on
+India paper and bound in the limpest, most velvety purple leather. She
+had also given Lilac a purse containing a five-pound note, four
+sovereigns, two half-sovereigns, six half-crowns and ten shillings in
+shillings and sixpences, all new coins of that year.
+
+“No need for you to go to your husband for pocket-money till you’ve got
+used to him, my girl,” said Aunt Elizabeth as she gave her youngest
+great-niece a dry and single good-bye kiss.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gillian was glad that the old lady did not appear on the day of the
+wedding. Nothing about it would have pleased her mind. The great, green,
+Burne-Jones window lighting the white-and-silver bride with her sheaf of
+Madonna lilies, followed by the six powdered and panniered bridesmaids
+with their gilded crooks and jaunty flowered-baskets, would have seemed
+to her equally sacrilegious with the operatic music sung by an exotic
+soprano and a dusky tenor in place of a sound Britannic anthem while the
+register was being signed. And the huge wedding-bell, composed of white
+roses and plaster Cupids, under which Lilac and Toby stood to receive
+congratulations in the drawing-room of the Grosvenor Hotel afterwards, a
+surprise planned and executed by old Winona, would have pleased Mrs.
+Mortimer as ill as the champagne and the confetti (silver hearts and
+horse-shoes these), which flowed and floated through the afternoon.
+
+Gillian took Lilac up to the hard, unfamiliar hotel bedroom strewn with
+dressmakers’ boxes and tissue-paper where the bride had dressed that
+morning and now was to change into her travelling-clothes. The room was
+crowded with people. There was Lilac’s new maid, a rather awful being,
+who had packed everything so thoroughly that there had been nothing left
+for Gillian to help with the night before, and there was Sophie, of
+course, and the awkward other bridesmaid who had to come up too, and
+Mrs. Barraclough whom they couldn’t very well keep out, and odds and
+ends of people who tapped at the door and said, “May I come in just for
+one second?” and Winnie Roehampton who dashed in very slim and cool in a
+leaf-green sheath frock of the most miraculous cut, and said, “Well, my
+dear, I was Lady Bottomley once and I hope you’ll make a better job of
+it than I did,” and skimmed out again before Lilac had time to thank her
+for the benediction.
+
+But Sophie cleared the room for the sisters for a final moment, and
+Lilac cried a little in Gillian’s arms before she went down to Toby and
+the confetti.
+
+“Jilly,” said Lilac, “promise me one thing. When I come back, when you
+see me again for the first time, you won’t open your eyes and stare at
+me, will you?”
+
+“No,” said Gillian; “but why should I stare?—and why should you mind if
+I did?”
+
+“Oh, Jilly, Jilly,” said Lilac, “I don’t believe you know.”
+
+
+                                   IX
+
+Gillian had a dazed, deafening headache. She couldn’t stay on and
+chatter to the wedding-guests. She couldn’t go on and dine at Claridge’s
+before the theatre-party with which the day was to end.
+
+Old Winona had another Macfarlane to look after her now. Gillian was
+absolved from her duties and was going to take a proper secretarial
+course in order to fit her for real life, a business for which life at
+99 was no sort of preparation. So Gillian was free to go home to the
+Club by herself; Mrs. Barraclough was making a complete orgy of it with
+the Roehamptons and the Glyndes.
+
+She took off her preposterous hat, shook the powder out of her hair, put
+on a hooded cloak and slipped out of the busy, indifferent hotel into
+the April twilight and walked down to the river.
+
+It was a soft, dim evening, heavy with spring. The plane-trees on the
+Embankment were shaking the fine splinters of their stamens out of the
+little tasselled bracts that opened with soft popping noises in the
+still leafless boughs. The air was as clouded and green-grey as the
+water; the figures hurrying to get out of the Park before the gate
+closed for the night moved on the other side of the river as if behind
+glass in an aquarium.
+
+Gillian leaned across the parapet and let the breeze that blew
+down-stream cool her aching flushed face. The tide was low. A few
+desultory gulls, the stragglers of the main fleet which had put to sea
+with the onset of mild weather some weeks earlier, scavenged quietly in
+the mud at the water’s edge. A police-boat prowled up from Vauxhall; two
+barges keeping to mid-channel travelled with the ebb, their sails set to
+catch what airs might stir to aid them. The evening was not so much
+peaceful as indifferent. Gillian lingered on, and an increasing
+desolation preyed within her. What was it that Lilac had done?
+
+“Lilac will always know that she is paying for a fake.” That was what
+her father had said. Was Toby a fake? Lilac had wanted him. She had
+wanted him so much that she had at last stretched out her soft arm and
+taken him by guile with her rosy, tapping fingers. Gillian never
+remembered that hand, creeping into the lamplight and shaking all poor
+Toby’s unhappy resistance, without a shock of wonder. What exactly was
+it that Lilac had done to him? How did she know she could do it? It was
+predatory, her gesture, yet it gave away something that could never be
+taken back again. Lilac had been paying, paying deliberately, for Toby.
+But was it Toby, the essential Toby, that dim, kind, gentle Toby who
+loved horses and fine engravings and had such clumsy hands and such
+vague, beseeching eyes that Lilac had bought with the lilt of a song
+from a fairy-tale? Or was it what Toby stood for? Was it only the power
+to buy everything, to go everywhere, to make, if she chose, such a
+crammed and monotonous wilderness of any house as Old Winona had made of
+99, that Lilac really wanted in Toby? wanted it so much that she had
+confused Toby, who was not in the least magnificent with the
+magnificence she could reach through him? Gillian thought with a slow
+gust of remorse of that far-off, unconsidered Millicent who too, in her
+day, had wanted Toby, and who was now—neither she nor Lilac had ever
+stopped to ask if she were dead—at least she had never spoken of Toby’s
+first wife to Lilac. What Toby had said to Lilac about her was their own
+affair; but Gillian might have spared her a thought.
+
+Lower and lower in her own esteem she plunged, down into the dark
+undergrowth where motives lie tangled in egoism and vanity. Jealousy of
+her sister; envy of Lilac’s freedom; feeble self-pity for her own
+loneliness—as if she didn’t want to be alone—assailed her as she groped
+in the shadows of her heart. What an aftermath of a wedding! Why
+couldn’t she be happy because Lilac was free, because she had both hands
+full of what she most wanted? Gillian wanted freedom too. But it wasn’t,
+after all, freedom that someone else’s money could give her. Lilac had
+freed herself with one hand by fettering the other. In a way she was
+more bound than Gillian, who could never hope to be freer than she was
+now.
+
+Gillian’s headache was gone; it had faded out with the daylight. The sky
+was quite black above the Embankment lights now, and the tide was rising
+and taking fresh reflections, long swords of light from the lamps on the
+bridges, as the waters broadened beneath them. Gillian turned her face
+to go home, her self-reviling over. But there was still an ache of
+disappointment in her thoughts. What was it she had asked of this day,
+that thing for herself, that secret and peculiar enjoyment which had not
+been given to her? Long ago, when she was a child, she had known this
+unsatisfied ache. “I’m not hungry, but I know there’s something very
+delicious I’ve not eaten,” she had explained to her father. Now the ache
+was there, but she knew what she had missed. It was the climax of the
+wedding-service which had never come; the moment when, in her prayer for
+Lilac, she had hoped, had meant to reach out and touch her father’s
+spirit if it could be possible that that spirit remained aware of her.
+She had promised herself to wait with closed eyes for the words:
+
+   “... whose daughters ye are so long as ye do well and are not
+   afraid with any amazement.”
+
+and they had never been spoken.
+
+Lilac and Old Winona together had had the service thoroughly pruned. The
+Bishop had tweetled an inaudible little sermon over the married pair,
+the murmurs of which were drowned to the congregation in the creaking of
+the bridesmaids’ gilded flower-baskets as they stood separated from the
+bride and fidgeting in the aisle for the end of the performance. There
+had been little need for consecrated phrases at the Pantomime Wedding.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER THREE.
+                         THE TORTOISESHELL CAT
+
+
+                                   I
+
+There was a knock at the door.
+
+Gillian, who was dusting books in the inner room, ran out to answer it
+without taking off the brown holland overall she was wearing, or untying
+the old, blue, silk handkerchief with which she had covered her head.
+
+Jane Bird stood on the landing.
+
+“Good morning, Tanagra,” she said, her face impassive behind her round
+spectacles. “_The Times_ has announced that Moloch has devoured your
+sister, so I’ve come to see if you’ve been singed at all during the
+sacrifice.”
+
+“I don’t know what you mean,” said Gillian, torn between shyness,
+excitement and an unresentful knowledge that Jane was being very
+impertinent, and that she was not going to be able to snub her for it.
+
+“Don’t you know about the Bottomley Sunbaths for Ricketty Children?”
+said Jane, “and may I come inside?” She followed Gillian into the inner
+room and sat down, very tall and flat, like a creature hewn and jointed
+together out of planks, on the red chesterfield.
+
+“Your brother-in-law has celebrated his marriage by giving a sun-cure
+installation, in Dorset, to the London Hospital,” she said. “It’s in the
+papers with photographs of the wedding. There’s one of you in fancy
+dress, with the fancy hat a little on one side. You oughtn’t to try the
+piquant style. Undine or Ophelia, with your hair quite down, and no
+stays, is all you should ever allow yourself.”
+
+“You can’t have Ophelia bridesmaids,” said Gillian, “it would be
+tactless. Hamlet was such an unmarrying-man. And how nice of Toby! He
+kept it very quiet. I didn’t know.”
+
+“Very wise of him till he’d got clear of the country, or he’d have all
+the hospitals in the kingdom after him. I know. I was brought up on the
+lap of a hospital committee. My father was the director of Addenbrokes
+till he died. That’s how I know so much more about Life and its
+Mysteries than most young women. I read all his books, and it wasn’t
+only medicine. I’m an orphan now, like you. I’ve got a mother—if mother
+indeed she can be called. She’s third curate, unpaid, at St. Luke’s, and
+I’ve taken a studio in Buckingham Palace Road for six months.”
+
+“Aren’t you going to Oxford?”
+
+“Nor to Cambridge. They’re coming to me. Do you know Larry Browne?”
+
+“No,” said Gillian.
+
+“You will soon,” Jane assured her. “He knows about you; his father was
+your father’s tutor at B.N.C., and he’s got a photograph of your father
+in his studio that might be you with your hair cut short and your nose a
+size larger. I recognized it because it’s the same one as I saw here the
+day I called on your sister last summer.”
+
+“It’s the only photograph he ever had taken that wasn’t a snapshot one,”
+said Gillian. “And why has your Mr. Browne got it? where did he get it?”
+
+“His father had it from your father in the days when you were both
+unborn. It’s like a nursery rhyme,” said Jane, “and he’s trying to put
+it into a large allegorical picture he’s going to enter for some prize
+or other. Up in the top corner—complicated with wings and a halo.”
+
+“I think,” said Gillian, “I think I should like to see it.”
+
+“Come along then,” said Jane Bird; “it’s only on the other side of the
+bridge.”
+
+They walked together over the bridge and along by the palings of
+Battersea Park, and as they went Jane told Gillian that she had
+discarded scholarship for sculpture, and had already sold two figures to
+a shop in Bond Street.
+
+“They’re not good,” said Jane Bird, “my figures are not good, but
+they’re very pretty, and I sell them for five pounds apiece.”
+
+Presently they crossed the road, went through the fragment of a gate
+that hung between two blistered gate-posts in a fence which ran along
+the footpath between two blocks of flats, and found themselves in a
+long, asphalted garden, common to a row of studios, where the fires of
+Spring were vainly striving to cover up the traces of the bonfires of
+November.
+
+The studios were of commercial build. Red brick, faced with white stone,
+cut into unnecessary and depressing arabesques above the gutters, held
+the doors, windows and skylights together. The woodwork of the whole row
+had originally been painted in that peculiar liver-coloured red which
+distinguishes the entrances of the Piccadilly and Brompton Tube
+stations, and is so often used by the London builder to enhance the
+yellower red of London bricks. But, here and there in the row, an
+occupant had sickened at the shade and had splashed in white or green
+over the landlord’s paint. The door of the last studio in the row was
+new and shining in a rich cobalt.
+
+“That is the azure goal of our pilgrimage,” said Jane Bird, and Gillian
+found that she dared not ask her to express herself with direct
+simplicity. Jane was making it perfectly clear that Gillian was no
+longer in authority and that she, Jane, intended to be as ornate and
+ridiculous as she pleased, when she pleased; would indeed go out of her
+way to be ridiculous and ornate, just for the triumph of seeing Gillian
+check her impulse to protest.
+
+Larry Browne, who opened the door to them, was tall and
+broad-shouldered, with thick, strong, golden-brown hair that curved
+without curling from either side of a deep, straight parting dividing
+his head from crown to brow. He had light eyes; grey-green with yellow
+gleams in them, and there was a curious triangular fleck in the iris of
+his left eye that gave him a false expression of being a man with an
+outward cast. He had a small, neat nose with beautiful wide nostrils
+that drank the air freely, and a beautiful fresh mouth from one corner
+of which, at that moment, hung a long cherry-wood pipe with a tassel
+half-way down its stem, and a china bowl, with a lid to it, painted with
+robins and forget-me-nots that hopped and twined in and out of the
+device _Traum und Rauch_ which ran in large black Gothic capitals below
+its brim. He wore a shantung shirt which had once been blue, but had
+passed through many washings and was now clouded, like an August sky,
+where the colour had run, leaving irregular white spaces. An enormous
+pair of green corduroy trousers was folded into the tops of his brown
+boots at the ankles, and pleated into a leather belt round his waist. In
+spite, or even because of, this voluminous garment, the young man
+appeared remarkable for slenderness and grace as he stood in the
+doorway, the sunlight beating full on his clear, bright skin, filling
+the little freckles that crossed from cheek to cheek with colour, and
+striking a high-light off the curve of the jaw that ran, a clean line,
+from behind his small flat ear to the end of his slightly pointed chin.
+
+“Behold,” said Jane Bird, still daring Gillian to protest, “the youth is
+ruddy and withal of a fair countenance and beautiful to look to.”
+
+“Hullo, Aholah!” said the young man in an even voice, removing the pipe
+from his mouth as he spoke, and shutting down the pewter lid of its bowl
+with one finger. “Come in. We call your friend Aholah,” he said, turning
+to Gillian, “partly on account of her iniquities, but also because it
+was my good fortune to stumble on the derivation of that ancient name.
+It means ‘she that has her own tent,’ which is Miss Bird’s case, while
+I,” said Larry Browne, “am forced to share mine with a faun, as you may
+see for yourself.”
+
+He pulled aside the curtain which shut the little lobby off from the
+studio itself, letting it fall again as the two girls passed into the
+gaunt, white room.
+
+Larry Browne’s studio was the usual wilderness of easels, canvases,
+mahl-sticks and more or less damaged properties, furred with the usual
+dust, smelling of the customary oil and turpentine. The blinds were not
+drawn across the skylight and the studio was flooded with sunshine. All
+the low windows on the farther side were open on to a hedge of box and
+ivy and Virginia creeper which was noisy with sparrows. Some of the
+sparrows had hopped in over the window-seat, and three of them were
+fluttering and pecking on the boards below the model’s throne. A fourth
+was perched on the knee of the figure which occupied the throne; seated
+on it with one leg hanging down, the other crossed and bent so that one
+naked foot lay on the right knee, just behind the unruffled bird.
+
+It was the figure of a man so slight and supple that at a first glance
+he seemed little more than a child.
+
+He wore a light-blue suit like an engineer’s overall, held up by a tape
+which passed over his neck from the middle of the garment and left his
+arms and shoulders as bare as his thin, brown feet. Some one—it was most
+probably Larry—had stuck an ivy-leaf into the close black curls on each
+side of the creature’s head, and the stiff corners stood up like horns,
+widening the low, wide brow and giving to the dark, heavily lashed eyes
+which looked out from under the thick eyebrows, a woodland air. The face
+narrowed on either side of a long hooked nose to a chin deeply cleft
+below a mouth which was at the moment pursed up into a soundless
+whistle. The faun was holding converse with the sparrow, having for this
+purpose broken off his attempt to clear up the studio with a
+long-handled broom which leant up against the throne and served as a
+perch for yet another brown bird.
+
+“Heinrich,” said Larry Browne, “you must shoo those fowls away. We have
+other guests.”
+
+The faun, with one liquid movement, broke the angles of his pose and,
+gathering the complacent sparrows together, bore them, perched on the
+fingers of either hand to the window and placed them, chirruping, in the
+hedge outside.
+
+“I go to put on coats, vaistcoats too,” he said with a brilliant,
+melancholy smile, and vanished.
+
+“Heinrich,” Larry explained, “is a faun by day. At six o’clock he puts
+on more coats and waistcoats and goes out to play in the second violins
+at Queen’s Hall. Some of him is German as his name expresses, some of
+him is Italian, some of him is Jew. His father undoubtedly was Pan. He
+must have had a good many mothers.”
+
+“And when you’ve done painting him into your fresco,” said Jane Bird,
+“he’s going to sit to me with a sparrow, real or stuffed.”
+
+“I wonder if William would sit with him,” said Gillian. “It wouldn’t be
+the same thing as a sparrow, of course.”
+
+“It would be quite another subject,” said Jane. “‘Tame cockatoo
+devouring wild violinist’ I should think would be what the group would
+sell as.”
+
+“I’m sorry,” said Gillian, and didn’t look for fear of seeing Jane
+Bird’s small annotating smile at her capitulation.
+
+“I suppose you’re doing Heinrich as Pan,” said Jane.
+
+“I’m not,” said Larry Browne, “Heinrich with sparrows is clearly a
+Cytherean theme. Without his overall, as you’ll see presently, he loses
+touch with nature. But, morning by morning as he sweeps the dust about
+the floor and encourages those vulgar birds to be perfectly at ease
+indoors, I’ve wondered what it was he reminded me of. He’s my idea of
+Cupid.”
+
+“Goodness!” said Gillian.
+
+“Even so,” said Larry. “With a bunch of arrows stuck through the front
+of that pointed pinafore of his, serious with a sidelong eye—a
+conscious, predestinate demiurge—enslaved by his own destiny of
+enslavement.”
+
+“That’s an Orphic Eros, not a Cupid,” said Jane.
+
+“By Orcus out of Aphrodite,” chanted Larry.
+
+“Oh, well,” said Jane, “if you like to mix your parents to fit the
+faun.... Aren’t you going to be charming to Miss Armstrong? She’s come
+because your father knew her father.”
+
+Larry Browne was easily charming. He remembered Gerald Armstrong’s visit
+to his old tutor, soon after his marriage to little Ellen, when Larry
+himself was a child of six. “He told me about you,” he said to Gillian,
+“he said you’d only one tooth and no hair. I wanted dreadfully to see
+you. I didn’t realize you were just a normal baby such as I could see
+any day in perambulators on Boar’s Hill. He called you ‘my daughter’ and
+I thought you must be grown up, particularly as he said you had the most
+beautiful manners, in which alas! you differed from me, as my mother
+pointed out, rather tactlessly, I thought.”
+
+And Gillian asked more about that visit, and discovered that Larry had
+been in Munich only a month after they’d left it five years ago, and had
+had re-introductions to her father which he’d never used, either then or
+in Paris, where they might have met if he’d only known. It was clear
+that the whole of Europe was thick with welcome for Larry Browne, and
+that he never used half his introductions in any place he visited. He
+had, indeed, it appeared, come to Battersea because London was the only
+place where you can really hide, “and even here,” said Larry Browne,
+“I’m subject to the inquisitions of Aholah Bird.”
+
+He showed Gillian the head he had painted from her father’s photograph
+in the long procession he was designing for a frieze which was the
+subject set for a certain much-coveted prize that year.
+
+“He’s the Knight. I’m doing imaginary characters, Fairy-Tale ones. I
+wish you’d sit to me for an hour if you’ve time one morning?”
+
+“What as?” said Jane Bird sharply.
+
+“As a changeling, of course,” said Larry Browne. “I wonder you troubled
+to ask so answered a question.”
+
+“Of course,” said Jane, “it’s what I’ve always wondered, and now you’ve
+told me. Well, I wish you luck.”
+
+Heinrich came back, rather more human, in a very shiny blue serge suit,
+a wisp of frayed tie holding the soft collar of his grey flannel shirt
+together, and they all four went out into Battersea Park and gave the
+raven in the aviary in the maze everything that was left over from the
+studio breakfast that morning.
+
+
+                                   II
+
+The laburnum-tree in the courtyard was dropping its amber-and-lemon
+florets in the sunlight, and the sparse blossom of the lilac-bush
+against the wall by Mrs. Barraclough’s window sent up a breath of such
+fragrance as its soot-clogged pores could still render to the morning
+air, as Gillian washed her breakfast-dishes. She had been late the night
+before, having gone with Jane and Larry to hear Heinrich play the violin
+by himself at another studio, after the Queen’s Hall orchestra had
+dispersed for the night.
+
+Heinrich, looking more unlike a Cupid than anything Gillian had ever
+seen, had played melodies in a piercing sequence, choosing them from
+orchestrated or fully harmonized scores and giving them in the naked
+strangeness of a single string. The air from Borodine’s musician’s
+quartette; the subject of the last movement of Smetana’s _Aus meinem
+Leben_; a phrase from a Bach three-part invention; “Cherry Ripe”; the
+pizzicato passage from one scherzo movement of Mozart, and other tunes,
+half-recognized or quite unknown, sang again in Gillian’s memory as she
+stood at the sink by the open window and let the water from the tap rush
+over the old Spode plate, the leadless glaze milk-jug, the Nanking
+teapot with its sodden, shabby bamboo handle, and the wide-pink-bordered
+Rouen cup and saucer she always used for breakfast.
+
+How lovely running water was, even out of an indifferently polished
+brass tap! How unearthly some of Heinrich’s playing had been! Faint and
+thin and high like a gnat’s music. How late it was! Nearly eleven
+o’clock. The milk-cart had clattered out, before she was awake; the
+butcher-boy’s bicycle had crunched swiftly over the gravel in the
+courtyard while she dressed; the ten-o’clock postman had knocked at all
+the doors where he had letters to deliver while she was sitting over her
+breakfast. Gillian felt she was getting demoralized. No Lilac to
+consider at night when she came in. No work to get her out of bed before
+she had finished her sleep in the morning. It would be a good thing when
+the vacancy at the secretarial school fell in next week and she had more
+motive in her days again. How did that Borodine tune end?—up or down?
+She turned off the tap and whistled the melody through softly to
+herself. No, that wasn’t right. Odd that she could hear it in her head
+and not be able to reproduce it properly. Humming was worse than
+whistling. Her voice made the oddest noises. She hadn’t a pretty voice.
+Still it hadn’t made, it couldn’t have made that queer little sound.
+Gillian stopped her low, uncertain singing and leaned out into the
+sunlight to listen. Yes. The sound was coming up from below, a shrill,
+hoarse, tiny cry. Not unlike Heinrich saying “No” when they had tried to
+make him play again last night.
+
+She leaned out farther, her two hands clutching the window-sill. How
+lovely it was to feel the sun on her neck, down between her
+shoulder-blades as her holland overall stuck out and made a tunnel
+there. A lock of her hair broke loose and hung vertically, soft and
+long, below the level of the window so that the sun shone through it and
+made it golden and iridescent. She shook her head a little to make the
+light dance in her hair, and saw with such a glow of vanity as only the
+straight-haired can feel that the movement made it curl a little at the
+tip.
+
+And still the little cry came up, tired and pleading. It sounded like
+the mewing of a cat. But it was against the rules of the Club for any
+member to have a cat, and Mr. Gordon’s Crack, a stout and arrogant
+fox-terrier, made it his vocation to preserve the yard against strays.
+But it certainly sounded like a cat. Gillian leaned out a little
+farther, so far that one shoe slipped on its sole from the stone floor
+and swung out behind her leaving her poised on one foot and two hands.
+Yes. She could see it—wedged in under the foot-scraper by the door five
+storeys below her—a kitten. Crack had probably chased it under the iron
+bar and had tired of the game, and nobody had seen it to set it free.
+What a good thing Gillian had heard it! What a good thing, after all,
+that she had time on her hands, this lovely, dancing, shining day!
+
+Down the ten flights of stone steps, eight to a flight, two to a
+landing, she ran twisting up her flying hair as she went. The courtyard
+was still empty and the kitten had wriggled itself free of the
+door-scraper when she reached it; but it was mewing none the less.
+
+Gillian had seldom seen a less attractive cat. It was not so very young,
+not so disarmingly small, now that she was on the same level with it. It
+was almost not a kitten any longer, and it was tortoiseshell, a brand
+she didn’t admire, and Manx, a thing she had never been able to bear. It
+had the four white feet and the white chest and face peculiar to its
+kind, and it was very dirty. Its nose was pink and dirty and its
+pink-rimmed eyes were sore. Gillian sat on her heels to examine it more
+closely. It smelled of indescribable things as well as of stale fish.
+And it mewed—oh, how it mewed!
+
+“I wonder if you’re hungry?” said Gillian. “Perhaps this awful smell of
+a dead sardine was eaten by some stronger cat who fought you for it.”
+
+The cat stopped mewing and took a step nearer to Gillian; then it pushed
+its cold nose and weak whisker against her hand and slithered the whole
+of its brindled flank against her knee with the travelling pressure cats
+exert in order to produce for themselves the sensation of being stroked.
+
+“I’d rather you didn’t do that,” said Gillian, “you’re not clean enough,
+even if this overall is going to the wash.” But the cat had whisked
+round and was sleeking its other side along her knee, offering the pink,
+unprotected obscenity beneath its upright stump of a tail to Gillian’s
+inspection.
+
+“Oh! I don’t like you at all,” said Gillian. And she stood up.
+
+But the cat, having attracted attention, was minded to secure a friend.
+It began to wind round and round Gillian’s ankles, once more uttering
+its short, exhausted mew.
+
+“After all,” said Gillian, “you may be really hungry, and if you were a
+pretty and attractive cat you’d not be here or some one else would have
+taken charge of you long ago.”
+
+And, closing her eyes, she stooped and took the unhappy thing by the
+scruff of its neck and wrapped it in the front of her overall. It made
+no resistance, and as she carried it upstairs she could feel the faint
+thrill of a purr creeping through the holland folds in which it lay.
+
+The cat was hungry. It lapped up two saucers full of milk almost as
+quickly as Gillian could pour them out, and it ate, with quivers and
+sharp, sudden jerks of the head, a cold sausage she had meant to have
+had with a lettuce for her own lunch.
+
+When it had finished eating, not because it seemed satisfied but because
+there was no more to give it, Gillian bathed its eyes with some warm
+boracic lotion and saw, with loathing, that it was lapping the water
+from the bowl when she returned from putting the muslin rag she had used
+into the dustbin.
+
+“_Schamlos!_” said Gillian. “I apologize to Heinrich for having let your
+voice remind me of him. Now you must go home. I daren’t let William know
+you’ve called.”
+
+So she put on her hat, carried the kitten down to the street with her,
+set it down at a street-corner, and then walked up to South Kensington
+to look at some T’ang horses in the Museum about which Larry Browne had
+been talking the evening before.
+
+Later in the day she went to tea with Old Winona, who was having all the
+post-cards sent her by the honeymoon couple as they progressed round the
+world along the most frequented tracks, framed and incorporated in a
+screen of fretwork. She herself was inclined to have the whole screen
+gilded, but Gillian thought it would look better, or at any rate that
+the pictures themselves would show better if the fretting were all
+black. So they were having one fold of the screen blacked and another
+gilded in order to see which pleased the greater number more. Winnie
+Roehampton had been in that morning and had suggested that they should
+get a third fold done pea-green.
+
+“I think Lady Roehampton must have said that in fun,” said Gillian.
+
+“Well, my dear,” Old Winona conceded, “her manner _was_ a little
+playful. Shall we say no more about it?”
+
+“We can always say we liked the black one best,” said Gillian.
+
+“Or the gilded one,” said Old Winona, who did not intend to like the
+black one at all herself.
+
+It was dusk before Gillian reached the Club again. She had stayed to see
+whether there would be any cards from Colombo by the seven-o’clock post,
+escaping before dinner as she was expecting Jane in later in the
+evening. As she reached the door in the courtyard there came a soft
+rubbing around her ankles and once more the short, hungry mew of the
+stray tortoiseshell rose to her ears.
+
+“Goodness,” said Gillian, “have you come for the night?”
+
+It seemed that such was the animal’s intention. It followed her
+upstairs, or rather, to be accurate, it came upstairs with her feet,
+purring as it slithered around and almost under them at every step.
+
+“It would,” said Gillian, “be far less trouble to carry you. Less
+dangerous also. But that would be encouragement—and I don’t want to
+encourage you.”
+
+But the human attitude, so long as it is not brutally repulsive, makes
+no difference to a cat. This one, meek outcast though it seemed, had
+that soft persistence by means of which the meek obtain fulfilment of
+the promise that they shall inherit the earth. Up to the fifth floor it
+squirmed, escaping injury as only a cat can, every time Gillian stumbled
+over its soft and moving form.
+
+“I shall let William see you this time,” said Gillian.
+
+But William proved an unexpected failure so far as discouraging the
+pensioner went. After a preliminary greeting of “Bow-wow-Bow-wow-wow”
+(William always got his animals wrong and had insulted Crack and
+seriously alienated Mr. Gordon by shouting “Baa-lamb” after the
+fox-terrier at their first meeting) he took very kindly to the
+tortoiseshell. And when Gillian, feeling that there was no need to
+deprive William of his wonted freedom because this dingy stray had
+invited itself to supper, let William out of his cage before she sat
+down to the table, William not only refrained from shooing the cat away
+from the plate of scraps Gillian cut for it from the boiled beef and
+suet dumpling which had come up for her dinner from the kitchens, but
+waddled across the floor with crusts of bread for the visitor’s plate
+himself.
+
+“Pretty cocky,” said William surprisingly, as he deposited each fresh
+crust, “pretty cocky,” and finally, deserting his perch on the back of
+Gillian’s chair, he established himself on the top rung of the
+fender-rail and turned his boot-button eye downwards on the eating,
+furry thing, and fixed it with cold, unwinking goodwill.
+
+And then the tortoiseshell cat broke down the last barrier of Gillian’s
+resistance to its adoption of herself and home by sitting up on its
+horrid stump of a tail when she began to clear the table and, with the
+aid of its pale, dry, little tongue and a grimy forepaw, beginning, very
+feebly, to wash itself.
+
+“Goodness,” said Gillian for the second time that evening. “If I’m a
+reforming influence in your poor little life I suppose you’ll have to
+stay.”
+
+“Weak,” said Jane Bird when she came in and heard the story, “weak but
+characteristic. There is no reason in logic or morals why any creature
+should reform itself under your roof against your will. Besides, it’s a
+vagabond. It has a bleary eye. It doesn’t want to stay. It only wants to
+get you into trouble. I shall take it down to its native gutter when I
+go.” And she did.
+
+But the next morning, while Gillian was having her breakfast, the now
+familiar mew, slightly stronger and more insistent came up from the
+foot-scraper by the courtyard door.
+
+She had received a letter by the early post telling her that she might,
+if she liked, begin her training at once at the very exclusive
+establishment Lilac had selected as the proper place in which her sister
+was to be polished into fitness for a Cabinet Minister’s confidence, and
+she was in a hurry to avail herself of the sudden vacancy in Miss de
+Stormont’s exclusive ranks. So she dressed to go out and, taking a jug
+of milk and a saucer in one hand, she locked up the flat and went
+downstairs intending to nourish the kitten by stealth behind the little
+box hedge that had succeeded in growing half across the north side of
+the yard.
+
+But, by the time she reached the door-scraper, the kitten had stopped
+mewing, and had almost disappeared into the box hedge. The stub of its
+tail alone was visible, and that quivered as though the rest of its
+person were in the act of consuming food. Gillian put her jug and saucer
+down on the ground-floor scullery window-sill and stalked the beggar to
+its grove. There, on the stony soil from which the box hedge sprung,
+stood a shallow bowl, a china bowl with a spiked, green dragon coiled
+around it, a beautiful bowl that was still half full of Devonshire
+cream.
+
+Gillian had no time to waste. The cat had evidently found a richer
+benefactor than herself and, musing a little who it might be in this
+Club who had cream for a cat and could set it before the creature in a
+piece which looked like part of the loot from Pekin, she hurried off to
+her first class in Buckingham Gate.
+
+The new surroundings, the unfamiliar routine drove this small but
+pictorial mystery from her mind for the rest of the day. But at four
+o’clock (Miss de Stormont gave short hours, half-past ten till one, and
+an hour and a half after luncheon to prepare for the next day) it came
+back to her with a thrill of romantic excitement as she turned in under
+the archway from the street and saw that the cat was lapping from the
+same bowl once more, but that this time the green dragon coiled over the
+faintly dimpled glaze, in the open, from the flagstone by the
+door-scraper.
+
+
+                                  III
+
+All her life long Gillian had been a spectator. The joys of her life had
+been the joys of the eye and the mind. Her sorrows had been few. The
+loss of her father, although she was unaware of it, had been mitigated
+for her, as it could not have been in a more physically passionate
+creature, by the consolations of that kingdom of the spirit wherein his
+companionship had taught her to travel. Her mind, in a very literal
+sense, was its own place. Since her father’s death she had possessed it
+alone. Trained by him to make æsthetic discriminations and to take her
+own pleasure in any manifestation of life or art, not only as the only
+valid test of its worth, but as the highest form of happiness attainable
+in human experience, she had, without any conscious intention, failed to
+develop the faculty for establishing personal relationships, for taking
+root in any place or affection, which her essentially friendly and
+enthusiastic nature should have encouraged. Lilac, who was both more
+captious and less affectionate than her sister, had many friends,
+useful, ornamental or merely pleasant, with whom she quarrelled or
+amused herself, and had whirled her way through several love-affairs
+before she met Toby Bottomley and decided that in him she had found the
+husband she required. But Gillian depended for her friendships either on
+circumstance, or on the determination of those who were willing to
+pursue. Love-affairs she had none. There had been two strange episodes,
+both of them of almost the same kind, in which infatuated strangers had
+applied to her parents for permission to address her, and, on the second
+occasion, Gillian, who was by then nearly twenty-two, had had some
+trouble in assuring her widowed and excusably flustered mother that she
+didn’t even know the young man by sight.
+
+“Do you mean to tell me, Gillian,” her mother had said when discussing
+the matter, “do you seriously mean to tell me that this is another case
+of that student at Lausanne all over again?”
+
+And Gillian had assured her mother that, so far as her conscious
+knowledge of the affair was concerned, this was indeed a repetition of
+that old vexation. And it had seemed to her that she was once again an
+onlooker at a play, the central character of which was a man who had
+fallen in love with a girl to whom he had never spoken a word.
+
+But that afternoon, through the clear May sunshine that was beginning to
+turn golden with the westering beams, there came to Gillian, as to a
+long-prepared appointment, a creature who filled the eye to overflowing
+with that completed harmony between experience and imagination which,
+when it comes to any empty heart, is the most unmistakable of all
+vanquishing powers.
+
+She was sitting on her heels, having taken off her hat as soon as she
+was inside the gateway (Gillian never wore a hat a minute longer than
+she needed, and not always so long as she should), and was watching the
+cat and admiring the bowl, when the door of the opposite building opened
+and a tall, dark woman came out and stood at the top of the steps.
+
+Even before she came down to the courtyard and claimed it, Gillian knew
+that this was the owner of the china bowl, the Providence that dispensed
+clotted cream to dirty little strays. But as she came with a swift,
+steady stride, the free rapid movement of a woman who had been much with
+horses, who had ridden from childhood, Gillian also knew, with a thrill
+of recognition so strange, so new to her experience that the shock of it
+took away all sense of any other consideration, that she beheld in the
+flesh the very image of a perfection wrought by her own imaginings in
+the secret places of her dreaming mind. This was not a beautiful
+creature for all the world to see and gape at, it was the figure—unique
+of its kind—for which the shrine of her spirit had stood empty and
+waiting till now.
+
+Dark hair, “curled like breakers of the sea” away from a low brow under
+which clear, tawny eyes shone beneath fine, exquisitely arched eyebrows;
+a wide mouth parted like a ripe pomegranate in a smile that showed
+white, even teeth, each separated from its fellow; an impression of
+clear red and white in the complexion, and, above all, that swift,
+scythe-like movement from hip to knee as the figure approached her where
+she crouched on the doorstep beside the lapping, oblivious cat, these
+were the first things Gillian was aware of as she gazed stupidly upwards
+into the vivid face.
+
+“Is this your little cat?”
+
+The voice was a disappointment: flat, metallic, not coming from any
+depth, curiously old and lifeless for so vital-seeming a possessor.
+
+“Oh, no!” said Gillian, “we aren’t allowed to keep cats in the Club;
+didn’t you know?”
+
+“Yes, I knew,” said the stranger, “but I thought you might be keeping
+one.”
+
+“You must have thought I was behaving very badly to it,” Gillian
+retorted, “if you’ve been feeding it too.”
+
+“Oh, well, I saw it was hungry. It’s been about for some days. I can see
+it from my window.” She made no attempt to excuse herself for the
+implied charge of neglect. Gillian thought she couldn’t have noticed it.
+
+“I _heard_ it,” said Gillian. “I couldn’t see it at first. It seems to
+prefer this side of the yard.”
+
+“Yes,” said the stranger. “So you live in the Club?”
+
+“I do,” said Gillian, “my name is Gillian Armstrong.”
+
+“Do you spell it with a J?”
+
+“No,” said Gillian, “it’s a soft G, like gilly-flower. I can see you
+live in the Club,” she went on, “because you’ve come out without a hat,
+but I’ve never seen you before. Are you a new member?”
+
+“Yes, rather new. I came in last year. I know you quite well by sight. I
+see you from my window.”
+
+“That’s because I don’t have curtains across mine,” said Gillian. “Up on
+the top floor it doesn’t really seem necessary. And Mrs. Gordon told me,
+when I asked if people could see in from below, that she’d never seen
+nothing wrong in my rooms.”
+
+The other laughed, a short dry “honk” that added no more mirth to her
+steadily smiling eyes.
+
+“Mrs. Gordon is a scream,” she said, “so is Mr. Gordon. Do you like his
+dog?”
+
+“No,” said Gillian. “I can’t bear Crack, and I don’t think you’d better
+leave this lovely bowl down here. Crack will break it, you know.”
+
+The cat had licked the last smear of cream from the sides of the bowl,
+and was now rubbing itself round the stranger’s ankles. Gillian with the
+bowl in her hands, stood up.
+
+“Shall I wash it for you?” she said; “I’ll do it with my tea-things and
+send it over by the maid who brings my dinner.”
+
+“Oh, don’t let Mabel bring it,” said the stranger, betraying what seemed
+to Gillian an extraordinary familiarity with the arrangements of the
+Club under which the four little housemaids revolved from floor to floor
+with each returning moon, so that you had the same maid for a month at a
+time and then passed into the hands of one of the other three. Gillian
+herself was quite incapable of finding out or of remembering which maid
+was waiting on any other floor but her own, though she had gathered from
+the verbosities of Mrs. Gordon that some floors were more popular with
+the servants than others, either because of the kindness of their
+occupiers or because of the more sensational furniture and adventures
+which occasionally distinguished one member from another in the gossip
+of the Club.
+
+“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Mabel is the rough one, she might drop
+it. How did you know it was Mabel’s turn on our landing?”
+
+“Mabel did my floor last month,” said the stranger, “and she told me she
+was going to yours in time for the wedding.”
+
+Gillian knew that a wave of resentment flowed through some dim backwater
+of her mind at this intrusion, but it was drowned in the flood of
+expectation with which she accepted a suggestion that, if she really
+insisted on washing out the Chinese bowl, its owner would be delighted
+to see her with it in her own flat.
+
+“My name is Victoria Vanderleyden,” she said, “and I live at Number 36.
+Do come up to coffee.”
+
+Gillian had never been bidden to go anywhere “to coffee” before, but she
+took the formula to indicate that she would be expected immediately
+after dinner, and she accepted the invitation saying she would come as
+soon as she had turned the cat out for the night. For the cat was
+already inside the door, looking back over its shoulder, a little
+impatiently at Gillian, and plainly intending to dine with her that
+night also.
+
+
+                                   IV
+
+The door of Number 36 stood open and lamplight poured out from the room
+over the dark landing where Gordon had not yet lit the gas-jet, when
+Gillian, carrying the china bowl and a bunch of purple centaureas from a
+basket of flowers which Sophie had left at the flat on her way from
+Glynde that afternoon, reached the third floor of the house across the
+courtyard, soon after eight o’clock.
+
+It was, Gillian saw, one of the large, two-windowed rooms. The windows
+looked westward, across the tops of the trees in the gardens of Cheyne
+Row, and through them, lower than the lamplight, there still came the
+glow of a late, red sunset. Accustomed as she was to the roofs and
+chimneys of the street, or to the windows of the house across the
+courtyard as the familiar views from the Club windows, Gillian felt, as
+she entered this lit and quiet room, as though she were going into some
+far country.
+
+Her own rooms and those of the Countess and of the Middletons, the only
+flats beside her own and Mrs. Barraclough’s into which she had so far
+entered, were all colour-washed a uniform cream, with white paint on the
+doors and window-frames and skirting-boards; and this colour scheme was,
+so Mrs. Barraclough had told the Armstrongs when they took their flat,
+the rule of the Club.
+
+But Miss Vanderleyden had evidently been allowed to break that rule, for
+her walls were tinted lavender, and all the woodwork that surrounded
+them was black. Long curtains, a shade darker than the walls, and
+touched by the sunset into a rosy mauve, hung at the windows, and two
+red, wooden candlesticks on the black chimney-shelf matched two painted
+Norwegian chairs which stood on either side of a low black table. A wide
+divan against the wall at one end of the room was covered with black
+satin and heaped with red and green cushions, and the bare boards of the
+floor were black and shining. There were no pictures on the walls, but a
+mirror in a red frame hung from ceiling to floor between the windows,
+and over the fireplace there spread a fan-shaped case in which hundreds
+of South Sea Island shells were ranged together in a geometrical
+pattern. Gillian looked for books, but there were none to be seen.
+“Perhaps she keeps them behind those strange curtains,” she thought,
+noting that three of the far corners of the long room were curtained off
+with what was obviously stuff from Burnets in Garrick Street, a shop
+into which Lilac, who preferred her cretonnes flowered, had definitely
+forbidden Gillian to go when they were furnishing Number Seven.
+
+A strong smell of freshly made coffee filled the whole landing; but of
+Miss Vanderleyden herself there was no trace. Gillian crossed the room
+and went over to the open window. Between two blocks of houses she saw
+the river move, still burnished in the fading light, and voices rose
+faintly from the small gardens under the trees below, where the dwellers
+in Cheyne Row were sitting out in the cool of the day. In one of the
+gardens a row of Chinese lanterns had been festooned between the
+branches, and some one was lighting them as if in preparation for a
+festivity. One green, one orange and one variegated globe were already
+swinging in the dusk and Gillian was waiting with absorbed, delightful
+speculation as to the probable colour of the fourth lantern, when a
+sound close beside her made her turn. Miss Vanderleyden was standing by
+the table on which she had placed a Benares tray with coffee-cups. She
+was gazing with lighted eyes, not at Gillian, but at her own reflection
+in the long, scarlet-rimmed mirror between the windows.
+
+“Come and look,” she said, without taking her eyes away from the glass
+before her.
+
+Gillian obeyed. Miss Vanderleyden had taken the red candlesticks from
+over the fireplace and had lighted the tall, white candles they held and
+had placed them on the table so that their wavering flames lit up her
+face as she leaned between them. The door, still open behind her, showed
+the dark abyss of the unlit landing beyond, which repeated itself in
+profound obscurity in the depths of the looking-glass. Out of the heart
+of the darkness the vivid face floated midway on the surface of the
+mirror—wide, white brow, wide, luminous eyes, wide, smiling mouth. Miss
+Vanderleyden had not changed the soft, dark, brown dress she had been
+wearing when they first met, and Gillian saw that the large,
+old-fashioned topaz brooch still fastening the lace at her throat was
+matched by a pair of heavy gold bracelets which she wore on either arm.
+The stones in these antique, fetter-like jewels threw out reflections
+into the mirror and seemed to illuminate the hands which, raised on
+their finger-tips from the dark surface of the table, as though each had
+a separate existence in the shadowy picture, completed without belonging
+to, the whole reflection.
+
+“Look at yourself,” laughed the mouth in the mirror, and the mirrored
+eyes met Gillian’s as she gazed.
+
+And Gillian saw herself, a moth-pale phantom behind the radiant head.
+Her white frock glimmered grey in the background, the candle-light
+glinted in her hair so faintly that its blondness looked silver above
+the molten glow of Miss Vanderleyden’s topaz and gold. Only her
+rose-flushed cheeks, and the starry glitter of the eyes she hardly knew
+for hers, prevailed with the ardent image that challenged her, and
+proved her able to meet the challenge.
+
+It was the first time in her experience of life that any direct personal
+appeal had aroused in her this profoundly personal, this intense and
+definitely physical reply. Miss Vanderleyden’s look had, Gillian could
+see it in her own reflection, changed the colour of her face, the
+expression of her own eyes and lips. For a moment they stood side by
+side looking at themselves and at one another in the dark pool of the
+mirror, and then Miss Vanderleyden spoke.
+
+“Aren’t we a nice contrast?” she said in the same flat, shallow voice as
+had startled Gillian that afternoon with its audible contradiction of
+all that her eyes could see.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+They drank their coffee, which was very good, sitting together on the
+black divan which was neither so soft nor so comfortable as it looked,
+being as Miss Vanderleyden explained with some pride, constructed out of
+her trunks and a spare mattress, and far too hard to be used as a bed
+except by actresses of whom, it appeared, Miss Vanderleyden knew all
+kinds.
+
+“And most of them will sleep on anything, poor dears, when they are
+resting,” she stated, without explaining why an actress should be able
+to rest in such discomfort.
+
+Statements of this nature, based on some occult information which,
+whether she could not or would not, she certainly did not impart, formed
+a staple of Miss Vanderleyden’s conversation and helped to send Gillian
+home across the courtyard to her own flat at midnight in a state of
+mingled exaltation and bewilderment. But some account of herself the
+wonderful creature had given, though few of the details were
+consecutive.
+
+Her name, as she had already said, was Victoria Vanderleyden, but she
+was usually called “Victor” by her friends, and she invited Gillian to
+use this sobriquet from the beginning because she could see that they
+were going to be real pals. Gillian had been able without rejecting the
+advance or accepting the actual title of “real pal” to select from a
+choice of other names, to all of which the lady had answered in her day,
+the alternatives “V.V.” and “Viva,” and had made it clear that the “G”
+in her own name was a soft one. “V.V.,” it seemed, had the blood of an
+authentic missionary in her veins, and so her title to benefit by the
+Club was clearer than the Armstrongs’ had been. Her father’s brother—“a
+real Dutchman” (Gillian could not make out to what extent the brothers
+differed in their respective Dutchness) had been a missionary in Borneo,
+and it was from him that she had inherited the trophy of shells. But
+some of her life had certainly been spent in Ostend, and she appeared to
+have a root or two as far north as Blackpool. A person called “Daisy”
+flickered in and out of the dialogue and, just before they parted,
+Gillian gathered that this was no lady but Miss Vanderleyden’s brother,
+who appeared to be a gentleman of independent means.
+
+These details were, in review, unsatisfactory and, added to the fact,
+which Gillian remembered Mrs. Barraclough deploring that Miss
+Vanderleyden was employed in a beauty-parlour, gave her a sense of
+having taken a step into an unknown and even a perilous region. But
+Gillian was not in the least afraid of the unknown and, as she looked
+for a third time that evening at her own reflection, this last time in
+her own toilet-mirror in her own bedroom, she knew that she must go on
+with the adventure.
+
+For her mirror showed her what V.V.’s mirror had shown her, the second
+time she had seen herself there—a new, and an undeniably changed and
+prettier Gillian. And she wanted to see this girl again.
+
+“You don’t know how to do your hair,” V.V. had said after half an hour’s
+talk with her new pal. “I can make it look twice as much. Do you mind?”
+
+And Gillian, who had been told till she was tired that she did her hair
+infamously, had submitted without the least reluctance while V.V.’s
+long, swift, cunning hands drew out the pins from the “bun” at the back
+of her head and untwisted the tight coils into which Gillian drove a
+dozen hairpins like carpenters’ nails twice or three times a day, in the
+despairing hope that they would hold her troublesome locks in place.
+
+V.V. had produced a set of long-bristled brushes, bleached with constant
+washing and innocent of any trace of the varnish with which their
+wooden backs had been originally finished, and several large
+professional-looking combs. And then, with a long, steady stroke and a
+light lifting of each separate strand, she had worked her way from brow
+to nape of the head beneath the showering hair that fell as straight as
+rain over the elbows of the girl who sat with folded hands in the
+straight-backed red Norwegian chair beneath the hanging-lamp in that
+quiet room. V.V. brushed and brushed, crooning with pleasure as the fine
+hair rose and crackled through the bristles before they let each shining
+lock slide back into its place again.
+
+“Lovely, lovely, hair,” she babbled, and Gillian hardly heard the
+foolish voice as the cool hands moved through her hair soothing and
+lulling, and flattering her senses till she almost slept.
+
+“Now,” said V.V. “Sit up, I’m going to plait it over your ears.”
+
+“Why, I look like a German schoolgirl,” said Gillian when the plaiting
+was over and the two long ropes had been coiled one each side of the
+parting which divided her head into two smooth shining segments, “and
+the pins hurt my ears dreadfully.”
+
+“You look like a fairy-tale princess,” said V.V. “I wish Dicky could see
+you. She’d simply love to draw you.”
+
+It certainly was an improvement, but, now that she was back in her own
+room again, Gillian felt quite sure that Lilac would never allow her to
+wear her hair like that: and she unpinned the plaits knowing that she
+would twist her hair as usual and drive the long black hairpins into it
+in the morning, and cram her hat down on the solid lump in the same old
+way as ever, before setting out to her humdrum day in the correct
+establishment of Miss de Stormont in the Buckingham Palace Road.
+
+During the next three or four days the intimacy between Gillian and V.V.
+grew like a gourd until, by Saturday morning, they were free of one
+another’s rooms and crockery; community of tea-things being one of the
+consequences of intimacy at the Mordaunt Club.
+
+On Saturday morning a bomb fell.
+
+   “DEAR MISS ARMSTRONG,” wrote Mrs. Barraclough on the die-stamped
+   correspondence-card she always used when reprehending members by
+   letter:
+
+   “I am writing to Miss Vanderleyden as well as to yourself in
+   order to request most emphatically that you will not continue to
+   encourage stray cats about in the courtyard. I understand that
+   you and she are in the habit of feeding a most objectionable and
+   probably diseased animal there night and morning, and must forbid
+   you to continue the practice.
+
+                                                  Yours faithfully,
+                                              THEODORA BARRACLOUGH,
+                                                        Secretary.”
+
+“And,” said Mrs. Gordon, who delivered the letter with her weekly bill
+and made no secret of having lifted the damp and yielding flap of the
+envelope in order to read the note on her way up, “Mr. Gordon’s going to
+set Crack on the little beast if it begins its mewing again to-night, I
+can tell you.”
+
+Gillian, as Mrs. Gordon very well knew, had got the little beast shut up
+in the inner room where William was helping it to the coarser seeds of
+Parrot Food in the intervals of eating the hemp out of the mixture
+himself. She made no reply to this sally but paid her bill and said that
+she would herself carry down the answer to Mrs. Barraclough’s letter and
+post it in Mrs. Barraclough’s letter-box when she went out later in the
+morning.
+
+“Miss Vanderleyden ain’t got hers yet,” said Mrs. Gordon vindictively,
+moving on. “A telegram come for her from Eppin’ ware she keeps that
+great dog of ’ers, this morning, and she’s gone off in a great state.
+Borrerd Mr. Gordon’s A.B.C., the one you threw away in Febewry, miss, to
+look out a train she did, and I hope she catches it.”
+
+“If she looked it up in a February time-table I’m afraid she’s missed it
+then,” said Gillian. “It’s June now, you know, Mrs. Gordon.”
+
+But Mrs. Gordon was panting heavily across the landing and made as if
+she had not heard Miss Armstrong’s fear.
+
+All day long Gillian pattered crossly about the flat, feeding the most
+objectionable and probably diseased little creature which followed her
+in and out of the two living-rooms and twice got out on the landing and
+mewed there “as if,” said Gillian to it, as she drove it in again, “as
+if it were not enough to have tempted me into a misdemeanour, and you
+must now advertise that I’m engaged in crime on your account.”
+
+Something must be done with the animal, and she certainly was not going
+to let Crack do it. Once the desperate thought of taking it up to
+Highgate and throwing it on Aunt Elizabeth’s mercies came to her. But
+Aunt Elizabeth’s mercies were not tender towards cats, and, though
+Atkinson might have sheltered it richly in the basement at 99, he was
+just then having a holiday and Gillian had no faith in the humanity of
+the first footman who was taking his place and who was not on friendly
+terms with the cook.
+
+William, too, seemed to be siding with Authority. “Good-bye,” he had
+observed rather severely to the cat several times since lunch, and when
+Gillian began to get tea and put down a sardine beside the saucer of
+milk for her guest, William raised his yellow crest and sang, “God save
+our Gray——” with unmistakable emphasis.
+
+“All right, William,” said Gillian, losing her temper, “you needn’t
+shout like that. I’m going to take it to the chemist next door to the
+_Blue Cockatoo_ and get it prussic-acided. So there.”
+
+She caught the little cat and put it into an old Gladstone bag of her
+father’s and set off with misery and dislike in her heart to spend a
+shilling on murder.
+
+Half-way to the chemist’s she met Heinrich.
+
+He was coming away from the studio and was tightly buttoned into the
+short jacket of his blue suit so that he looked smaller than ever. He
+wore no hat, and one diaphanous black curl stood up, like a smoke-wreath
+in still air, from the very middle of his forehead making his long nose
+seem longer than before. His eyes were unusually blue and fierce.
+
+“I go to buy a cage,” he announced with dramatic abruptness, stopping
+Gillian who had not intended to speak to anyone till her deed were
+accomplished, “a cage in which to shelter the beautiful canary Larrie
+gives to me. Zoze sparrows, zey pluck at ’im. Zey are proletariat birds.
+Zere is somesing alive in your bag,” he ended, suddenly diverted from
+his own mission by unmistakable signs of struggle in the interior of
+Gillian’s burden.
+
+Gillian explained her dilemma and the cat in the bag grew violent.
+
+“Oh,” said Heinrich, “ze poor animal will perish of himself in that
+confinement and zere will be no need to call on ze chemist. You shall
+just srow him in ze river.”
+
+“Goodness,” said Gillian, “how horrid. I must let him out.”
+
+“Come on ze Embankment to a seat,” said Heinrich. “I go wiz you. I will
+look at zis cat. My canary is all right for now. I have shut out all
+zoze sparrows till I shall give him a cage.”
+
+“What’s happened to the cage he came in?” asked Gillian as they hurried
+to a seat. “Larry can’t have brought a canary home in a piece of paper.”
+
+“Oh, it is somevere,” said Heinrich vaguely. “I sink we have lost it. It
+was a small, old cage. Perhaps Larrie sit on it.”
+
+They reached the seat just in time. The little cat had given up the
+struggle to escape and was gasping for dear life at the bottom of the
+bag when they opened it.
+
+Heinrich lifted the mottled, furry body out and laid it across his
+knees. The creature had improved a great deal during its friendship with
+Gillian, but it was still an unprepossessing cat. Heinrich stroked it
+with his dark, thin hands and lifted one corner of its drooping mouth.
+
+“It lives. It jumps,” he announced. And presently, with a twitch or two,
+the tortoiseshell cat was itself again.
+
+“It is a bad little cat,” said Heinrich, looking at it with mild
+criticism as it sat morosely on his knee, and lifted one paw after
+another with a tearing noise out of the serge of the trouser-leg, into
+which it had struck its claws to ensure its grip of the position. “Quite
+a bad little cat. It shall come to live in ze studio wiz Larrie and wiz
+me.”
+
+“But, Heinrich, won’t it eat your canary, and frighten your sparrows?”
+
+“No,” said Heinrich, “I say it is a bad little cat. If it would eat
+canaries and sparrows it would be a good little cat. I will take it in
+my hand.”
+
+And he went back, across the river, towards the studio carrying the bad
+little cat in his arms.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER FOUR.
+                              LARRY BROWNE
+
+
+                                   I
+
+Heinrich, barefooted as was his custom, and wearing the light-blue slops
+in which he always performed his self-appointed task, was trundling a
+mop across the studio floor the next morning when Gillian went down to
+see how the little cat had prospered among the birds. It was half-past
+ten and Sunday. The church-bells on the Battersea side and those fainter
+peals which came from over the water had stimulated the canary, which
+hung in an extremely fine cage in front of the long window by the hedge,
+to such tremendous matins of its own that Heinrich did not hear her
+knock at the open door. Gillian, on the threshold, waited while Heinrich
+swept on. He brought an entire seriousness and a complete lack of method
+to his work, and was, when Gillian arrived, absorbed in chasing a
+dandelion-seed which had blown in from the waste places of the Park,
+across the width of the studio floor, stalking the mist-like intruder
+with elaborate patience. He approached it with creeping stealth, hardly
+breathing as he lifted the oiled mop-head at the end of its long pole
+before the blow that would bring his prey to rest, only to see the spiky
+phantom dance away in the wind he had raised. The sparrows were
+everywhere. He drove them off from the immediate field, isolating the
+drifting seed. The sparrows appeared to have abandoned their vendetta
+against the canary now that it was caged, and to be pursuing their
+lawful occasions again with the usual noise and fluster. Some of them
+were perched round the rim of Larry’s zinc sponge-bath which had been
+pulled out from the bedroom at the back of the studio and filled with
+clean water for them to bathe in, and one, as Gillian came to the door,
+had flown up from the water and was shaking the drops out of its wings,
+perched on the crown of Heinrich’s black, devoted head.
+
+Heinrich’s estimate of the little cat’s character was being abundantly
+justified; for the creature was seated on the model’s throne, mildly
+washing its face with its paw, while, three feet away, a couple of
+sparrows were picking at the bird-seed which the canary scattered from
+the seed-box in the cage above them.
+
+“Puss, puss,” called Gillian from the doorway. The little cat took no
+notice. Either it did not hear her or it had already forgotten her in
+the new security of its home. But Heinrich heard and came towards her,
+dragging the mop behind him, his face a little anxious with the
+eagerness of his welcome.
+
+“I beg that you will enter,” said Heinrich. “Have you been long at ze
+door? I hear nozzing for ze cantata of my canary. It shall cease.” He
+laid the long-handled mop down on the floor in the place where he stood,
+stumbled slightly over it, regaining his half-lost balance with the
+lightest ease, and bustled, if so lithe and gentle a movement could be
+called bustling, after the sparrows, clearing them from the room in
+handfuls and putting them out at the casement which he closed upon them.
+
+“It’s like putting toys away in a cupboard,” said Gillian, who never
+tired of watching the clearing process Heinrich always accomplished
+before attending to a visitor.
+
+“Zeze sparrows are my toys,” said Heinrich. “My canary is my friend.”
+
+“And what is the cat going to be?”
+
+Heinrich met this conversational inanity with a seriousness it had not
+been framed to elicit.
+
+“Tell me,” he questioned, his blue eyes very lustrous and dewy under
+their long lashes, “have you complete responsibility for ze life of zis
+little cat?”
+
+“Goodness!” Gillian was alarmed. “I don’t even know if it belongs to
+anybody. It adopted me, and I’ve been feeding it with a friend. Here are
+its sardines. It has only had three out of the box.”
+
+Heinrich took the oily tin, over which Gillian had tried unsuccessfully
+to re-roll the lid that curled back from its contents on its key opener,
+and counted the sardines with his thin forefinger.
+
+“Ten fishes,” he announced. “Are zeze not your own food for to-day?”
+
+“Mine! No! I hate sardines, especially in oil. So does William. They
+belong to the cat, really.”
+
+Heinrich picked a sardine out of the tin with his fingers and carried it
+by the tail across to the throne where the cat still continued its
+perfunctory cleansing.
+
+“See, Minchoulina!” he chanted, “a fish!”
+
+But the cat had evidently gorged its fill on some earlier meal and,
+collapsing into one of those acrobatic postures with which the meanest
+cat can put the proudest human to scorn, went on licking its way over
+its person with an increase of zeal.
+
+“When you know me better,” said Heinrich gently, “you shall dance and
+sing when I come.” And he carried the sardine back to its tin which he
+had laid on the floor beside the mop.
+
+“And zis friend,” persisted Heinrich, putting the sardine carefully into
+its oil again, “is it her cat?”
+
+“No. I don’t think so. No, I’m sure it isn’t. She has a dog. She’s gone
+away to see it. You can have the cat for your very own if you like, and
+if Larry doesn’t mind. Where is Larry?”
+
+“Charing Cross.”
+
+“Gone to meet a friend?”
+
+“No, gone to go a walk.”
+
+“What a funny place to walk to!”
+
+“Oh, he will not walk zere. Afterwards he will walk all day. But at
+Charing Cross he get a train.”
+
+“Don’t you ever go with Larry for his walks?”
+
+“Me? Sometimes. Yes. But I do not like so many hills and so much rain.
+And to-day I must play in my orchestra in the afternoon.”
+
+“Heinrich,” said Gillian, sitting down on the window-seat and taking off
+her hat, “I’m going to stay and help you put the studio really tidy.
+Tell me how did you and Larry ever come to share it?”
+
+Heinrich brought the mop and the sardine-tin over to the window-seat and
+sat down with them, cross-legged on the floor in front of Gillian.
+
+“Zis studio is mine,” said Heinrich; “it is left me by my uncle, and I
+let it to Larrie, and he take me wiz it. Quite simple. There is room for
+two people. In two years I am rich by my uncle’s money which is still
+now in his will, until I shall be older, zen I _give_ zis studio to
+Larrie.”
+
+“And where will you live then?”
+
+“Everywhere,” said Heinrich gravely but with decision.
+
+Gillian thought the programme admirable and they discussed it in much of
+its possible detail as they worked together at putting the studio really
+tidy. Gillian was glad of so good an excuse for not going back to the
+Club. She had been piqued at V. V.’s sudden departure yesterday and had
+an unreasoning desire that V. V. should in her turn wonder what had
+become of her.
+
+At twelve o’clock, while Heinrich retired to his room behind the gallery
+to assume his “coats,” and Gillian was washing her hands in the little
+lavatory which opened out of Larry’s room on the ground floor,
+preparatory to making a salad for luncheon, Larry himself walked in. He
+was wearing light, rough tweeds, carried a metal-pointed cherry-wood
+stick and was rather cross.
+
+“I’ve missed the only train in the day,” he said, “and I’m not in the
+mood to go anywhere but to Coldharbour. The rhododendrons will be out in
+the wood on the Ockley side and there’ll be bluebells left beyond
+Tanhurst and I sent Mrs. Print a post-card to say I would have lard-buns
+for tea.”
+
+“Can nothing be done about it?” said Gillian.
+
+“Yes. We can take a ’bus—a motor-omnibus from the Latchmere at one
+o’clock, and you are coming with me. It won’t take us to Coldharbour,
+but it will take us to the larch-wood and the buns, and I’ve got
+sandwiches enough for two here already and we’ll commandeer Heinrich’s
+lettuce. That’ll larn him to be a rabbit.”
+
+“Heinrich can have the cat’s sardines,” said Gillian, feeling, as she
+dried the lettuce and put on her hat, that larch-woods near Coldharbour
+were more than an offset to a dog at Epping.
+
+
+                                   II
+
+The larch-wood grew on one side of the hollow bridle-path that led
+across the hill from Broadmoor to Pitland Street. The rest of the way
+was through pine and birch with some oak scrub and a holly-bush or so at
+the intersection of the main bridle-path with the smaller tracks which
+ran straight down the slope.
+
+They came out through a beech-tunnel that switch-backed narrowly between
+palings and, at a turn in the path, saw the aisles of green larch-boles
+shot with violet rising out of the bracken, greener at that time of year
+than the feathery green of the curved, fine arabesques of the branches
+above it.
+
+It was nearly four o’clock when Gillian and Larry reached the
+larch-wood, and the sun, held up by the long shadow of Holmbury Hill,
+behind which in another two hours’ time it would be setting, was sending
+slanting rays between the trunks of the trees.
+
+The bluebells Larry had promised were there, though not in great masses:
+but their coming disturbed a jay which fled away from them through the
+purple tree-trunks, flying low so that the light flashed on his blue
+head and picked out the black-and-white feathers in his wide, strong
+wings. The brambles were all in bloom under the green fronds of bracken
+and their pinky-white flowers repeated the tender rose of the horizon
+seen beyond the green veil of the larch-spindles.
+
+“It’s softer than the mountain larch-woods with snow behind them,” said
+Gillian.
+
+“Colouring’s sentimental,” said Larry, “but the drawing’s good. I’m
+going to use it for the background of my fresco design. It’ll repeat
+well, and I can change to sky instead of the hill behind it for the
+figures. Panoramic pathetic fallacy. Dawn for the Changeling. You’re
+very like a Dawn anyhow, Gillian; and twilight for the piping Eros.
+Can’t put a violin into symbolism—and the lewte’s an instrument I never
+could a-bear. It’s a filthy job altogether—I wish I’d never started on
+it. I could draw Heinrich for ever, but this making a photograph-gallery
+of one’s friends....”
+
+“Then why do it?”
+
+“Oh! I dunno. Hand to the plough and all that. Besides, it _is_ a good
+idea. Why can’t you be the Eternal Feminine you look, Gillian, and cheer
+the artist in his despondent hours?”
+
+“I thought you meant it. Besides, I can quite see that there are times
+when you would get tired of an idea like that. Are you putting all your
+friends in?”
+
+“No. Nor half mine enemies either. What could you do with Bird in a
+fresco, for instance?”
+
+“If you were Augustus John——” said Gillian.
+
+“I shouldn’t be going in for a London County Council prize competition,
+my poor dear Dawn. Try to rise to daylight, or is it your tea you need?”
+
+“No, not yet. Let’s stay here. I like this mauve and green and rosy
+wood. Why didn’t we bring Heinrich?”
+
+“You think that because Heinrich can pick up sparrows in his hands as
+though they were tennis-balls, that he’d be at home in a wood among
+squirrels and nuts. But you are quite wrong. Heinrich is brother to the
+sparrow who is a city bird. He’s good with Cockneys. But he’s an indoor
+pet—that’s why the canary is not wasted on him, or that dreadful little
+cat you’ve planted on us. But put him in the open and he’s lost. Think
+of Heinrich in tweeds! It can’t be done. Heinrich suggests the spirit of
+the wild to people who’ve only read about it in the Classics. He’s Art.
+He’s the eternal Will to be Other. But there’s nothing of the English
+public-school boy, the country gentleman about him. And that’s the man
+who really enjoys your muddy lanes and your streaking red sunsets and
+says ‘pretty dear’ to the rabbits he’s going to shoot.”
+
+“I’m sorry,” said Gillian, “but you introduced me to Heinrich as a
+faun.”
+
+“And did you ever see a faun in Surrey? Or in Devonshire? Or in Wales?
+I’ve heard of fairies in Wales. Little grey men with long beards who
+don’t mean to let you see them—and there’s a lot of dialect ballad metre
+about pixies on Dartymoor; but the faun—the faun, my child, is the
+invention of the sophisticated artist.”
+
+“Heinrich’s not sophisticated.”
+
+“Heinrich in his way is a genius. But the home of his soul is Leicester
+Square. I found him, covered with sparrows, on a bench in front of that
+soaring tribute to Shakespeare which so fittingly presides over the
+Empire, the Alhambra and Daly’s.”
+
+“He’d be all right at Taormina,” said Gillian.
+
+“And when his uncle’s money comes out of his will”—Larry grew emphatic
+and a little angry—“he shall go there, if I can keep the vultures away
+from him till then.”
+
+“I suppose people might swoop down on him if he had money to give away.”
+
+“Yes, they would. But that isn’t what I was thinking of.”
+
+“What did you mean by vultures, then?”
+
+“Oh, nothing.”
+
+“Heinrich’s very endearing,” said Gillian, passing on from vultures,
+“he’s the kind of thing you’d like to put in your pocket and take home
+to keep with your dolls.”
+
+Larry looked at her quickly. It was the same sharp, surprised look she’d
+seen jump into Toby’s eyes the day she found the chopped volume of
+_Poems and Ballads_.
+
+“That’s how the vultures feel,” he said shortly.
+
+“But mine isn’t a devouring wish.”
+
+“No. I don’t suppose it would be. You’d better leave it at that.”
+
+So they watched a nuthatch pulling its way up the bole of a tree in
+front of them; and wondered why it was there instead of the squirrels
+which seemed more probable in such a place; and smoked Petit Caporal
+cigarettes, which Larry got from a little shop near Victoria and
+pretended to like, though Gillian, who wasn’t much of a smoker herself,
+didn’t see how he could. And then they went down to Pitland Street and
+came to Honeysuckle Cottage, so called because of the honeysuckle bush
+which stood at the garden gate and was visited by gardeners for miles
+around, being something of a curiosity. It was beginning to flower and
+was full of bees that day, and Mrs. Print, who counted it one among many
+occasions of her pride, stood by it, like a benevolent witch, a bent,
+smiling figure in a black dress and a white apron, with smooth hair,
+still black, parted tightly on either side of a nutcracker face that
+looked as if it were carved out of old ivory.
+
+“Hurry up, Mr. Browne,” she called to him as they crossed the green in
+front of the house, “them lard-buns you ordered is baking themselves
+dry, and it’s going to rain. You’ll be getting the young lady damp.”
+
+The sky had clouded over, and as they drank strong Indian tea, heavy
+with cream, and ate what Gillian thought was bilberry, but Mrs. Print
+called “Hurt jam,” in her parlour, the rain began to fall outside. Mrs.
+Print’s parlour was a room as full of flowering geraniums and other
+hot-house plants as if it had been a conservatory instead of being the
+chamber in which Mrs. Print stored the strange and occasionally valuable
+things she’d spent a lifetime buying at the sales at great houses in the
+countryside both here in Surrey and in Lincolnshire where she’d gone in
+marriage with her first husband, a Mr. Booty of those parts. She had
+returned at Mr. Booty’s death to her mother’s house which she had
+inherited and to which she had welcomed Mr. Print, a meek little man
+whom she had married, chiefly, said Larry, who recounted Mrs. Print’s
+history to Gillian over their tea, because he was a gardener by trade
+and could give professional services to the honeysuckle bush.
+
+“It’s my belief, Mrs. Print,” said Larry, repeating what was clearly an
+old and trusted joke, “that you and Mr. Print do something to that bush
+to prevent its being a creeper. It isn’t a freak of nature at all, but
+just a common work of art.”
+
+Mrs. Print picked up a crumb from the Brussels carpet and smoothed a
+plush chair-back that hung over the interlacing pattern of a beautiful
+Heppelwhite settee.
+
+“You’ve said that before, sir,” she answered with friendly scorn; “if
+you was a gardener yourself you’d know better. How’s Miss Jerusalem?”
+
+This appeared to be a frontal attack of considerable weight, for Larry’s
+golden freckles disappeared into his blush as he answered, rather
+hurriedly, “Oh, quite well, I fancy. What about getting to the station
+in all this rain?”
+
+“I’ll step round and see if Mandible’s got a trap going.” Mrs. Print was
+immediately side-tracked by the appeal to her instinct for preserving
+the young from damp.
+
+And accordingly, ten minutes later, Gillian entranced, watched Mrs.
+Print in an enormous black straw wide-awake trimmed with a plain band of
+what was now very rusty black ribbon, her shoulders protected from the
+elements by a small three-cornered red woolen shawl and carrying a
+large, green cotton umbrella, “step” down the garden path and out across
+the green on her way to see about a trap.
+
+“Couldn’t we have gone ourselves?” she asked, feeling very young and
+ruthless for exposing so bent a frame to the weather on her behalf.
+
+“We might have tried to go, but we shouldn’t have gone. It’s my belief
+that Mrs. Print takes a commission on orders for Mandible’s trap and
+likes to book them herself.”
+
+Presently Mrs. Print came back up the garden path and stood outside the
+open glass door of the sitting-room while she unpinned her skirts and
+shook the rain out of her umbrella.
+
+“Mandible’s took the trap over to Malquoits with a party hisself,” she
+announced over her shoulder, “but Madge’ll put the old pony into the
+closed conveyance for ye, and you’ll have to be startin’ soon as she’s a
+slow driver and the roads is slippery with all this wet.”
+
+The June rain was falling heavily by this time. It washed the sandy path
+before Honeysuckle Cottage into a golden ridge between two brawling
+torrents which ran down to a pool at the south side of the green to meet
+the motor-road where the rods of water broke into circles of spray with
+a beating patter as they hit its shining, tarry blackness.
+
+The “closed conveyance” driven by a small, morose girl from the brim of
+whose straw hat the rain was falling in a stream over her large,
+melancholy nose, swished through the rivulets beneath its wheels and
+drew up outside the gate, where it stood, wreathed in the steam from the
+old pony’s devoted and unclipped flanks, and waited while they said
+good-bye to Mrs. Print. It was a very small, very old brougham; a
+metropolitan, luxurious padded trifle with silver-and-ivory handles to
+its doors, and ivory knots and buttons for the brocaded window-straps
+and arm-rests, the heavy crimson cords and the flower-vase clip, the
+pencil-tray and the hanging letter case, with which it still was fitted.
+There was a shelf, under the window behind the coachman’s box, high
+enough to take the paper-bordered bouquet of the lady it had once
+carried to Court or to the Opera in the days when the Empress Eugénie
+visited her royal cousin at Buckingham Palace. Two cords buttoned across
+the roof had once held the silk hat of her escort when she drove out in
+the daytime and could make room for one beside her silken skirts. It
+might have been the original coupé designed by and built for the
+fashionable beauty who first called her carriage after the original
+garden-chaise of the fierce Lord Brougham; so neat was its finish, so
+brave the excellence of its frame, so heroic the resistance to age and
+decay which the cracked but still valiant leather of the coachwork, and
+the remaining varnish on its slender wheels still offered to the eye.
+Even the unkempt and dejected pony who stood, too low for his position,
+between the curving shafts, could not destroy the serious elegance, the
+accomplished and considered frivolity of its air.
+
+“Hallo, Mrs. Print,” said Larry, surveying the “trap” between the
+spreading leaves of a huge arum lily which stood in the parlour-window,
+“why have I never seen this remnant of forgotten splendour before?”
+
+“You generally walks to the station, sir,” said Mrs. Print dryly.
+
+She had returned from escorting Gillian to the vehicle under her green
+umbrella, and was now waiting for Larry to pursue through his various
+pockets the exact equivalent in coin of the tea they had consumed.
+
+“Mrs. Print is certainly a fairy. Is she your godmother, Larry?” said
+Gillian as they drove away, the rain drumming on the roof and misting
+over the windows of the little carriage where they sat, hunched and
+crowded on account of Larry’s height and rucksack and the thickness of
+his tweeds. Larry fidgeted and wiped the mist on the inside of the
+window next him with a too easy unconcern.
+
+“Oh, the Honeysuckle Bush is a great place for reading-parties. I’ve
+known her ever since my first year at Trinity.”
+
+Larry was silent for the rest of the drive. The noise of the rain, the
+clop-clopping of the pony’s hoofs on the wet asphalt, the swish of
+overhanging branches across the roof of the little brougham which held
+them both so tightly, made it easy not to talk and Gillian, tired with
+the long day in the open—they had walked eight miles to get to the
+larch-woods—lay back against the worn but not ragged brocade of the
+padded lining and wondered with a little sting of envy who Miss
+Jerusalem was.
+
+It must, thought Gillian, be rather wonderful to be a friend of Larry
+Browne; very friendly to have been with him at Cambridge—there were
+girls as well as men who belonged to that near past of his! Some of them
+had come to the studio, easy, laughing creatures who talked of swimming
+and tennis, of walking tours and winter sports and only very casually of
+“jobs” which they took, not because they had to work to live, but
+because it was better fun to be doing something. Miss Jerusalem, she
+supposed, was one of these.
+
+It was none of her business, and she had not fallen in love with this
+tall, careless, beautiful Larry Browne; but, if ever she could come back
+to live the life on earth again, as some people imagined possible, and
+if she might, remembering this life, make her choice of the next time,
+it would—of this she had long been sure—it would be that she might be
+one of this free and happy company who were cradled in learning, and to
+whom money was a means already granted and never an end to be pursued,
+hardly even a necessity to be toiled for.
+
+The sudden chilling of the summer air that had come with the rain, fell
+also on Gillian’s mood as they travelled slowly between half-seen
+hedges, down the long, gradual hill to the station in the valley. Larry
+Browne, the friendly, argumentative companion and guide of the sunlit
+hours of the day had now grown strange, detached, almost inimical.
+Gillian had a sudden and desolating wonder. Was she boring him? The
+thought had never occurred to her before, but if it should be—how was
+he, how was she, to endure the rest of the cool, dim journey back to
+London?
+
+In the train Larry, who had cheered up as soon as they were released
+from the antique confinement of Mandible’s closed conveyance, unpacked
+his rucksack and offered her her choice of _The Three Mulla-Mulgars_ and
+_Georgian Poetry_ to read till they got to Charing Cross. Gillian, who
+had bought the anthology when it came out, chose the novel, which turned
+out not to be a novel at all, but something so much better that she came
+up as from the depths of a well to realize that the train had stopped at
+Waterloo Junction which was why it had suddenly grown too dark to read.
+The wistful merriment of the monkey-pilgrimage she had been following
+with a sense of a new world to explore had chased away her own cloud of
+self-pity, and she saw with a free heart the lemon and lavender of a
+clearing sky reflected in the lamp-spangled waters of the Thames as the
+train moved slowly into Charing Cross, and the lit clock of the tower of
+Westminster pointed to half-past eight.
+
+It was cold at Charing Cross. It was cold on the top of the No. 11
+omnibus which trundled slowly down the rain-washed slope of Whitehall
+and took its almost solitary way along Victoria Street, splashing
+through the pools of petrol and water that had settled in the uneven
+shallows of the traffic-furrowed road. Gillian’s spirits drooped again.
+She was lonely. She was ending the day farther away from Larry than she
+had been before it began. Lilac was at the other side of the world by
+now, in Japan. There would be no one in the little flat under the roof
+of the Mordaunt Club. The grate in the inner room would be empty, bare
+and clean, the chimney swept for the summer. She did not even know if
+there were a bundle of firewood in the cupboard by the scullery sink,
+and there was a hole in her right stocking, right round the base of her
+great toe, and her feet were cold, and by the time she had walked from
+King’s Road to the Club, her feet in the thin shoes in which she had
+walked so far that day, would be wet through. Gillian wished she were
+there in the cold twilight, with the door locked, having a thorough good
+cry. The omnibus stopped with a grinding jerk. Larry helped her off the
+step with a kind hand under her elbow, which he held a moment in his
+warm, firm palm as they walked along the slippery pavement together.
+
+“Dumpy? Come and have supper with Heinrich and his mice—oh yes, he has
+mice out when the sparrows have gone to roost. There’s sure to be cheese
+and eggs, and we might make coffee and omelette with the Primus.”
+
+“Oh, Larry! May I?”
+
+“Yes, of course,” said Larry.
+
+“I’ve got some macaroons and a Buszard cake,” said Gillian as they
+passed the Club; “shall we get them too?—and Lady Bottomley often sends
+down strawberries on Sunday.”
+
+“Up we go to see,” said Larry, with enthusiasm.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+A golden flicker of light under the door of Number Seven crept across
+the landing to their feet as they reached the top of the stairs.
+
+“Whoever—whatever!” Gillian was alarmed. “Is it on fire?”
+
+“What a first-rate idea,” said Larry, “let’s hope it is a good one—omne
+ignotum pro magnifico, or Hope for the best, as they say in the
+schoolroom. Hadn’t we better go in and see?”
+
+For Gillian was hesitating on the doorway. Her key was not in her
+pocket.
+
+“I’m frightened, Larry.”
+
+“The longer you wait the more frightened you’ll be. Is the door locked?”
+
+“I forget, I’ll try.”
+
+The doors at the Mordaunt Club were so constructed that, even if you
+forgot to lock them as you went out, nobody who didn’t know the secret
+of the handles could open them from the outside.
+
+Gillian pushed the knob and the door fell back.
+
+The light came leaping and glowing from the inner room. Someone had
+kindled a fire in the empty grate.
+
+
+                                  III
+
+V.V. was sitting in front of a fire burning clear, and licked with flame
+as only a newly lit fire can burn. She had left the window-sash thrown
+up from below, and the stirring night-airs blew the curtains about so
+that they made shadows in the lamplight from the windows on the opposite
+side of the courtyard. The eager fire and the waving curtains filled the
+room with a dance of flame and shade. The great Fortuna on her rope
+above the world; Saint Hubert praying to the crucifix that rises between
+the horns of the stag he has hunted till sundown, were revealed and
+hidden as the flames leapt and the curtain waved across the white wall
+where they hung, the tall white bookcase between them.
+
+She sat in the red-leather couch, her astonishing eyes watching the
+doorway, her dark mouth fixed in a steady smile. The firelight moved in
+the great waves of her hair, burnishing their heavy curves, and flashed
+on the whiteness of her even teeth. She wore a dress of some thin silk
+many times washed to a faint brick-red, and her long hands, their wrists
+held in the tawny bracelets she always wore, lay palm to palm in her
+lap, the finger-tips catching the light above the sharp angle made by
+her knees which jutted sharply through the stuff of her clinging skirt
+as though it were a skeleton and not a woman sitting under the rusty
+silk that fell to the rug at her feet hiding them in its folds.
+
+Gillian stood in the doorway smiling back at the firelit face. It shone
+out against the background of book-filled shelves behind it, gathering
+up the glint of the lettered bindings, their reds and yellows and browns
+in one living concentration of colour and light.
+
+“God! What a colour scheme!” said Larry from behind her shoulder.
+
+“A fire’s nice on a wet evening, isn’t it?” said V.V., stretching her
+hands to the blaze but making no other movement. “I’ve had supper ready
+for an hour.”
+
+“You’ll have to stay to supper with us, Larry,” said Gillian. “This is
+Miss Vanderleyden who lives at Number Thirty-Six in the other house.
+V.V., this is Mr. Browne. He’s adopted our cat.”
+
+“Well,” said Larry, “that’s one way of putting it. I’ve been told that a
+cat, I hesitate to believe it was ever Miss Vanderleyden’s, and you say
+it wasn’t yours, Gillian—I’ve been told that a female cat has been added
+to the menagerie at my studio without my consent.”
+
+“I didn’t know it was a she,” said Gillian.
+
+“All tortoiseshells are,” said Larry. “That is one of the beautiful
+truths which are universal.”
+
+“Oh,” said V.V., “Mrs. Gordon said there’s been a fuss about it and I
+found a silly letter from Mrs. Barraclough when I got in. Was it your
+cat after all?”
+
+“I’ve just told you, V.V.,”—Gillian had already noticed that V.V. often
+did not quite follow everything that was said—“I’ve explained I’ve given
+the cat to Larry. It was a stray.”
+
+“Oh, was it?”
+
+“Yes. Where have you put supper, and is there enough for three?”
+
+“In the other room. Didn’t you see as you came through?”
+
+“No; we thought the book-room was on fire.”
+
+V.V. laughed quite heartily at this and then, suddenly becoming
+practical and administrative, she announced that there was hot water for
+Gillian to wash and enough for Larry, too, if he didn’t mind washing at
+the sink, and that they could get tidy while she dished up.
+
+“Does this vision dwell with you?” asked Larry while V.V. disappeared to
+ration the boiling water.
+
+“Not exactly, but she knows where I keep everything. Isn’t she lovely?”
+
+“She looked gaudy in the firelight when we came in, but the drawing of
+her face is bad. Nose wrong. No chin.”
+
+“I thought you looked as if you wanted to draw her.”
+
+“I am going to paint her. Her colour’s exciting.”
+
+V.V. had made a fine supper. A strange, sliced sausage which she said
+came from Looms, which might, for all Gillian knew, be a suburb of
+Epping; a crisp salad, not cut with a knife but lightly torn, and
+sprinkled with a dew of lemon-juice and a frosting of brown sugar; a
+junket with cream in which the huge Bottomley strawberries were drowned;
+the macaroons; the Buszard cake; a bottle of white wine; a loaf of brown
+bread; a dish of radishes, and her own as well as Gillian’s butter, made
+enough for three. V.V. had laid these things out in dishes, some of them
+her own, some of them Gillian’s and had brought over two amber glass
+candlesticks with dangling lustres which she had inherited from an aunt
+and which were the joy of Gillian’s life at that moment. Two tall
+candles stuck in these heirlooms lit the feast and threw down white
+copies of their flames that lay like waving petals on the dark, waxed
+surface of the table.
+
+“Poor Heinrich! we might have fetched him,” said Gillian half-way
+through her second macaroon.
+
+“No, we mightn’t.” Larry was heaping his plate with the
+cream-extinguished strawberries. “He’s quite happy. He’s got all the
+cheese for his mice.”
+
+“What about that little cat?” asked V.V. “Is Heinrich the name you’ve
+given him?”
+
+“Heinrich,” Larry informed her, “is a mouse-tamer. It’s a more difficult
+thing to be than a lion-tamer. He also tames sparrows. That is difficult
+too. It is also quite messy. Worse than William who is but one and, I
+suppose, trained for the house.”
+
+“You suppose wrong,” said Gillian, “but no matter. Go on telling V.V.
+about Heinrich.”
+
+“Heinrich, for the moment, follows mouse- and sparrow-taming as a hobby.
+He lives by his fiddle and with me. With, but not _on_. I pay him no
+rent and the studio is his. He pays me no board and the studio is mine.
+One day Heinrich will be rich.”
+
+“How rich?” asked V.V., gleaming.
+
+“Oh, quite. His uncle had foolish, dilatory ideas about Heinrich’s
+majority, and there are things in Chancery for him. A grasping place.
+But that’s neither here nor there. Heinrich has his own joys and his
+needs are few. If only he could wear my clothes his needs would be
+none.”
+
+Larry looked down, a little self-consciously, at his long tweed-covered
+legs, and Gillian thought of the yellow and pink, blue, silk skirts and
+Brobdingnagian trousers he usually wore when at work, and of Heinrich’s
+shiny serge suit and the pathetic blue slops slung round his thin bird’s
+neck as he mopped the studio floor after his birds.
+
+“At this moment,” said Larry, warming to his work, “Heinrich is most
+probably marching on tip-toe, a sort of solemn dance—an antic hay—all
+round the studio. He’ll have lighted a little, bronze, Roman lamp with
+olive-oil and a wick made out of the marrow of a seven-months child and
+it will be burning blue and violet in the middle of the floor, and,
+after him, there will skip mice of all ages, on _their_ toes, their
+pink, little, sharp-nailed toes, and sparrows, walking in their sleep,
+will come in twos and threes and dance with them, and, at the tail of
+the procession, your tortoiseshell cat, Miss Vanderleyden, will be
+walking on his hind legs, and the canary will have broken cage and be
+perched on the bow as he fiddles—oh yes, he’ll be fiddling away, and
+spiders will come swinging down on threads from the roof and all the
+cockroaches from the studio next door will look in——”
+
+Larry paused for breath.
+
+“What a queer little man he must be,” said V.V. “I should like to meet
+him.”
+
+Gillian was almost afraid that V.V. believed it all, but she did not
+like to tell her that Larry was just talking, in case she had really
+understood. It was difficult with two people you didn’t know very well.
+After all, she’d not known Larry much more than a month and V.V. less
+than a week. Besides, what Larry had said was true, in a way. Heinrich
+might at any time make friends with a spider, even though Gillian hoped
+he wouldn’t with a cockroach, and it was more than probable that he was
+at that very moment fiddling a tune for the little cat to dance to.
+
+“Shall we go and call on that funny man?” said V.V.
+
+But when they got to the studio all was quiet. Nobody was fiddling,
+nobody was dancing and the canary, its head long since under its wing,
+was asleep, a ball of pale down on the perch of its cage high up in the
+shadows of the soaring roof.
+
+The table was laid with an untouched supper for two; bread, cheese, a
+mug of beer and a plate of green apples, and, curled in a corner of a
+divan, among sketches and scarves and half-empty boxes of crayons,
+Heinrich slept, with the tortoiseshell cat purring quietly, asleep,
+beside him.
+
+“What a shame,” said V.V. “He’s waited for you and never touched a thing
+himself. Let’s wake him and give him his supper now.”
+
+So they woke Heinrich who admitted that he was very hungry—it was now
+almost eleven o’clock—and V.V. set to and made a cheese omelette of a
+high superiority, and the cat had all the milk and Heinrich had all the
+beer which made him astonishingly gay and polyglot.
+
+“Heinrich talks all the languages there are,” Larry explained to V.V.,
+“talks them all with a foreign accent and I don’t believe he gets any of
+them quite right, but he gets most of them far better than we get any of
+them except our own, and as he’s not got one quite of his own——”
+
+“Oh, I expect he’s got one of his own all right,” said V.V., “but he
+keeps it dark.”
+
+“Mein bester,” said Larry, “she’s insulting you. Can you hear her?”
+
+Heinrich was sitting on the floor, his hands clasped round his knees,
+rocking slightly to and fro. His eyes were fixed on V.V.’s face as she
+sat above him in a gilded Italian chair with a large green apple in her
+hand. Gillian thought he was paler than usual, but he was always so pale
+that this might only be her fancy.
+
+Suddenly Heinrich spoke in a high, quick voice, rocking to and fro in
+time to the words.
+
+“Ich liebe dich,” said Heinrich with conviction.
+
+“Mich reiz’ deine schöne Gestalt.
+
+“Und bist du nicht willig,” he chanted, the wind rising in the music
+behind his voice:—
+
+“Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ ich Gewalt.”
+
+“There!” cried V.V., in some alarm, “I told you so! He’s talking some
+outlandish language of his own. Does anyone understand him?”
+
+But Larry was rolling in his chair in a paroxysm of joy.
+
+“Oh, Heinrich, you unmatchable treasure! Your virtue is beyond rubies,”
+he shouted. “_So brauch’ ich Gewalt. Gewalt!_ Did you hear it, Gillian?”
+
+“Yes,” said Gillian, a little dazed, “and I think, in a way, he would—he
+could, I mean.”
+
+“I told you he’d got a funny language of his own,” Miss Vanderleyden
+reiterated, her eyes shifting quickly from Gillian’s smile to Larry’s
+laughter-wrinkled face.
+
+“You know, the Erlkönig wasn’t brawny after all. Play it to us,
+Heinrich, you haven’t played to us this evening. Get your fiddle and
+spin.”
+
+Larry, for all his mocking tongue, was very proud of this odd, gifted,
+incalculable friend.
+
+So Heinrich got his fiddle and spun the mist and the wind and the
+night-ride through the storm, and rocked them with the galloping horse,
+and cried to them with the terrified child, and stirred them with the
+sound of the goblin’s insatiable desire.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gillian and V.V. went home in the small hours. They walked across the
+bridge in the light of an old moon lying on its back low in the sky,
+having refused to be accompanied by either Larry or Heinrich. It was
+V.V. who had insisted.
+
+“We shall be seen coming in by one of the old cats,” she said, “and
+they’ll think you’ve come in too.”
+
+“Goodness!” said Gillian, “what a horrid thought. But they couldn’t.”
+
+“Oh, yes, they could,” and V.V. proceeded to tell how the Countess had
+written to Mrs. Barraclough, once when one of V.V.’s actresses was being
+put up on the hard divan, to complain that Miss Vanderleyden’s visitor
+had come home after midnight with a man, _who was never seen to leave_!
+
+“What did Mrs. Barraclough do? Did she come up and look in your cupboard
+for him?”
+
+“No,” said V.V. “She wrote to the Countess and said she was so sorry to
+hear that she’d felt obliged to sit up all night in that way, but that
+she felt quite sure I was able to chaperone my guests myself.”
+
+“Did he?” said Larry.
+
+“Did who, what?”
+
+“Leave.”
+
+“He never came in, of course. The Countess lost sight of him in the
+archway, I suppose. Serve her right if she did sit up till morning.”
+
+“Oh, well,” said Larry, “if it means keeping Countesses out of their
+beds till dawn, and you’re quite sure——”
+
+“That Heinrich gives me the creeps,” chattered V.V. as they walked home;
+“his fiddle and those eyes. And you did look such a thin, tired little
+thing, I wanted to take you home and brush your hair and put you nice
+and comfy in your little bed-a-bies long ago. I came home for a surprise
+for you this morning and you weren’t there. I said to Dicky that you’d
+be wondering where ever I’d got to yesterday, but she had Jerry and
+Frank coming and poor old Biddles had had to have a pill. So I lit the
+fire and got supper ready and all, and we could have had such a nice
+cosy little evening all to ourselves, and then you came in with your
+Larry and spoilt everything.”
+
+“But V.V., you were quite pleased to see Larry, and, please, he’s not
+particularly mine.”
+
+Gillian was irritated a little by V.V.’s chatter. It was very late; she
+herself was really tired and it seemed beyond understanding that anyone
+could have listened to Heinrich’s fiddle and not still be silent in the
+mood it had woven round them all. Larry was still in it, she was sure,
+and Heinrich himself had never come out of it at all, but had sat, a
+shadow among shadows, in the darkness round the model-throne, plucking
+fragments of melancholy airs out of his violin while they said
+good-night.
+
+V.V. was a puzzle. In the moonlight, with her rich colour greyed into
+monochrome, Gillian could see what Larry meant about her nose being
+clumsy and her chin weak. They seemed to reinforce the vapid, babbling
+voice, making it sillier than it sounded by day or in the lamplight.
+Only the swift, smooth walk, the balanced rhythm of knee and shoulder
+moving in continuous, co-ordinated harmony kept their beauty. They were
+a lilt of the enchantment under which Gillian had fallen, beating time
+to the pulses of her heart, carrying her back to the room overlooking
+the gardens, to the compelling magic of the face which had shone out of
+the dark mirror on the night when Gillian had washed up the cat’s
+cream-bowl, only a week ago.
+
+“Is Biddles your dog?” She asked the question to escape from the
+creeping disillusionment that sickened beneath her fatigue.
+
+“Yes, he is, the darling. Dicky’s keeping him till I can afford to have
+a cottage. He’s a borzoi. They’re very delicate, you know, and Biddles
+bites—that’s why he’s at Epping.”
+
+Gillian was too tired to ask whether biting dogs were cured or endured
+at Epping.
+
+They let themselves into the courtyard stealthily and then, because it
+might wake Mrs. Barraclough, who lived on the ground floor, if V.V. were
+to open the hall door and go up to her flat in the farther house, she
+came up to Gillian’s and slept, in borrowed night-gear, on the red couch
+by the embers of the fire she had kindled.
+
+Gillian slept well that night. V.V. had carried out her programme and
+had brushed Gillian’s hair and braided it into two long plaits which she
+tied with ribbons and pulled out over the sheet on each side of
+Gillian’s face as she tucked her up in bed.
+
+“It’s my flat,” Gillian had protested, “I ought to be putting you to bed
+really.”
+
+“But you’re not,” said V.V. She stood by the bedside, a lighted candle
+in her hand, and looked down at the tired girl with a brooding
+eagerness. Then stooping swiftly, she kissed Gillian, kissed her with a
+little gurgling murmur, as if a mother were kissing her baby, kissed her
+twice on her open, astonished mouth.
+
+“How odd of V.V.,” said Gillian sleepily to herself when the door had
+closed behind her, and the room was dark and still. And she pulled her
+handkerchief from under her pillow and wiped her lips as if she had
+taken a drink from the tumbler of water which stood on a table beside
+her bed.
+
+
+                                   IV
+
+Later in the week, Gillian went to tea with Jane Bird in her workshop in
+Buckingham Palace Road. It was conveniently situated for the purpose,
+being on the way home from the Secretarial School.
+
+Jane had called the place her studio when she first took it, but since
+she had begun to sell her figures she had changed the name.
+
+“It’s not Art, it’s Commerce that I woo behind these portals,” she
+explained. “Besides! Look at it!”
+
+The place was certainly business-like. It had originally been a
+coach-house and stables, and the loose-box and stalls still remained as
+store-rooms, divided from the larger portion in which Jane, standing at
+a long table on trestles, worked on her plasticine figures.
+
+“I keep three going at a time, one being modelled, one being painted,
+one being varnished. Mr. Quist has invented a varnish which is
+transparent without being shiny.”
+
+Mr. Quist, a little olive-skinned man with a shock of white hair, who
+worked in his shirt-sleeves and wore a red tie and a gold watch-chain,
+looked up and bowed his acknowledgment of this introduction, but did not
+speak. He was varnishing a figure with a camel’s-hair brush which he
+dipped with marked precision into a clear, colourless liquid that
+seethed in a glass retort under a spirit-lamp.
+
+Gillian went across the workshop to look at the figure. It stood about
+eighteen inches from the square base on which it was moulded and which
+was painted in the semblance of a sandy path between two flower borders.
+The figure was that of an old, bent woman in a black full-skirted gown
+with a bodice buttoned tight across the hollow, stooping chest. It
+stood, leaning forward, supporting itself with two claw-thin,
+parchment-white hands on the crook of a large, bushy, green umbrella.
+The face, keen and delicate, like an old ivory, was framed in smooth
+bands of dark brown hair gathered into a bag-like net at the back of the
+fine, old head.
+
+“Goodness!” said Gillian. “It’s Mrs. Print.”
+
+“Goodness!” mocked Jane Bird, “how did you know?”
+
+“Larry took me to tea there last Sunday.”
+
+“The Pirate! Mrs. Print’s mine. Larry had no right to share her. I’d
+have taken you there myself.”
+
+“Oh, dear!” Gillian was remorseful. “Why didn’t I say ‘by the pricking
+of my thumbs’? Anyone can see she’s a witch—a good witch.”
+
+“She’s nothing of the kind. She’s a village landlady who knows her
+business, but you make every-think into a fairy-tale.”
+
+“Well, look at her! Look what you’ve done with her! How did you get that
+black-velvet net effect on her hair?”
+
+“How did she get a chenille net? I don’t suppose there’s another within
+a hundred miles of London. Did she tell you about her teeth?”
+
+“I don’t think she’d got any.”
+
+“She hasn’t. And she hasn’t had for years. She bites with her gums.
+They’ve grown hard and sharp, and she reads without spectacles, and she
+takes her mother out in a bath-chair every Saturday afternoon.”
+
+“Jane! what magnificent people you know! Larry and Heinrich and Mrs.
+Print.”
+
+“Magnificent isn’t the right word for either Heinrich or Mrs. Print.
+Larry, perhaps.”
+
+Mr. Quist looked up from his varnishing. He pushed his gold-rimmed
+spectacles up on to his forehead, put his paint-brush down on a glass
+tray, dropped a glass extinguisher over the blue flame of the
+spirit-lamp and, without a word, trotted off across the workshop and
+disappeared into the loose-box.
+
+“Jane, who is Mr. Quist? He doesn’t look like a workman.”
+
+“He’s a genius. And I know no more about him than you can see for
+yourself. He called here one morning to buy a figure he’d seen in that
+shop I told you about. They’d sold that one and he wanted another, and I
+wouldn’t make one for him. So he told me about his varnish.”
+
+“It sounds like the Great Panjandrum! Did he speak?”
+
+“Not much. The bare minimum. We carry on mostly in pregnant silences.
+I’m good at mute eloquence.”
+
+“I know you are. But I shouldn’t have thought two could have been
+eloquent enough that way.”
+
+“Well, we are. He’s gone to fetch the Larrys for you.”
+
+Mr. Quist emerged from the loose-box carrying in either hand a veiled
+object, much like a priest bearing two chalices to a sick parishioner.
+Mr. Quist jerked his head sideways and Jane, advancing to meet him, took
+one of the muslin-shaded figures from him and placed it on the
+work-table. Mr. Quist carried the figure he still retained to a shelf
+with a small, carved canopy, evidently prepared for the exhibition of
+completed figures, and then returned to unveil the one Jane had taken
+from him.
+
+It was Larry Browne in his wide green corduroys, his blue, cloudy shirt
+open, his straight hair a little heightened in colour so as to balance
+the gay mosaic of paint on the palette he was holding, his head thrown
+back and a little on one side as if he were watching a smoke-ring he had
+blown. The right arm hung straight from the shoulder and slightly
+backwards, and a cigarette burned between the fingers of the hanging
+hand.
+
+“Jane, it’s lovely,” said Gillian, “so long, so graceful, so alive.
+But—but—he isn’t painting—his face is all wrong, not concentrated.”
+
+“No,” said Jane. “He doesn’t. Didn’t you know?”
+
+“But he does, I’ve seen him. I’m sitting to him. And he has proper
+models. And there’s Heinrich.”
+
+“He draws,” said Jane, “quite well. And he plans all sorts of pictures.
+And he squeezes miles of Windsor and Newton out on that wonderful
+palette of his. It belonged to Arnold Boecklin. Did you know?”
+
+“Yes,” said Gillian. “I’ve often wondered why he got it.”
+
+“It was a bad debt. A very bad debt. He shouldn’t have taken it. It’s
+part of his curse. He is so interested in being interesting, in the
+details, in literaryishness—and he’s got such an audience, and enough
+money to live on. He’ll never paint. Not unless——” Jane smudged a
+thumb-load of plasticine vindictively on to the figure she had left when
+Gillian came in, and began scraping it off again, and left her sentence
+unfinished.
+
+“Well,” said Gillian, “I don’t think it will be much of a pity if he
+never finishes that procession of a fresco for the competition. But he’s
+going to paint V.V. Vanderleyden in the fire.”
+
+“Golly, what a name!” said Jane rudely. “Who is it? Another?”
+
+“She’s one of the Club members. He saw her in my flat on Sunday.”
+
+“Has he taken her to Mrs. Print’s?”
+
+“Not yet. He doesn’t seem to take many people there, really, Jane. Only
+me and Miss Jerusalem.”
+
+Jane’s high colour ebbed away and her face looked streaked and queer
+between the black bosses of her hair.
+
+“That’s me,” she snapped. “Jane Ursula Mayne—they called me ‘Jerusalem’
+when I was little. They used to send me to Mrs. Print’s for weeks
+together after measles and things.”
+
+“What a lovely name for a little girl!”
+
+Gillian watched the blood flow back into Jane’s flat cheeks and
+remembered how Larry’s blush had swamped his freckles at the same name.
+Why hadn’t Larry told her that at the Honeysuckle Bush Jane was
+“Jerusalem”? It was such an addition to Jane.
+
+“May I see the other figure—the one on the stand?”
+
+Mr. Quist removed the second veil with a flick which might or might not
+be an expression of feeling.
+
+It was Larry again: slim and dapper and sleek in the hard white and
+black of evening dress, white waistcoat, white tie, white gloves. The
+figure was shown buttoning one glove critically, lovingly, the whole
+attitude expressive of intense absorption in the matter so charmingly in
+hand. It was finished with a minute perfection, a ridiculous attention
+to detail, Pre-Raphaelite in its insistence on every button, every seam.
+Gillian, who had never seen Larry wearing any garments of the kind, was
+forced to admit that this Larry was even more accurately portrayed than
+the other.
+
+“Jane,” she cried, “what a horrid thing! Just like one of those painted
+plaster figures they put in shop-windows.”
+
+Jane was angry. “How can you be such a philistine! Look at the
+modelling! Look at the pose! It’s a masterpiece.”
+
+“I don’t like it,” Gillian persisted.
+
+“Like it. You like your pictures pretty, I suppose. You aren’t meant to
+like it. It’s a warning. Larry’ll revert to type, he’ll be just like
+that before he’s done.”
+
+“Has he seen it?”
+
+“Not yet. He shall before it goes home, though.”
+
+“Jane! you’ve not sold it?”
+
+Jane nodded, and by a rustle that came from the direction where Mr.
+Quist was varnishing Mrs. Print, Gillian understood that he was the
+purchaser.
+
+Gillian was puzzled. She had thought Jane and Larry were friends.
+
+“Have you done Heinrich yet?” she asked, more to change the difficult
+subject than because she thought this possible.
+
+“No,” said Jane, “I can’t do him out of my head, and he hasn’t been able
+to sit to me. He’s very busy about something or other.”
+
+“Heinrich’s always busy. I’ve never seen such an occupied creature.
+Besides, he’s rehearsing a new Russian Symphony, and there are afternoon
+concerts.”
+
+At that moment there was a knock at the workshop door, and before anyone
+could reply to it, Larry himself walked in. Gillian saw Jane’s
+immediately suppressed movement towards Mr. Quist’s purchase, and saw
+how that movement had directed Larry’s eyes to the effigy, which stood
+in its niche on the same wall as the door, so that it was invisible to
+anyone entering the studio.
+
+“Hullo!” Larry swung round to look at the figure. “I say, Jane, that’s
+pretty cruel,” he said. “What made you do it?”
+
+“My prophetic soul, of the wide world dreaming on things to come, I
+suppose. These things are in the air.” But it was odd how unhappy her
+voice was.
+
+“Le Beau Brummell de nos jours. Well, I seem to be making a success
+there, at any rate. Are you going to give it to me?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“It’s sold.”
+
+“Jane, don’t be a fool! You can’t sell my portrait.”
+
+“It isn’t a portrait. You didn’t sit for it. It’s a fantasy.”
+
+“It’s a simpering horror. You’re to destroy it.”
+
+“It isn’t mine to destroy.”
+
+“Then I will.”
+
+Larry took a step towards the figure, but Mr. Quist reached it first.
+With a practised hand he swathed the property in its butter-muslin
+shroud and, lifting it from the stand, carried it back to the loose-box
+where the statues were packed.
+
+Larry watched him go and gave a short laugh.
+
+“Sorry, Jane. I’ve lost my temper, and you’ve got to help me to find it
+again at once. You must promise not to let whoever has bought it have
+that idiotic thing.”
+
+“He’s paid for it,” said Jane, “and I’m going out to see the Guard
+change at the Palace. I’ve got an order for a Grenadier complete with
+busby”—and going to a peg on the wall, she took down her hat and gloves
+and marched out of the still open workshop door. Larry looked for a
+moment as though he were about to involve Gillian in the discussion, and
+then, tossing his hair back with the very gesture Jane had caught for
+the figure which still stood uncovered on the work-table, he followed
+her into the street.
+
+Gillian waited a moment to let them get a start so that she might not
+appear to be following, and while she waited, Mr. Quist came out from
+the loose-box again and began to wrap up the laughing Larry.
+
+“I’m afraid, Mr. Quist,” said Gillian, feeling foolish for speaking and
+yet nervously unable to keep silence, “I’m afraid Miss Bird and Mr.
+Browne have misunderstood each other about your figure.”
+
+Mr. Quist looked at Gillian over the top of his glasses.
+
+“Sublimation. Sublimation,” he said.
+
+Gillian, who had never heard of the theories of Vienna or the practices
+of Zurich, had not the faintest idea of what Mr. Quist meant.
+
+It was the first time she had heard his voice. It was a thick, smooth
+voice, and she thought there was a note of triumph in it. She did not
+feel she was going to like Mr. Quist, and she was not at all sorry that
+he made no attempt at further conversation before she said good-bye and
+went out.
+
+
+                                   V
+
+Whenever Gillian felt she had come to something she didn’t want to think
+about, she either cleaned out William’s cage or went to see Aunt
+Elizabeth. William’s cage was, of course, cleaned out every day. That
+is, he had fresh seed, fresh water and fresh sand as punctually as
+Gillian had her own breakfast. Indeed, there had been mornings in the
+Pelham House days when Gillian’s breakfast had been omitted in favour of
+William’s cage. It was in recognition of what she called her sister’s
+slavery that Lilac had once tried to teach William the hymn which says:
+
+   “All my wants by thee supplied,
+   All my sins by thee forgiven,”
+
+as a surprise while Gillian was away. But William, who was a pronounced
+eclectic, had welcomed Gillian’s return from a holiday with the remark,
+“Hello—sins forgiven? Bow-wow,” and had then gone off into peals of very
+strident laughter in imitation of Mabel, who had, at her own request,
+undertaken the care of William’s food and cage during his rightful
+servant’s absence. But, in moments of doubt or pain, there was no more
+successful anodyne than half an hour’s extra attendance on the cage.
+William, who enjoyed extra attendance, always assisted with might and
+main at all efforts towards the promotion of his own well-being, and
+while William was helping and encouraging you there was no time for
+metaphysical brooding or morbid self-analysis. Sometimes, when she
+wanted practical advice or felt the moment was come for facing rather
+than escaping her problem, Gillian would go to Highgate. But it was a
+long way to Highgate, and, besides, Mrs. Mortimer was away just then,
+and, even if she had been available, Gillian was not at all sure that
+she could have had any patience with so insubstantial a grief as the one
+she now carried. For Gillian was fighting a shadow which was never
+vanquished and had now become so constant in assailing that she could no
+longer doubt the existence of the shape which cast it. One day, and that
+day might be to-morrow, she felt, the shadow would pass her by and leave
+her face to face with the reality in which it originated, and of that
+day she was afraid.
+
+There was a force, a malign thrusting-on, at work, in the lives around
+her; she saw it more and more, to which her own experience gave her no
+clue. It seemed to go by the name of Love, but in its manifestation it
+was the most unloving impulse in the world. It lay, Gillian had known
+that, behind Lilac’s whole attitude to Toby; it was, she had seen it,
+implicit in Toby’s submission to Lilac. And now it was binding and
+hurting Jane Bird, making her cruel and vulgar and yet giving her a
+power over Larry which he resented but did not deny. Larry had been
+angry with Jane. That was clear enough and easy to understand—but he had
+followed her when she defied him, and it was to his own defeat he had
+gone.
+
+Gillian knew very little about sex. She had escaped the definite
+physiological instruction which most people of her age and station had
+had administered to them in their teens. A little vague botany, put
+before her with the best intentions while she was at school, had bored
+without enlightening her. Flowers were flowers. Diagrams of their works
+with straight black tines leading out of them like so many stamens, with
+A, B, C, and D at their tips, had seemed to her of far less use or
+interest than the pages of the little green Huxley’s Physiology, another
+class-book which had been brought to her notice at the same time. But
+that concise and well-illustrated manual confines its guidance to the
+alimentary canal and the organs of sight and hearing, and it had never
+occurred to Gillian to make any connexion between the two branches of
+knowledge. They had been laid before her, separately, in a hopeful
+spirit, by parents and guardians who shrank from directer methods of
+illumination, and who credited adolescent curiosity with greater powers
+of accurate deduction than there was any sound reason for supposing it
+to possess. Gillian had failed entirely to deduce. She had assimilated
+one set of facts and rejected the other; for she had a clear and honest
+mind and chose by instinct, competent instruction in preference to
+tentative and disingenuous information set up as an analogy which she
+had not the means to follow.
+
+Later on, when disturbances in her own development might have turned her
+mind inwards, she had been in the full tide of that friendship with her
+father which had filled them both with so deep and so shared a passion
+for impersonal beauty that human love, except as it found its expression
+in Art and Letters, had seemed a matter which might very well wait its
+time. Gerald Armstrong, like so many men of his type when they begin to
+meet on its own ground the first blossoming of the mind they have
+trained, had fallen in love with his daughter, idealizing the
+crystalline beauty of her girl’s mind, loving the eager courage of its
+unflawed innocence and jealously guarding that virginal quality from any
+taint of a dark knowledge she might never need to bear. When she had
+asked him what
+
+   “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame”
+
+meant, he had given her _Madame Bovary_ to read, and had adored her for
+the comment with which she returned the book to him: “I suppose the
+French of those days were even more different from us than they are
+now.”
+
+When he died and she was left with his books, she had taken to those
+they had not read together, the same spirit of detached and impersonal
+enjoyment of literary quality as had distinguished his own
+appreciations, and had retained unimpaired the habit he had never
+checked since the day when he had first discovered it, of classing any
+allusions or franknesses she did not understand as “Elizabethanisms,” a
+term he himself had once used to dismiss a very early inquiry as to the
+precise meaning of a passage she and Lilac had failed to elucidate in
+the psalms for the day when Lilac was seven and she was nine years old.
+
+And before Gillian could venture very far by herself, her father’s more
+valuable and rarer books had been sold, and she had been allowed to keep
+for her own use only such ordinary editions of the classics as would not
+fetch more than remainder prices in an auctioneer’s rooms. Out of these
+she got all she required, either as food for her own mind or as material
+for those lessons in literature which she had so disastrously added to
+the curriculum of Pelham House. But in actual knowledge of life she
+moved, at twenty-three, in the same occasionally troubled but still
+enchanted dream as she had known at seventeen, when her father died.
+
+Love, according to the best authorities known to Gillian, was the guide
+to many a wandering bark; many waters could not quench it; it suffered,
+endured, and hoped all things; it made the world go round, in which last
+connexion it was assisted by the blessing of the Church in the
+Solemnization of Matrimony. When it made people ridiculous or tiresome
+it was called Calf Love; when it was transferred from its legitimate
+objects it was called Sin; and when, as sometimes happened, particularly
+on the Continent, it took place between people who had conscientious
+objections to marriage, it was called Free. So far, this conspectus of
+an important but not personally urgent business had met any case which
+had come under her observation; but, lately, Gillian had begun to
+suspect its adequacy. Toby and Lilac had made what is called a
+love-match. Had not Mrs. Middleton given them for a present an
+illuminated copy, in a frame, of a work supposed to be a translation
+into more adequate terms of the well-known passage from Corinthians? It
+had made Gillian’s blood boil at the time, particularly the improvement,
+which ran:
+
+   “Love has no taste for anything which is impure but a responsive
+   delight in all that is genuine.”
+
+But it certainly was about love, and Gillian had always understood that,
+as a definition, however translated, the original had never been
+bettered. Possibly there were things about love which Saint Paul did not
+know. Times had changed, and love with them. There was Modern Love.
+There were the sixteen-line pseudo-sonnets—“We are betrayed by what is
+false within”—“A kiss is but a kiss now, and no wave of a great
+flood....” Gillian had always thought that an interesting but rather
+exaggerated way of referring to a kiss. “Love that had robbed us of
+immortal things,” that was better, a beautiful line, all o’s—better,
+Gillian thought, than the one about the swan and the twilight wave,
+which didn’t somehow come in quite naturally. “I suppose he’d seen a
+swan at twilight, and used it up for his last line in the same way as
+Tennyson used his nature notes.” Gillian didn’t care about these
+detachable beauties. You didn’t find them in Shakespeare’s sonnets. All
+the great lines fitted there: “The mortal moon hath her eclipse
+endured,” or, “Come in the rearward of a conquered woe.” ...
+
+
+                                   VI
+
+By the time Gillian got back to the Club she had walked herself out of
+love to literature, and there, on a happy well-known path, she was
+herself again. No need to give William second sand, after all. But she’d
+do it, for a treat, for William’s treat, and he should walk up and down
+outside the window of her bedroom on the street side while she did it,
+and address the children on their way home from school at half-past
+four, a performance he, and they, enjoyed vastly.
+
+But when she turned into the courtyard she was met by an excited crowd
+headed by Mrs. Gordon and superintended from the window of her
+ground-floor flat by Mrs. Barraclough herself. Club members, some of
+whom Gillian had never seen before, were visible at windows or present
+on the gravel under the laburnum-tree, and a first glance informed
+Gillian that V.V. was not among them. But the Countess, in hat, veil,
+gloves, parasol, and a fan, was conspicuous; as was Mrs. Middleton,
+whose hair was coming down and who had buttoned the blouse she had
+donned in haste in most of the wrong holes.
+
+And over the noise of the mob, drowning it in a torrent of excruciating
+protest, flooding the sky with clamour, the voice of William shrieked
+from the open window of the book-room under the roof.
+
+“Oh, Miss!” cried Mrs. Gordon, trundling towards Gillian as she emerged
+from the archway. “’Ere you are at last. ’E’s been goin’ on like this
+for a _h_our or more, and none of us can’t get anywhere near ’im to
+pacify of ’im.”
+
+“Oh, dear,” said Gillian, “but haven’t you my duplicate key?”
+
+“No, Miss, that I ’aven’t.” Mrs. Gordon was righteousness under outrage.
+“That Miss Vanderleyden come and borrowed it off me to take ’im a piece
+of groundsel, and she’ve gone off with it and ’ere we are.”
+
+“And groundsel isn’t a bit good for him,” said Mrs. Middleton, “we all
+know that. Do you think dear William is dying in agony?”
+
+“No,” said Gillian, “he’s evidently perfectly well. Only cross. I’m so
+very sorry. I’ll go straight up and scold him.”
+
+Up she went, accompanied by Mrs. Middleton, who loved William with
+passion, and followed at a speaking distance by the Countess, who made
+no mystery of her feelings towards “this savage bird.”
+
+And, even as she ran, listening to the sympathetic bleat of Mrs.
+Middleton at her side and pursued by the blistering invective of the
+Countess behind her, Gillian was conscious that Mrs. Gordon’s pardonable
+rancour against Miss Vanderleyden was shared by her fellow members. And
+it was not because she had locked a screaming William in and disturbed
+them all over their tea that they were angry with V.V. She felt that in
+a way they were glad to have this excuse for saying, “So _very_
+peculiar. A little officious. Members should _never_ borrow the
+duplicate key.”
+
+William, it turned out, had a real grievance. Touched by one of those
+synchronizing impulses which it was her queer gift to receive and act
+upon, V.V. had herself come over and had given William fresh seed, fresh
+sand, and fresh water, as well as the bunch of groundsel which now lay,
+severely mauled but uneaten, on the bottom of his cage. But not content
+with these ministrations, she had, with a zeal commensurate to the
+protest it had evoked, polished the whole of the cage, bar by bar, wire
+by wire, with Bluebell. It stood there glittering in the afternoon sun,
+the brass ring by which it was carried from room to room a perfect blaze
+of reflected light. The room reeked of the polish, and it was against
+this smell quite as much as in disapproval of the unwonted scintillation
+of his home, that William’s voice was still most devastatingly raised.
+
+It was not until she had quieted the bird that Gillian caught sight of a
+three-cornered note, stuck in the back of the old settee and addressed
+to her in V.V.’s black, curly handwriting, out of which the tops of the
+t’s and d’s stuck like pins in an untidy pincushion:
+
+   “Belovedest” (V.V. had an expansive epistolary style), “I’ve
+   polished up Cocky’s cage for a s’prize and I’m going to the
+   concert with Hinerik, so don’t look me up till I get in. A
+   thousand kisses—V.V.”
+
+Gillian sat with William rubbing his beak against her ear and clucking,
+“Pretty Cocky! Pretty Cocky! S’rimps for tea,” and tore the note into
+tiny fragments, wondering why V.V.’s letters moved her to nothing but
+dismay, when V.V.’s presence had in it the power to fill her with
+transporting joy. The soft, thick, gilt-edged paper on which the note
+was written tore without sound into pieces, each of which showed at the
+furred indefinite edges little glistering filaments of the pulp from
+which it had been dried. Almost like blotting-paper, she thought,
+remembering how sore her middle finger had been for days when she had
+sliced it against the sharp, hard corner of the note-paper on which she
+used to imitate the Bottomley signature from Knightsbridge.
+
+Presently, to her surprise, Larry knocked at the door.
+
+“I’ve come to tell you,” he said, pushing his hair back from his eyes as
+he subsided into the chesterfield, “I’ve come to tell you that I’m sorry
+I let fly at Jane as I did. It was a rotten thing to do, anyway, and
+with you there”—he flicked a fragment of the torn letter away from the
+back of the couch with his hand as if disposing of himself and his
+behaviour for a while.
+
+“I didn’t like that figure myself,” Gillian conceded, “but Jane seemed
+to think you deserved it.”
+
+“So I do.” said Larry moodily. “I’m a rotter.”
+
+“That’s silly,” said Gillian. “It was rather rotten of Jane, you know,
+as well—to sell it, I mean.”
+
+“Oh, Jane’s got to get her own back. Besides, she didn’t make it to sell
+it. She made it because she thinks I ought to do one thing at once.
+She’s afraid of my atavistic impulses. In a way she’s right. But life’s
+a great thing in so many ways. And Jane’ll only hear of me having it in
+one.”
+
+“Well, one thing at a time is the only way if you’re going to do
+anything great.”
+
+“Who wants to do anything great? It’s like being a non-drinker, a
+non-smoker, and a Nonconformist like an old gardener of ours, because he
+wanted to be sure of living a long time in this world and missing
+hell-fire in the next. The great object of life is living—not saving
+life up to do things with. I’d rather die of life at thirty than hang on
+‘doing.’”
+
+“Jane believes in doing things.”
+
+“I ought to know what Jane believes by this time.”
+
+“Larry, are you in love with Jane?”
+
+“No. Not now. That’s the trouble.”
+
+“I don’t think,” said Gillian slowly, “I don’t really suppose that I
+quite understand about being in love.”
+
+“Your state is the more gracious.”
+
+“Well. It’s supposed to bring happiness.”
+
+“It’s the devil. It has the primal, eldest curse upon it.”
+
+“Oh, Larry—that was murder, not love.”
+
+“It wasn’t. You’re a shallow, superficial child, and you’re talking like
+a parrot—like that William of yours.”
+
+“But the King in _Hamlet_ had killed his brother, that’s what his
+offence was rank about.”
+
+“What had he done it for? Shakespeare was a subtler johnny than that.
+Read your Bible. What is the eldest curse? Not Cain’s. Golly, no! His
+was easy, ‘a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth’—lots of us are that,
+and like it. No, the primal, eldest curse is Adam’s: ‘I will put enmity
+between thee and the woman.’ _Enmity_—‘It shall bruise thy head.’ That’s
+love,” said Larry. And he thrust both hands deep into the pockets of his
+flannel trousers—he was wearing a perfectly normal, grey flannel suit
+that afternoon—and began to whistle, through his teeth, a tune which
+Gillian recognized after a bar or two to be “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”
+
+But she was quite sure that Larry had no notion of what he was
+whistling, and she didn’t tell him.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER FIVE.
+                                ILLUSION
+
+
+                                   I
+
+Larry went to Germany. He said he knew a place in the Bavarian Tyrol
+where in the third week in June the hay was all flowers and no grass and
+each separate flower had its butterfly coloured to match itself, and
+that there was an inn, _Zur Goldenen Rose_, at a place called
+Dinkelsbühl, on the way back, which hadn’t had a chair added to it since
+the eighteenth century. And, why, when there were these things to be
+inherited on the Earth, he or anyone should stay in a jerry-built studio
+in Battersea Park Road——? Larry was in a difficult temper. Heinrich, who
+couldn’t go with him, partly because his orchestra was active until
+after the third week in June and partly because he hadn’t any clothes to
+travel in, was very pensive about it both before and after Larry’s
+departure from Waterloo in a crashing thunderstorm late one Sunday
+evening.
+
+Larry was going by Havre. It seemed a long way round and was not so
+cheap as the other ways. But Larry was in the kind of temper which makes
+people—and more especially men—go the longest, dearest way on purpose,
+and gives them some interior satisfaction of the kind which arises from
+being able to blame others for these self-inflicted aggravations of an
+initial injury. Larry’s state of mind was in no sense Heinrich’s fault,
+but Heinrich pined and wilted terribly after his departure.
+
+“I shall have that Hinerik to tea to cheer him up a bit,” said V.V., and
+Gillian, who admired nothing in V.V.’s rather featureless character so
+ardently as her real kindliness, went off to Seaford, comforted by the
+idea of the comfort these two apparently friendless beings would give
+one another.
+
+Gillian’s errand was not of her seeking. On the day of Larry’s departure
+she had received a letter in an imitation less exact than her own of Old
+Winona’s hand. It was dated, “Marine Hotel, Seaford,” and ran:
+
+   “MY DEAR GILLIAN,
+
+   Miss Macfarlane is very kindly acting as my amanuensis to-day,
+   and I am asking her to tell you that I have come down here on a
+   matter of important private business on which I should very much
+   appreciate the benefit of your advice.
+
+   The matter concerns a little gift which I mean to make to our
+   dear Lilac on her return from her wedding-journey in three
+   months’ time, and as time presses I shall be glad if you will
+   come down here for a week or two as soon as your classes at the
+   Polytechnicum are over.
+
+   I enclose a small cheque to cover the necessary expenses, and
+   remain,
+
+                                             Yours, affectionately,
+                                                  WINONA BOTTOMLEY.
+
+   P.S.—The car will meet you at Lewes.”
+
+“Goodness!” said Gillian when she had read this epistle through twice,
+“what ever _can_ she be doing? She can’t have gone down to Seaford to
+knit a shawl for Lilac, and I’ve never known her make anything else. I
+wonder if she’s mad. The Macfarlane in office has evidently not been
+able to persuade her that I’m going to her own revered de Stormonts’,
+which goes on for ever like that dreadful brook, and has no terms. I
+think I’d better go at once.”
+
+So she telegraphed to the Marine Hotel, called on Jane and excused
+herself from an engagement to sit to her for that portrait of the
+Changeling which Larry had never painted and which Jane was now going to
+attempt, and with the zealous aid of V.V., who washed and ironed odds
+and ends of ribbon and lace and packed them for her with the utmost
+delicacy and precision, got herself started for Seaford within
+twenty-four hours of receiving the summons.
+
+The car met her at Lewes. This simple phrase but poorly conveys the
+experience of being met by Old Winona’s car. It began on the platform,
+where two startlingly liveried menials flanked a bowing stationmaster,
+drawn up, unfortunately, in front of the Pullman in which Gillian had
+not thought it necessary to travel, although the cheque for expenses had
+allowed margins in every possible direction. It continued, in
+processional splendour, with Tompkins bearing her ticket and umbrella
+before, and Wilkins carrying her reasonably new suit-case and her quite
+unreasonably battered hat-box behind, and it ended, much to the delight
+of an admiring crowd, when the car, a Rolls-Royce of the largest size,
+mistook the road and, with three men to direct and prevent its ways, had
+to back down one steep and cobbled hill and up another before it could
+find a space sufficient to turn round in. The ways out of Lewes from the
+railway station are almost as difficult as if they had been expressly
+planned for the bewilderment of haughty and companioned chauffeurs.
+
+Miss Macfarlane, a new one, met her in the hall. She was a thin and
+serious girl who had not done very well at Newnham and was finding
+private-secretaryship more remunerative but less straightforward than
+the scholastic career for which Nature had planned and Education had
+almost fitted her. On the way up to Lady Bottomley’s private suite
+Gillian gathered that things were in a bad way. “And I am afraid,” said
+the Miss Macfarlane with depression, “that the fault is partly mine. I
+had hoped to inspire Lady Bottomley with a wish to visit the châteaux of
+the Loire herself. Instead of which we are having frightful trouble down
+here.”
+
+Some of the trouble, it appeared, had been due to the presence at the
+Marine Hotel of another Belfast baronet’s widow, a lady on a visit of
+supervision to an only son in a preparatory school who had broken a
+quantity of bones in a riding accident. This lady, in virtue of her
+sorrows, had claimed the suite, the best suite on the first floor, for
+which Lady Bottomley had negotiated.
+
+The air was still surcharged with the fury of the storm which had raged
+over the claims. Finally, Old Winona had won, on a point of precedence.
+“Ours is the earlier creation,” she had announced. Sir John had been
+raised to the title in 1906. And Lady Eaton, whose husband had had to
+wait until 1908 before his merits had been formally acknowledged by a
+dilatory government, had admitted her just defeat. The other matter,
+however, was more serious.
+
+The glories of Chenonceaux and Blois, the architectural resplendency of
+Amboise, the marvels of Tours for which the mild young secretary had a
+deep enthusiasm, had been displayed before her employer in so many
+photographs, diagrams, and literary panegyrics that they had gone to the
+poor lady’s head.
+
+“She wants,” said Miss Macfarlane, “to have bits of them copied into a
+kind of composite villa here, and Sir Edwin Lutyens has just refused to
+do it for her. She will tell you the rest herself.”
+
+Gillian did not hear the rest at once, for she had been assigned a suite
+of her own, bedroom, bathroom and sitting-room, on the second floor,
+and, having a horror of lifts in descent, had wandered for some time
+along unfamiliar corridors all carpeted in the same monstrous pattern
+before she found the rooms Lady Bottomley now triumphantly occupied.
+
+“My dear,” said Old Winona, who, by way of emphasizing the difference
+between an hotel and her own home, was wearing an imposing bonnet
+although she had not been out that day, “I am glad you have been able to
+get away so soon. Do you know anything of architecture?”
+
+“Very little,” said Gillian.
+
+“Socially, I mean,” said Old Winona.
+
+This was difficult, but Gillian was able to gather that what was
+required of her was information about architects of a more docile
+temperament than those of riper years or wider fame were proving
+themselves to possess. Young men, willing to carry out the plans which a
+lavish and devoted mother was making for her children’s dwelling;
+impecunious young men, in short, were what the lady sought.
+
+“I have,” said Old Winona, “already purchased the house, an admirable
+one: south aspect, modern sanitation, large grounds, within easy, but
+not too easy, reach of the sea. Children,” said Old Winona with a long,
+prospective look through the closed windows and across the waters of the
+Channel, “children have been known to escape from their nurses, however
+numerous.”
+
+“But Lilac——” Gillian began, intending to point out that Lilac, though
+not yet of age, could swim quite well.
+
+“Not yet—not quite yet, I dare say.” Lilac’s mother-in-law was evidently
+hopeful, possibly even better informed of the future than Gillian. “But
+though she has many years before her, there is no time to be lost.”
+
+Dinner was coming up processionally, borne in courses by a staff visibly
+awed by what had happened during the installation of the occupant of the
+first-floor suite, before Gillian had heard the whole story. The house
+intended as a surprise for Lilac and Toby was not to be destroyed. It
+was a large, three-storied affair, gabled and balconied with terraces to
+its garden, and Old Winona’s idea was to have replicas of as many of the
+distinguishing features of the châteaux in question as could possibly be
+crowded together affixed to the building, so that in none of its aspects
+it should fail to remind the beholder of at least one, and often of
+several of them. And, having been told by one famous architect that he
+thanked her but that, praise God, he was not a reincarnation of
+Viollet-le-Duc, and by another that nothing would induce him to consider
+her project, she had applied, very feebly seconded by Miss Macfarlane,
+to the local builders and found that they simply could not begin to
+understand her idea. So, knowing that Gillian lived in Chelsea and was
+therefore surrounded by people who drew and planned for the upper
+classes, Old Winona had decided to leave the problem in her hands.
+
+Gillian sat up for an hour with the Miss Macfarlane, after the old lady
+had gone to bed, trying to think of a way to save Lilac from the
+consequences of the secretary’s plot for foreign travel. Nothing, of
+that Gillian was quite sure, nothing would induce Lilac to live at
+Seaford for any part of her time, just as not even the occasion to
+select her own models would have moved Old Winona abroad without
+anything less than six months’ preparation.
+
+“You might just as well have told her about Ludwig of Bavaria and gone
+on touring round all those crazy castles next summer,” she said to Miss
+Macfarlane, who was horrified, not caring for the idea of visiting any
+places that were not known to be famous for good art and authenticated
+history.
+
+But, two days later, having seen the house, which had been originally
+built as a school, and having interviewed the puzzled builder, Gillian
+had an inspiration.
+
+Jane would be quite equal to constructing a model of such a fantasia as
+Old Winona desired; and superintending Jane might distract the old lady
+for a time and would help to preserve the builder’s sanity which her
+direction, supplemented by portfolios of photographs and engravings, had
+severely shaken. And, so long as the house itself remained untouched
+until Toby and Lilac returned to take up their own responsibilities, it
+could be put into the market again; whereas, once improved according to
+plan, it must remain for ever planted on the Bottomley family, only too
+probably to be known, as other less comprehensive outrages had been
+known in other places, as Bottomley’s Folly.
+
+The idea pleased Old Winona, and it enchanted Jane, who came down for
+two days and went back to London with a suit-case full of plans and
+photographs.
+
+Gillian stayed on at Seaford for another week, bathing and walking over
+the cliffs towards Cuckmere Haven and up and down the Seven Sisters all
+morning, and relieving Miss Macfarlane after tea, and going on to Glynde
+when Lady Bottomley abandoned the Marine Hotel in order to open a bazaar
+in Belfast in the first week in July.
+
+When she got back to London she found Jane and Mr. Quist fully occupied
+in modelling, painting, and varnishing such a doll’s-house as had never
+been made in any studio. Gillian looked in at the workshop on her way
+home for Victoria.
+
+“Delirious, ain’t it?” said Jane, “and not a staircase, not a gargoyle
+without documentary evidence of its origin in other brains than ours.
+The colour I’ll admit is often my own. I’ve never faltered more or less
+in my great task of happiness since I started this. What a peach, what a
+queen, your divine Winona! How sumptuous in outlook! A ton of plasticine
+in the yard and everything handsome about me. I’m having a
+painting-blouse embroidered with bicycles to keep my mind from being
+puffed up, and you’ve got to come and sit to me like a ghost at
+twilight, to prevent my spirit from being snuffed out.”
+
+“I shall have to sit with V.V. at twilight for a bit now,” said Gillian.
+“I’ve been away for three weeks and she’ll expect me to make it up to
+her at first.”
+
+“You’ll find V.V. otherwise engaged,” said Jane darkly.
+
+“Goodness!” said Gillian. “Engaged?”
+
+“To the unfortunate being she will call Hinerik,” said Jane.
+
+“But she must be years older.”
+
+“She is. Ten at least. She would be.”
+
+“What ever made them do it?” wondered Gillian.
+
+“Hadn’t you better ask them?” said Jane. “It might be love, you know.”
+
+
+                                   II
+
+Heinrich was extremely pleased about his engagement. He wore a “Mizpah”
+ring, which V.V. had given him, and a rather small Trilby hat which he
+had disinterred from some forgotten cupboard himself. Arrayed in these
+additions to his toilet, he called formally on Gillian that evening.
+V.V. was not at home. She was working late in Bond Street all that week,
+renewing the youth of the fashionable clientele before its final exodus
+from town.
+
+“I have taken ze responsibility for zis life,” he explained, as though
+V.V. were another cat or sparrow. “V.V. has never enough money till ze
+end of ze munz. For ze last two, tree, four, five days she does eat
+nozzing.”
+
+“Heinrich! What ever do you mean?” Gillian was startled. It had never
+occurred to her to inquire into V.V.’s finances, but all sorts of
+instances crowded into her mind at Heinrich’s words.
+
+“I mean what I say. V.V. has not enough money for food for four weeks,
+only for tree. In ze force week she starve. On ze first day of ze monz
+she have fresh money. Zen she eat. So I marry her.” Heinrich was
+delighted with the adequacy of this solution.
+
+“Have you got married while I was away?”
+
+“Not yet. It is to come. Now we food on love.”
+
+This was beyond Gillian. “Will she live with you and Larry in the studio
+when you do marry?” she asked, turning to practical matters for relief.
+
+“No. I give ze studio to Larry for himself. V.V. and I we go in many
+countries. Countries where it is warm. Italy and Africa and Hindustan,”
+said Heinrich.
+
+“You’ll have to wait then,” said Gillian with reference to the golden
+liberty which was known to lie behind the clauses of Heinrich’s uncle’s
+will.
+
+“A little, yes. But not so much time as before. I go to my ozzer onkel,
+and tell to him zat now I marry. And he say I may have some money out of
+ze will, from him. He is not quite a good man—but there is in him a
+little goodness sometimes. I sign him a paper so that he have twice as
+much out of ze will by and then. And I get sree hundred pounds for each
+year till ze will is over.”
+
+Unversed though she was in the ethics of finance, Gillian had a distant
+feeling that Heinrich’s uncle was being the not quite good man Heinrich
+had admitted him to be in the question of that other uncle’s will on
+which his future depended. But Heinrich had done his best for V.V.
+
+And he looked taller and braver, more nearly a man, and rather
+distressingly a little less like a fairy than he had seemed to her till
+now.
+
+“Does V.V. want to marry you?” she asked.
+
+“Oh, very much.”
+
+In the dark of her mind Gillian felt a jealous pang. V.V. then had
+forgotten her.
+
+“I go now to take her to dinner, in a restaurant: proper dinner,” said
+Heinrich impressively, “wiz prrawns.”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Late that night there was a furtive knock at Gillian’s bedroom door.
+Gillian called “Come in,” wondering who could be there. It was V.V. She
+stood in the doorway smiling, excited.
+
+“Oh, you darling,” she said in a hungry whisper, “oh, you darling.”
+
+“V.V.! how did you get in? Gordon locked up hours ago.”
+
+“I had your house-key copied while you were away,” said V.V., and did
+not wait to hear how Gillian took this announcement, but strode across
+the room and knelt by the bedside, thrusting her long, strong, bony arms
+in under the bed-clothes and dragging Gillian to the edge of the bed in
+an almost angry hug.
+
+Gillian struggled out of the straining clasp and sat up, pulling the
+ends of her long plaits from under the sheet and shaking out the
+crumpled bows of blue ribbon with which they were tied.
+
+“V.V., how thrilling!”
+
+“Isn’t it! isn’t it!” said V.V., burying her face in Gillian’s shoulder.
+Her hair smelt of brilliantine—a sweet, heavy smell like
+scented-geranium leaves when you pinch them—and of fresh
+Virginia-cigarette smoke, and she had been drinking liqueur. She was
+shaking all over and Gillian could feel the quick, pushing beat of her
+heart vibrate in the wire of the stretched spring-mattress of the little
+iron bedstead.
+
+“Goodness!” said Gillian, putting one arm round V.V.’s trembling
+shoulder. “Are you as happy as all that?”
+
+“Of course I am, you darling, aren’t you?”
+
+“Well, no! You can’t expect me to be quite as excited as you are—or as
+Heinrich is.”
+
+“Hinerik? What’s he got to do with it?” V.V. sat back on her heels and
+frowned. “I’m excited because I’ve got you back again. You know that,
+you monkey.”
+
+Gillian felt uncomfortable. She had not expected this pudicity in V.V.
+
+“I’m sorry,” she apologized, “I thought you knew I knew. Heinrich told
+me. So did Jane.”
+
+“Oh, that,” said V.V., “that’s Hinerik’s funeral.”
+
+“I thought it was to be your wedding.”
+
+“P’r’aps. Some day. But we won’t bother about silly old weddings now
+I’ve got you back again.”
+
+“Get the basket-chair and a cushion and come and talk to me a minute,”
+said Gillian, clasping her hands round her knees outside the bed-clothes
+and preparing to conduct an inquisition. “You tell me such a lot about
+your life, all in bits, and I can’t ever put them quite together in any
+real plan.”
+
+“Oh, mine’s not been a planny life,” said V.V., dragging the chair and
+cushion close to the bedside.
+
+“Well, never mind about the whole of it now,” said Gillian, “but try, if
+you can, to tell me what Heinrich meant about you not having proper
+meals some weeks.”
+
+“Oh yes.” V.V. was frank as always, with a baffling and allusive
+frankness that more often than not darkened the situation she attempted
+to illuminate. “My brother, you know. He’s not quite all there—not mad
+you know, but sometimes he drinks a little, and sometimes he goes out
+and paints the town red, and then he can’t send me the whole of my
+allowance.”
+
+“I didn’t know you had an allowance. I thought you worked in Bond
+Street.”
+
+“Oh, that’s a debt. The rent for the flat at Ostend. I’ll be paid by
+October and then I shan’t go to silly old Jacynthe’s any more.”
+
+“But V.V., if your brother is like that he oughtn’t to have the money to
+control. You ought to have it and send him his allowance.”
+
+“Yes, I know. But he’s the eldest, and a man. He’s the trustee too, but
+I don’t like him. If I marry Hinerik and he can get hold of his money
+we’ll put my brother into a home and he can have it all.”
+
+“How did Heinrich find out?”
+
+“Oh, he just came to dinner and there wasn’t any. Old Mrs. Gordon
+wouldn’t send any up because I’d not paid my book. She’s generally quite
+good about waiting, but when she came up on Saturday with the books, I
+was unpacking some bath-salts and she seemed to think I could have done
+without them.”
+
+“Oh, V.V., that’s why you’re so thin.”
+
+“Oh, I was always bony, even”—V.V. did not intend to be enigmatic—“even
+at Ostend.”
+
+And then she yawned and Gillian said she was sleepy too, and V.V. kissed
+her and went over to her own flat.
+
+
+                                  III
+
+“V.V.,” said Gillian, “I can’t make out why your bedroom is so different
+from this room.”
+
+They were sitting in the large room at Number Thirty-Six, and Gillian
+was contrasting its considered effects, seen by daylight to be hastily
+contrived, with the muslin and pink ribbons of V.V.’s bedroom, the outer
+of the two communicating rooms that completed the set, into the inner of
+which Gillian had never penetrated.
+
+“Oh,” said V.V., “this is all Jacky’s furniture. She’s on tour, Cape
+Town and Australia. She won’t be back till Christmas. She was very good
+to me when I was down on my luck.”
+
+“But you mayn’t sublet flats in the Club, or be away for more than three
+months at a time.”
+
+“We haven’t sublet. We live together. But it’s mostly her furniture.
+Hers and Peter’s.”
+
+“Who’s Peter?” Gillian was conscious of a growing irritation as each new
+woman with a man’s name emerged from the horde of V.V.’s acquaintances.
+
+“Oh, Peter’s Smithy. I was with her before I met Jacky. She’s married
+now. She won’t ask for her furniture because we quarrelled and she
+doesn’t want Evelyn to know that she lived with me. She never told him
+that. He was in the same company on tour and he never came to our flat.”
+
+Gillian did not pursue Smithy and Evelyn into the seclusion of their
+matrimonial relationships. She was not particularly interested in their
+vague and distant passage through V.V.’s life and she was beginning to
+dread the copious and unilluminating anecdote with which V.V. replied to
+any polite manifestation of concern for the fortunes of these drifting
+adventurers.
+
+V.V. was polishing her manicure-tools. She sat on a low seat by the
+table, a duster on her knees and her case of instruments, emptied of its
+contents, lying by them on an outspread sheet of the _Daily Mail_. The
+sun, shining on her bent head, brought out chestnut lights in the waves
+of her dark hair and showed her pale skin, yellowed and sallow below her
+ears where her neck had not been covered with the fine, perfumed powder
+she always used.
+
+Gillian sat in the window darning her socks. Her attention was absorbed
+in the in-and-out in-and-out of her short darning-needle, as it drove
+its way backwards and forwards through the warp and woof of the thread
+which stretched across the painted glass of the china darning-egg in the
+heel of her brown stocking. There was something very satisfying to
+Gillian about a good large darn. It gave the stocking, which had looked
+so desperate and uncomfortable with a ragged hole in it, a cared-for and
+rather interesting appearance of having survived adventure and being
+prepared for more, and it was, of all necessary mending, the most
+interesting to do, surpassing the sewing on of buttons, always a
+tiresome business, especially when, as usually happened, the buttons
+didn’t quite match and the strong cotton was missing.
+
+She was in V.V.’s flat for the day because her own was given over to the
+workmen who were installing a telephone in Number Seven. This was a gift
+of Lady Bottomley’s, who, on several occasions, had wished to telephone
+to Gillian without success for the sufficient reason that there was no
+telephone at the Club.
+
+The innovation was being showered upon her in recognition of the donor’s
+sense of the services Gillian had rendered in introducing Jane Bird. It
+was also a valedictory beneficence. Having learnt by one of those rich
+coincidences which do occur even in the most heavily sheltered lives,
+that the Royal Princess who was to open the next bazaar on her horizon
+had just returned from visiting the châteaux of the Loire, Old Winona
+had decided that what Royalty had done she could do also, and Miss
+Macfarlane, her days heavy with time-tables, hotel tariffs and
+interviews with Cook’s clerks and couriers, was realizing the profound
+sadness of having a long-treasured dream come true (as it so often comes
+true in this trying world) more than a little wrong.
+
+Jane had gone with them, but not Gillian. This was entirely Gillian’s
+own fault, for an invitation so pressing that it had almost the force of
+a command, had been issued to her as soon as the decision to go at all
+had been reached. And she had refused, alleging that the three weeks
+already spent at Seaford must be made up before the Secretarial School
+closed for a fortnight in August. Old Winona, who respected a business
+reason, had acquiesced insisting, however, that the occasion must be
+marked in some way, and choosing the telephone as its monument.
+
+To Miss Macfarlane (her real name Gillian discovered was
+Bronx-Prittlewell, and this did seem an excuse for going on calling her
+Macfarlane)—to the harassed secretary Gillian confessed that the
+prospect of three weeks’ pilgrimage from one best hotel to another in a
+party consisting of Old Winona, her maid, a courier, three chauffeurs,
+two cars, as well as Jane and herself, was so asphyxiating that she felt
+as if they would all be smothered if she, Gillian, added herself and her
+luggage to the caravan. But, in her heart of hearts, she knew that she
+would have endured the restraints and adored the enjoyments of such a
+pilgrimage with the utmost indifference to one and abandonment to the
+other if it had not meant separating herself again from V.V.
+
+V.V. herself had been quite unscrupulous about it, and had declared that
+she would not look after William if Gillian went to France. She had not
+looked after William while Gillian was at Seaford. He had gone down to
+the basement for the period of Gillian’s absence, on a visit to the
+Gordons who looked upon him with mingled admiration and terror as being
+“almost a Christian.” And, Christian or no, William had come back with
+Mabel’s sniff and Mr. Gordon’s cough and Mrs. Gordon’s raucous cry of
+“’Arry!” (this being the title by which Mr. Gordon was known on the
+hearth) added to his repertoire, and was in consequence rather more than
+Gillian could bear at times. For William was always immensely proud of
+any new phrases he had acquired, and had sniffed and coughed and
+summoned ’Arry with penetrating distinctness and with reiterations which
+would not be quenched for at least half an hour every time Gillian had
+come into the flat since her return. She had vowed that she would never
+go away again unless either V.V. or Heinrich were left behind in charge
+of him. But Heinrich had gone to Bristol for a Musical Festival in which
+the orchestra to which he belonged was competing, and V.V. thrust her
+own deserted state as well as her refusal to harbour William into the
+scale when Gillian had hesitated over the invitation from Knightsbridge.
+
+So Gillian saw the expedition start without her and remained at home to
+solace V.V. and to strive to soften William’s memories of kitchen life.
+
+On this particular Saturday morning he was entertaining the telephone
+men with the whole of his repertoire and Gillian, having warned them
+that everything they said would be repeated by the bird, hoping in that
+way to keep William pure from the grosser profanities of proletarian
+expletive, darned her stockings and listened to V.V., and prayed that
+William would not and could not learn to make a noise like telephone men
+hammering telephone nails into the well-built and very resisting walls
+of the Mordaunt Club.
+
+V.V. prattled on, cleaning the blades of the tiny knives and slender
+scissors in her outfit, taking minute stains out of the ivory
+file-handles and the pushing and picking instruments, fitting fresh
+chamois leather on the large wooden buffers for nail-polishing, testing
+the screw tops and the glass stoppers of some bottles and putting fresh
+corks into others. She worked without much method but with fastidious
+care. Everything about V.V. was fastidiously cared for, immaculate,
+crisp or shining according to its kind, from the glass of the
+window-panes in her flat, which sparkled every day of the year as the
+windows of Gillian’s rooms only sparkled for two or three days after the
+quarterly cleaning, to the Japanese paper napkins which replaced
+table-linen in her domain and which she used extravagantly and burned
+after every meal. V.V. might go without food in the weeks when her
+allowance ran short, but she would not go without soap and hot water.
+
+“I wonder,” said Gillian, “if it’s eating so little or washing so much
+that makes you so thin.”
+
+“I ’xpec’ it’s a bit of both,” said V.V., whose speech was far more
+slovenly than her person; and she rambled on into a fresh tangle of
+autobiography in which Smithy and the landlady of some theatrical
+lodgings in Wrexham and a box of Keating’s powder all played equally
+ambiguous parts.
+
+“What I can’t understand,” said Gillian as the story finally lost itself
+in a species of delta with V.V. sitting on Smithy’s dress-basket all one
+Sunday morning in the cloak-room of a Welsh railway station whose name
+V.V. kept, quite unsuccessfully, trying to retrieve from a long list of
+railway stations she had waited in, “what I keep on trying to get you to
+explain, V.V., is why if you’ve never been an actress you travelled
+about so much with touring companies. Were you really never on the
+stage?”
+
+“Never quite,” replied V.V., “I walked on once in a play Jackie was in,
+_The Notorious Mrs. Something_ I think it was, or else _When Knights
+Were Bold_, I’m not sure, but I was too tall for the clothes and they
+got a girl the next night. I was sharing Peter’s rooms then. She was ill
+and couldn’t afford things, and my being there helped. It’s cheaper
+travelling two.”
+
+“You’re a kind creature,” said Gillian.
+
+V.V. changed the subject.
+
+“Come along, Gillian, put your horrid old stockings away and I’ll do
+your hands for you.”
+
+“Wait one minute. I must just put one more thread through this darn to
+make it tight. It’s such a beauti_full_ darn, V.V., worth having a
+blistered toe for. I walked that toe through in Richmond Park on Friday
+evening, seeing the full moon with deer, and I’ve darned it all into the
+hole again, moon, and mist over the lake, and an owl that hooted and
+flew—no, it didn’t fly, what is the proper word for the way owls make no
+noise when they go through the space in front of your nose at night?”
+
+“How you do talk!” said V.V., filling the dragon bowl with warm soapsuds
+and a little sponge, “make haste or we shan’t get both hands done before
+lunchtime.”
+
+So Gillian put away her darning and pushed up the sleeves of her cotton
+frock. She lay back among the gay cushions of Jackie’s Russian-ballet
+room which V.V. piled one by one into the big arm-chair by the window,
+with consummate knowledge of where you did and where you didn’t need a
+cushion to be. And, one hand laid on the clean towel on V.V.’s knee
+while she dabbled in the warm, scented soapsuds in the green-dragon bowl
+with the other, Gillian forgot the flatness of V.V.’s voice, the
+baldness of her narrative style, forgot that she could never talk to
+V.V. about the shape of a word, or the meaning of a colour, or the way
+people took in life, but could only ask her questions to which V.V.
+never could give coherent answers. She could let herself be petted and
+caressed and flattered and told how each of her fingers as it passed
+under file and cutter and emery board to the ultimate polishing,
+exceeded any finger that V.V. had ever polished before in the beauty of
+its shape, the fineness of its skin, the rising of the half-moons at the
+base of its nail and the colour of the tip. It was all nonsense, of
+course, nonsense of the worst kind, but it was extraordinarily soothing
+on a hot midsummer day at the end of a long week of shorthand and
+typing, card-indexing and tables of precedence, and the most
+preposterous lectures on how to address envelopes to persons of title,
+it was balmy and cooling to lie back in heavenly comfort and let your
+mind be vitiated by it for an hour. Gillian would have been very lonely
+after Lilac’s wedding if she had not found V.V.
+
+
+                                   IV
+
+They sat on through the hot afternoon drowsing in easy chairs by the
+open windows, the green-and-orange sunblinds drawn so low that, of all
+the world outside, only the glitter of the sun on the river could be
+seen under the rims of the sunblinds. Three tawny roses in a slim
+rainbow-glass vase dropped their petals hour by hour on the black table
+under the mirror and filled the still air of the room with their breath;
+the fragrance coming and going in obedience to that mystery of a
+flower’s life which gives its odour a rhythm and makes it rise and fall
+by a law we do not know.
+
+It was too hot to darn any more socks, and her hands, sleek and languid,
+with the scent of V.V.’s unguents still hanging around them, lay idle in
+Gillian’s lap, the milky opal in her mother’s engagement-ring which she
+always wore, gleaming in the tranquil light with almost as rich a lustre
+as the over-polished nail of the finger on which it shone. One of V.V.’s
+sharp little knives had slipped and cut into the flesh at the side of
+Gillian’s right-hand little finger, and the smarting of this
+infinitesimal wound was pain enough to prevent her falling completely
+asleep. But V.V., tired and happy, was sleeping, her mouth a little open
+and her head fallen sideways against a purple cushion; and, as she
+slept, she gave occasional soft, puffing snores, like the engine of a
+doll’s train going uphill.
+
+With eyes closed and sagging mouth, V.V.’s face lost the light and glow
+which in her waking hours made it so difficult to realize that she was
+not as intelligent as she was vivacious. Gillian, watching her, saw what
+Larry’s trained eye had taken in at a glance—the abnormal fading away of
+the jaw-bone, which, after lifting the chin away from the long, thin
+column of the neck, disappeared into the cheek, giving to the lower part
+of the side face a flat, unmodelled look. The nose too, long and blunt,
+with wide, unwinged nostrils, was unfinished, almost embryonic in its
+failure to achieve any dignity of form. And yet the rest of her; the
+wide flat shoulders; the thin flanks, and long, harmoniously
+proportioned and swift-moving hands and arms; the slim, straight legs
+with that moving line from thigh to knee which was to Gillian the first
+element of grace in any human beauty, belonged to an inbred fineness, an
+inherited civilization which should have had its corresponding signal in
+her mind. Gillian had searched the more eagerly for this confirmation of
+excellence in V.V., as she grew increasingly aware of her own
+enslavement to the infatuating spell which the thought, far more than
+the actual presence of the elder woman had established upon her life. It
+was galling to her dignity, and contrary to an ascetic strain in her
+nature to admit that V.V.’s predominance was due to the eager adoration,
+the curiously maternal devotion she professed and practised. Gillian, it
+is true, darned V.V.’s stockings and had, since she learned of V.V.’s
+ways with her allowance, made it her business to see that V.V. had three
+good meals a day, but then she liked the act of darning, and nobody
+could be reasonably comfortable themselves with a fellow being starving
+within earshot. The rest of their relationship consisted of services
+offered; daily, almost hourly oblations by V.V. It was V.V. who
+supplemented the duties of Mabel and her rotating colleagues in all
+sorts of details for which Gillian had no time. The Bluebelling of
+William’s cage was symbolic of her whole attitude to Gillian’s
+surroundings. Gillian seldom had cut-flowers in vases because she could
+not bear to see flowers die, and so spent more time than she could spare
+changing their water and clipping their stalks when she did have any in
+her rooms. V.V. kept flowers fresh in water as clear as plate glass in
+all three of Gillian’s rooms, and so stimulated a tiny dwarf rose-bush
+which Gillian had nurtured for several years, by giving it packets of
+some patent forcing compound that it bloomed and withered in a
+fortnight.
+
+Once or twice when Gillian had dined or gone to a play with Stephen and
+Sophie, V.V. had sat up till after midnight with hot water for her to
+wash in, and clean brushes to brush her long hair out before she went to
+bed. On hot evenings V.V. produced ice for the Club lemonade; on rainy
+afternoons she had tea waiting when Gillian came back from her classes
+tired and cross. V.V.’s hours in Jacynthe’s beauty-parlour appeared
+elastic; they had interfered with some of Heinrich’s arrangements, but
+Gillian remembered with a startled thought as she brooded sleepily in
+the deep chair, they never prevented V.V. from being at hand when she
+could do anything for Gillian. Where, Gillian wondered with a pang of
+remorse, did V.V. get the ice they had had so often since her return
+from Seaford? How had she found money to fill both flats with flowers
+ever since April? V.V. must have gone without many more meals than
+Heinrich had counted, if her brother had drunk or spent her allowance
+very often in the past three months. Gillian could not feel honestly
+grateful to V.V. for these supererogatory ministrations. They were more
+than the services of common friendship, but they checked rather than
+encouraged the unique response she made to some other quality than the
+slavish activity in V.V. That quality was undeniably a physical one.
+Gillian had suffered V.V.’s exaggerated and frequent embraces with a
+docility which had surprised her in herself, and lately she had found
+herself returning them with a queer thrill of satisfaction. It was
+rather wonderful to hear the thump of V.V.’s heart through the thin silk
+of her blouse when she kissed you; to feel her cool, strong hands on
+your shoulders and to smell the mixed aromatic confusion of scents from
+her hair and her face-powder; from the soap she washed with and the
+paste she used for her shining, greedy-looking teeth; from the creams
+and lotions with which she kept her hands in order. V.V. did not reek of
+these things. She was almost morbidly clean and dainty in her person, as
+in all her surroundings. Her clothes were worn but spotless, shabby with
+much cleaning, limp from many laundries—you had to come very near to her
+to know that blended, exciting smell. Gillian knew it well now. It was
+V.V.’s most intimate secret; something she could not know herself, even
+when she imparted it. And yet it was not a secret after all. It must
+have been shared between all sorts of people, the Jackies and Dickies,
+the Peters and Brownies and Smithys—they must all have known it in their
+day. And that mysterious woman, the one figure in all the picaresque
+vagabondage to whom V.V. never gave a name, the shadowy friend with whom
+she had gone, oh, but quite years ago, to live in that little flat in
+Ostend for which she still owed some one rent, had she too kissed V.V.
+and breathed her scented warmth? Gillian was wide awake now, her mind
+alive with pictures and speculation. V.V. must have been quite young in
+those days. She was only just thirty now and there were at least ten
+years between the Mordaunt Club and the home she had left for ever to go
+to Ostend. For some reason V.V. didn’t seem to think needed explanation,
+her father had refused to let her return to him and her sister when she
+wanted to come back. It wasn’t as if she had run away with a man Gillian
+reflected. Fathers, she knew, were entitled to be harsh when their
+daughters did that, and the partner of their flight either could not or
+would not, or, in any case, did not, marry them. But V.V. and her horse
+and the borzoi she now kept at Epping had come to England, but not to
+V.V.’s home, when the Ostend adventure ended, and V.V. was working at
+Jacynthe’s to get herself free from a debt—though to whom she owed the
+money and for what and why and where the woman was through whom she came
+to be in debt at all, Gillian could even now not understand. It was all
+so overlaid with the procession of other women and their affairs which
+trailed along the more immediate past of V.V.’s life. She had clearly
+loved them all in her way. But not for long. Did she, Gillian wondered,
+always love immoderately, with lavish bestowal of material proofs of her
+love and so wear herself and them out? V.V.’s face as she sank deeper
+into sleep was unlined, but it had shadows on its imperfect beauty. Her
+waking face was always pathetic rather than tragic in its shallow
+ardour; its expression of her unbridled desire to give; but when the
+vivid evidence of that outgoing impulse was shrouded and her face was at
+rest, the shadows could be seen, resting lightly, where time and change
+might have driven furrows in a more resisting field. Even the
+catastrophe to that friendship for which she had left her father’s house
+and had not even seen him before he died, had left no mark on her smooth
+forehead. Could one love lightly and violently too? And many times?
+Gillian knew that V.V. loved her with a kind of obsession now—and there
+was Heinrich—V.V. loved him too. Of course she did. He was away just
+now, which was why she had so much time for Gillian. And she was missing
+him, missing his love-making. It must, thought Gillian, throwing a shy,
+hurried thought after an idea which had skimmed across her mind like a
+swallow in flight, it must be very touching to be made love to by
+Heinrich. Rather like the flattering, miraculous advances a squirrel had
+once made to her when she was quite a little girl and had spent a whole
+day being most happily lost in a wood. Heinrich had made love to V.V.
+like that, and V.V. had kissed him and thrust her scented fingers into
+his hair and laughed in her throat, and he had felt her heart beating
+and smelt her spicy odour and had kissed her softly and whispered to her
+as though she were a mouse or a sparrow or their poor, dull, little
+tortoiseshell cat. It must have been like that. It must have been very
+sweet and wonderful. And V.V. was missing it all. How should she not
+miss such a thing, she whose whole happiness lay in demonstration of
+that kind? That was why her hands were so often round Gillian’s neck in
+these days, and why her clear eyes, hazel-brown, black-ringed, lovely
+eyes, looked at her with such an overwhelmingly dewy appeal. Gillian
+felt the tight little core of resistance to V.V. which had been hard in
+her heart, melt into pity and love. Dear V.V., kind, lavish, squandering
+V.V.! Why should Gillian stiffen herself against so warm, so human, so
+fragrant an adoration as this transferred and wistful passion? “And how
+much nicer for Heinrich, and safer, to have me occupying till he comes,”
+said Gillian, coming to the surface of her reverie in a bubble of
+laughter. “V.V. must love somebody aloud all the time. Suppose she’d
+fixed on Larry or some other man? Heinrich would have minded that.”
+
+And then, suddenly, she remembered why Larry had gone away. It was much
+easier not to have love-affairs, unless you were rich like Toby and
+could marry them at once. Would waiting till Heinrich’s money came out
+of his uncle’s will and make him really rich, put enmity between him and
+V.V.? She hoped not. Heinrich would take enmity so seriously. And V.V.
+wasn’t serious about anything but kissing; and kissing, after all, isn’t
+a serious matter.
+
+There was a sudden knock at the door. V.V. woke with a start and sat up
+in her long chair, putting up her hands to arrange her perfectly tidy
+hair with the instinctive gesture of one whose personal appearance is
+her constant thought.
+
+“Who ever can that be?” said V.V.
+
+The knock was repeated and seemed to emerge from a background of more
+complicated though muffled noises.
+
+“Oh! _Come_ in!” shouted V.V. through a yawn.
+
+The door was pushed open and Mabel’s voice, carried on the clamour that
+rushed in, as a soloist sings with the accompanying orchestra, was heard
+delivering a message.
+
+“Please, Miss Armstrong, Mrs. Barraclough says it’s William again, and
+will you go over to your own flat and see to him.”
+
+William’s voice certainly could be heard in the din; but it was not its
+chief ingredient. It rose and fell, tossed about like a cork on the
+surface of the flood of sound that stormed in through the open door from
+the landing and from the courtyard beyond the landing window. The noise
+was the noise of many pianos in conflict over one piece of music. From
+the floor below Number Thirty-Six but from the flat on the courtyard
+side there rose the Ballade in A Flat, played loudly, heavily, horribly,
+with steady thumpings and the dreadful vibrations of an instrument on
+the loud pedal of which an unrelenting foot is pressed without lifting.
+
+“Goodness!” said Gillian, “that’s the new tenant at Twenty-Nine. Mrs.
+Barraclough told me she’d had a piano left her by a friend. Do you think
+it’s driven her mad?”
+
+“It’s driving the Countess madder,” V.V. grinned as she leaned through
+her scullery window and looked out over the courtyard with Gillian at
+her side.
+
+The Countess, her window wide to the afternoon, was, in her turn and
+with enormous _brio_, rendering Chopin with all the assurance of a
+compatriot and all the calculated resonance of a powerful mistress of
+the instrument. Neither in _tempo_, nor in the exact place each
+performer had reached in her interpretation was there any pretence by
+either player at synchronizing the two performances. They were intended
+to clash and they clashed. That William should have joined in the din
+was both natural and comic; but a touch of pathos was added to the
+conflict by Mrs. Middleton, who, with sturdy perseverance in well-doing,
+was pedalling away at the harmonium she usually only employed on Sunday
+evenings and, all stops drawn, was attempting to sound the note, not so
+much of Christian forbearance as of holy awe, by sending out the tune of
+“Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” in a series of simple but heartfelt
+chords.
+
+“I don’t think,” said Gillian, sobbing with laughter as she raced across
+the courtyard and up the ten flights of steps to her own flat, “I really
+do _not_ think that William is to be blamed for this.”
+
+But William, who had felt lonely since the telephone men had gone home
+at noon, was making up for several hours of silence. Refreshed by sleep,
+and strengthened by a pickled onion which one of the workmen had shared
+with him at the lunch interval, he was in full song and in no mind to
+stop for anybody. Even when the instrumental contest had subsided until
+none but the missionary strains of good Mrs. Middleton’s harmonium
+continued to break the evening peace, William sang on. And,
+unfortunately the competition had stimulated his memory, from the dark
+and backward abysm of which he had dredged up fragments, taught him by
+the lewd sailors who had carried him from the tropic isle which saw his
+hatching. These he now scattered to the Mordaunt Club with piercing
+distinctness just as they came back to his undiscriminating mind. And
+presently, Mrs. Middleton, her pacific task accomplished, closed down
+the folding lid of her harmonium and took her feet from the red-carpeted
+pedals. And still William flung loud, obscene snatches from his marine
+repertory out of the double mufflings of green baize and Mexican blanket
+which Gillian had flung over his cage, hardly caring if she stifled
+William’s self so long as his songs were stifled too.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+V.V. came up to dinner, with a muslin-covered basin of ice in one hand
+and _Pharaoh’s Book of Dreams_ in the other.
+
+“All the old cats on my landing have written to complain about the new
+member,” she said.
+
+“I’m sure the Countess will complain of William,” said Gillian, “and
+Mrs. Barraclough has warned me that if anyone does he’ll have to go.”
+
+“Shall you let him? Poor old cocky.”
+
+“No, of course not. I shall _take_ him away.”
+
+“Oh, Gillian—where?”
+
+“To wherever I go, of course.”
+
+“You wouldn’t leave the Club!”
+
+“I should have to.”
+
+“And poor V.V. too?”
+
+“Well, in any case you’ll leave when you marry, and besides, we don’t
+know yet that I’ll have to go.”
+
+However, as they were drinking their coffee in the book-room Mabel came
+up, very full of importance, and delivered a letter from Mrs.
+Barraclough in which Gillian was given a final warning.
+
+“I will overlook the matter this last time,” wrote Mrs. Barraclough, “as
+William, in spite of several representations made to me by some of the
+members, cannot be held entirely responsible for this afternoon’s
+disturbance, but I must be very plain with you that this _is_ the last
+time.”
+
+“I’ll tell you what, darling,” said V.V., her eyes very bright in the
+cloud of cigarette smoke she blew about her head as she sat curled up in
+a corner of the chesterfield. “We’ll take a ducky little flat together
+on the Embankment past Beaufort Street and keep William in the window
+and buy those white china elephants you want so badly from the shop in
+King’s Road to go with him, and we can have a real bath with a geyser to
+it, and no more cans of hot water up from the kitchen or boiled on the
+Primus for our bedroom tub. Won’t that be lovely?”
+
+“It would be very nice to have a flat with a proper bath and electric
+light in it,” said Gillian, “but, if you can find one, you’ll have to
+take Heinrich there, not me.”
+
+“Oh, him,” said V.V. “He’s sent me a picture post-card, such a funny
+one. Look!”
+
+Gillian, who had seen some of the coloured comic post-cards with which
+V.V. cheered her betrothed on his travels, looked rather anxiously at
+the response which V.V. drew from the pages of _Pharaoh’s Dream Book_.
+Heinrich, however, had not replied in kind. He had been over to Wells
+and had sent V.V. an enchanting picture of a head from one of the
+cornices.
+
+“He’s not written anything on it but the address and put a little H down
+in one corner. It’s a dull sort of thing to get, I think,” said V.V.
+without rancour.
+
+“I think it’s perfectly lovely,” said Gillian, “and it’s a little like
+you—the way the hair parts, and the eyebrows. That’s why he chose it.”
+
+“Me! Like that ugly stone thing! I hope not,” said V.V., and she tore
+the card across and threw the pieces into Gillian’s waste-paper basket.
+
+That night, when she had brushed out her hair and shown her how much
+more becoming two narrow ribbons of different colours threaded in the
+lace of her nightgown were than one wide one, V.V. pulled down her own
+hair, slipped out of her old silk dress, and, her thin arms looking very
+brown and dusky in contrast to her white underclothes, proceeded to sit
+cross-legged on the floor with a candle on either side of her, to
+interpret her own and Gillian’s dreams from the pages of the ragged book
+she had brought upstairs with her.
+
+“You must take off all metal and one garment before you begin,” she
+explained. “We used to do it at Ostend.”
+
+“V.V.! If you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t do it here. I don’t want
+to know about my dreams, anyway. They are my own, and I know what they
+mean to me.”
+
+“Oh, all right, ducky. I thought it would amuse you, pertickly as you
+said you’d dreamed of flowers, and that’s a lucky dream always.”
+
+And gathering herself and her oracle together, she rose from the floor
+and, coming over to the dressing-table where Gillian was still braiding
+her hair, she kissed the back of her neck and the shoulders round which
+the blue and mauve ribbon she had threaded held the lace of Gillian’s
+nightgown together.
+
+“You baby,” said V.V. “I should like to eat you.”
+
+“V.V., if you don’t take care I shall knock your lovely front teeth out
+with my hair-brush,” said Gillian. “Go home now before Gordon locks up,
+and eat a bun instead.”
+
+“I haven’t any buns, and you are being dreadfully cross to your V.V.,”
+she said. But she went home in quite a good temper, having once more
+reverted to the glories of the possible flat with gas and a geyser in
+it, which she was sure they could find without much trouble. V.V. seemed
+to know all there was to know about dear little flats.
+
+“All the same,” said Gillian to herself when V.V. had gone, “I hope she
+won’t find one till Heinrich gets his money settled. I don’t think I
+could bear to live all day and all night in the same flat as dear V.V. I
+must have some lucid intervals. And there’s nothing lucid about her.”
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER SIX.
+                             AUNT ELIZABETH
+
+
+                                   I
+
+“It’s high time I came home again,” said Lilac. “_Look_ at your hat.”
+
+Gillian took off her hat and looked at it. It was an old one she had
+retrimmed herself.
+
+“What a funny expression ‘high time’ is,” she said. “It’s like ‘now
+then.’ You know what it means, but it doesn’t mean anything at all when
+you think about it.”
+
+Lilac made the noise that is written down as “pish” or “tush” to convey
+her opinion of that remark and returned to her point. Lilac had a most
+feminine gift for returning to the point.
+
+“Your clothes are past praying for, and you say ‘Goodness’ twice a day
+instead of once a week. You _have_ been left to yourself.”
+
+Lilac had as evidently been left to herself, for she had come back from
+her honeymoon travels more emphatic and more critical, more woman of the
+world and more beautifully dressed than she had been able to be when the
+combined influence of Gillian and poverty had kept her relatively
+easy-going and only tentatively fashionable.
+
+“Your hat’s a marvel,” said Gillian, “so neat and yet so gaudy. It looks
+expensive all over even though it’s so plain. Paris, I suppose?”
+
+“Vienna, my dear.” Lilac was infinitely up to date: almost in front of
+date, Gillian thought, once more reflecting on the oddness, the strong
+commerciality of the phrase “up to date,” but this time keeping her
+comments to herself while Lilac chattered on of how _no_body went to
+Paris now for really new ideas in clothes. All the cleverest things came
+from Vienna, which was more Russian than the Russian ballet, so far as
+colour and decoration went.
+
+She had brought Gillian an enormous grey fox muff and stole from Vienna
+and a string of clear glass beads that hung down to her knee and then
+ended in a cerise-and-magenta tassel to bring out the green colour of
+the glass.
+
+“Just like that poem in _Georgian Poetry_,” said Gillian, “and they’ll
+go most wonderfully with V.V.’s flat.”
+
+“Well, I hope you’ll wear them there,” said Lilac, “and not come to my
+house in them or in any other string of beads, like a savage. I’d never
+have got them myself. It was Toby’s idea. He said they looked like you.”
+
+“How lovely of Toby!”
+
+“Well,” said Lilac, “he seemed to think I should want to wear them
+because they reminded him of you. Men _are_ the queerest creatures.”
+
+“Oh! Poor Toby! He wanted to be able to see them every day, and now
+you’ve given them to me.”
+
+“You can wear them when Toby takes you out to dinner, and I hope he’ll
+be calm about it when you catch your knee in them and they break and
+roll about on the floor at the Berkeley or get caught in the spring-seat
+at a theatre. Beads,” said Lilac, “should be seen but not weared.”
+
+“Does Toby let you make nursery jokes?”
+
+“Toby would let me do anything so long as I didn’t prevent him getting
+back to England in time for fox-huntin’. We’re going to Ireland next
+week about horses and then back to wherever it is he’s got that horrid,
+cold, little house you can’t get to from anywhere.”
+
+Lilac was on the whole discontented; a little with Toby, Gillian
+thought, and a little with life. She had no definite, spoken grievance
+except one against Gillian for not preventing the house at Seaford
+altogether.
+
+“Of course, neither Toby nor I will ever go near it. Never, never,
+never. She’s got that ridiculous clay model all over the billiard-room
+table at Knightsbridge, and the Bird, looking like an owl, to explain it
+to us. Why ever did you let her?”
+
+“But how could I help it?”
+
+“Well, she says you advised her. And Seaford of all inhuman
+wildernesses. We could have done with a house at Ascot, and there are
+schools there.”
+
+“I’m sorry. But she’d bought the house before I knew and she thought
+you’d like one near Glynde.”
+
+“Pish!” said Lilac again. “And, anyway, it was you who got Bird into it.
+Painting all over those cauliflowers and gargoyles. It’s like a
+lunatic’s house. It’s worse than the Phené toy in Oakley Street.”
+
+“Well,” said Gillian, “Jane’s going to have it in her show in Grafton
+Street. In the middle of the room with the portrait figures all round.
+It’s very amusing, and awfully clever too. She’s not made a mess of it.”
+
+“Oh, the model’s all right as a joke, and some of Bird’s figures are
+very good. She’s going to be a rage. She’s the best friend you’ve got. I
+think you ought to drop the others.”
+
+“Really! Lilac——”
+
+“Yes! Don’t look at me as though I had a smut on my nose. My face is
+perfectly clean, and I mean what I say. You have no taste in people.
+Larry Browne’s all right. He belongs to quite a good family. All that
+living in a studio and wearing a big hat is just pose. He ought to have
+gone into the Home Office and done a little painting in his spare time,
+then you could have married him.”
+
+“But, Lilac——”
+
+“Oh, yes, I know you never think of how you are to get out of all this
+nonsense about earning your living. But I think of it for you. No one
+but rather an odd sort of man would marry you. Unless, of course, I can
+_make_ you dress properly and look at things in an ordinary common-sense
+way.”
+
+“Lilac darling, I’m perfectly happy as I am. And quite ordinary enough
+to keep myself out of an asylum.”
+
+“For the present. But look at the lunatics you go about with.”
+
+“Lilac!”
+
+“Yes. I saw you yesterday in Sloane Street with something rather like an
+Italian organ-grinder without the organ and the monkey. Without a hat
+too.”
+
+“Oh, that was Heinrich. He plays in the Queen’s Hall orchestra.”
+
+“Look here, Gillian. You can’t be seen about with a man who plays in a
+band; and Bird told me yesterday that you’d got another crony, a woman
+hairdresser with a wild name.”
+
+“That’s too bad of Jane. She’s always been horrid about poor V.V. I
+think she’s jealous because Larry has drawn and painted her so much
+since he came back. She’s engaged to be married to Heinrich. They are
+both perfect dears.”
+
+“Well, Jane Bird does not approve of the woman, and I’ve seen the
+band-player myself. Let them marry one another, by all means, as soon as
+possible, and then you’ll be rid of both of them.”
+
+“No, I shan’t. They can’t marry for some time. And I’m very probably
+going to share a small flat with V.V., so as to be able to make a home
+for William. Mrs. Barraclough has given me notice for him again, and,
+this time, he must go.”
+
+“Nonsense, Gillian. If you must leave the Club, go and live with Aunt
+Elizabeth. She’s very frail and lonely. I was up there yesterday. She
+asked about you. Have you been to see her lately?”
+
+“N-no. Not since she came back from Matlock.”
+
+“It hasn’t done her much good. And you’d far better cherish her a little
+and leave these fearful wildfowl you’ve collected alone. Toby and I’ll
+take William on if you want a home for him, There’s a conservatory in
+the house we saw yesterday in Norfolk Street that would suit him very
+well.”
+
+“I’ll think about William, and I’ll go to see Aunt Elizabeth on Tuesday.
+It’s her birthday.”
+
+“So it is. I’d almost forgotten. We shall be in Ireland. I must have
+some flowers sent up.”
+
+And Lilac gathered her sable coat about her and cast a rather wistful
+look round the flat.
+
+“Good-bye, Jilly dear. In some ways I envy you for being here still, in
+spite of the oil-lamps and the bedroom bath. You’re free, and the rooms
+are very peaceful, once you get up all these stairs.”
+
+
+                                   II
+
+The air was yellow and the pavements were slimy with what might at any
+moment thicken into a December fog as Gillian made her way from the
+workshop to the Highgate omnibus, where she had spent the morning
+sitting to Jane. Nothing short of missing the last omnibus on a wet
+night ever drove her into any Tube.
+
+She had spent a depressing morning. Jane, who never worked on the model
+with a sitter, had taken a few sketches and had then insisted on having
+lunch, in order, as she frankly confessed, to talk to Gillian. Jane was
+much happier since she had returned from her commissioned journey in Old
+Winona’s retinue. The progress from château to château had been
+marvellous in every aspect, whether as business and its involved and
+legitimate pleasures, or as the illicit delight any prolonged
+acquaintance with the mind and methods of that great and wonderful woman
+could not fail to arouse in anyone so keenly alive to the varieties of
+human experience as Jane Bird. But it was not only the refreshment of
+that change which had calmed and illuminated Jane’s spirit. There was
+now, as Gillian could not fail to notice, a new and a curiously peaceful
+understanding between her and Larry. They no longer hailed each other
+with torrents of esoteric abuse: indeed, they seemed to have quite
+wonderfully little to say to each other in public. But every now and
+again in general conversation it would appear that Jane or Larry
+possessed the answer to some question asked of one or the other, and,
+several times when she had been out alone or with V.V., at night,
+watching the moon on the river or coming home from a play on the top of
+an omnibus, she had seen Larry and Jane arm-in-arm strolling together
+deep in talk and laughter. Gillian never saw Jane at the studio when she
+went to fetch V.V. home from a sitting or to join her and Heinrich at
+supper, and Larry never came into the workshop when she was sitting
+herself to Jane, but it was clear that they spent a great deal of time
+together and that each knew every detail of the other’s work. More than
+once Gillian had been on the brink of asking whether Mr. Quist had taken
+the glove-buttoning figure home, but the question had never been spoken,
+and no reference to it appeared in the little descriptive catalogues of
+Jane’s works which they had all drawn up together in preparation for the
+coming exhibition of them.
+
+But it was not of herself, nor of Larry, that Jane delivered opinions
+that morning.
+
+“It’s about Heinrich, Gillian. Do you think that painted mannequin of
+yours is behaving properly to him?”
+
+“V.V.? Why, yes. Why shouldn’t she?”
+
+“Well, I don’t. Have you noticed the look in his face? His eyes get
+nearer together every time I see him. The bridge of his nose hardly
+separates them. It’s an ugly look. And he never takes his eyes off her
+while she’s with him.”
+
+“I know he doesn’t. It gets on her nerves a little.”
+
+“She shouldn’t have nerves. No woman who undertakes Heinrich has any
+business with nerves. He’s got more than enough for a whole family. And
+she won’t let him have his sparrows in, or play with mice.”
+
+“I know. She says the cat is enough now that it has killed the canary
+which she _did_ like. She’s very tender-hearted.”
+
+“Very _what_?”
+
+“Tender-hearted, Jane. You don’t know V.V. as I do, and you are not fair
+to her or about her.”
+
+“Gillian, you’re dotty about that woman. And it isn’t right. You’re too
+old. I know what I’m talking about. I was dotty about you two years ago.
+Crazy. I didn’t think of anything but how to make you look at me again.
+But I came through. And you were worth it. You meant something, and you
+never set yourself to lead me on. Do you remember the King’s daughter?
+You showed me the bit in that purple, locked book of yours. How did it
+go? ‘Let us love her or none—to choose the false in mere impatience with
+the true, that it is which degrades us....’ And that Vanderleyden woman
+won’t see you through, Gillian. There’s nothing to her, once you’ve got
+her colour and her bones—she’s a model, but only a model. It’s not worth
+it—it’s not good enough. Not for you. Larry doesn’t like it either.”
+
+Gillian was angry.
+
+“I wish you’d not discuss my private affairs with all sorts of people.
+Lilac was saying on Saturday that you’d slandered V.V. to her. She’s the
+only person who bothers one little bit about me, and she never says one
+unkind word about you.”
+
+“Oh, all right. Lose your temper. It’s a symptom. Only when the crash
+comes, remember I’m like the man in the Psalms: I’ve delivered my soul.”
+
+“Well, I always did think that was the top note of self-seeking,” said
+Gillian, getting up from the table and putting on her hat with emphasis,
+rather on one side; “and besides, it isn’t Psalms, it’s Ezekiel.”
+
+“Pedant!” said Jane. “You are right, ‘if he turn not from his wicked
+way,’ which is what you’ve refused to do. And if you won’t finish your
+lunch you won’t. There’ll be two lemon cheese-cakes for me. Also a
+cream-cheese. You didn’t know that. But it’s too late now. You can’t
+relent and forgive me just for cream-cheese.”
+
+“I could,” said Gillian, “but I’ve got to go and buy some chrysanthemums
+and get up to Highgate before it’s black dark.”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outside in the raw, damp air Gillian’s temper cooled. She sat on the top
+of the omnibus, on the left-hand corner seat, in front, her arms full of
+the crisp, copper-coloured flowers, their festive winter scent filling
+her brain with half-remembered excitements: children’s parties; her
+first grown-up dance; the bouquets which came at New Year when they
+lived at Lausanne—mimosa and carnations or chrysanthemums always. The
+scented memories crowded out her resentment at Jane’s strictures as the
+omnibus lumbered on and the heavy air cleared and lightened with every
+mile. But there remained with her the half-guilty, half-puzzled sense
+that had beset her before.
+
+It was half-past three before she reached the top of Highgate Hill, and
+there was a faint glow of sunset with a little shred of new moon dim
+through the watery twilight above the trees in Mrs. Mortimer’s garden,
+when Gillian rang the bell at the gate.
+
+It was answered by Maggie, a devoted and entirely disrespectful retainer
+who had “stood up to” Aunt Elizabeth for many years and was known to be
+keeping a matrimonially inclined policeman at bay, until she could find
+another person (Maggie did not care for the word “woman,” refused to say
+“servant,” and considered “lady” to be an unsuitable description of the
+ideal she sought) fit to take charge of “the mistress.”
+
+“I’m glad you’ve come, Miss Gillian,” said Maggie in the tone of one who
+could have said “and surprised,” “and I see you’ve remembered it’s the
+mistress’s birthday. Seventy-three she is, and looks it. She’s been far
+from well the last ten days and more.”
+
+Gillian carried her flowers through the square hall where the
+grandfather clock, which had belonged to her own great-grandfather,
+ticked to the rocking of a full-rigged ship that tossed to and fro
+across its aged face on a painted ocean very full of waves, and opened
+the door of the room with the view.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer sat in a chair by the fire, a pile of white muslin in her
+lap. She was hemming window-curtains for Gillian’s flat.
+
+“Lilac told me you’d none now she’s left you,” said she, as Gillian
+kissed her and asked her why she tired herself with sewing in the fading
+light.
+
+“How lovely of you,” said Gillian, not daring or even wishing to tell
+that she preferred her windows unblinded. “I believe you do it a little
+out of vanity because you can see without glasses.”
+
+But when she had arranged her chrysanthemums, to which Mrs. Mortimer
+paid very little attention, flowers inside a house being, in her
+opinion, out of place and in the way, Gillian, sitting on a low stool in
+front of the fire, looked up at her great-aunt’s face and saw that she
+was very tired. And Aunt Elizabeth, looking down at the young face
+lifted to hers, saw a shadow there.
+
+“Have you anything to tell me, my girl?” she said.
+
+It was the consecrated phrase in which, ever since Gillian and Lilac
+could remember, she had made open confession easy for them.
+
+“Aunt Elizabeth,” said Gillian, “did love make you unhappy?”
+
+“The Lord,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “dealt very graciously with me and gave
+me the man of my choice.”
+
+“But not for a great many years, Aunt Elizabeth.”
+
+“He was given to me in the first moment I met him.”
+
+“How did you know?”
+
+The old woman was silent. Her dim eyes fixed on the glowing embers of
+the fire.
+
+“By a bodily pang,” she said at last.
+
+Gillian was startled.
+
+“Tell me about it,” she said, taking one of the thin old hands, its blue
+veins dark under the transparent, silk-smooth skin, and laying her cheek
+in its palm. “Tell me, Aunt Elizabeth. I want so much to know.”
+
+“I was an unbeliever in those days,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “a wicked,
+haughty girl, a Sabbath-breaker. I and my brothers, James and Penrhyn,
+would ride together twenty miles on horseback and think nothing to dance
+all night afterwards, and ride home again in the morning without sleep.
+They called us the handsome Armstrongs. James was dark like an eagle,
+and Penrhyn had red hair and a blue eye, piercing and terrible. Two
+girls pined and died when Penrhyn had looked at them only. And I was
+betwixt and between, cinder-colour they called my hair, and my eyes were
+not so grey as James’s nor so blue as Penrhyn’s; but my hair was thick
+and long so that I could sit in it and you could not see my hands if I
+put them in my lap or behind my back, and it was curly. And my eyes were
+well enough, even if my face was pale. Tall like a Maypole I was. ‘Long
+Bess Armstrong,’ they called me, and I was mad for horses and pleasure.
+Twice I broke my arm and once my collar-bone riding, and when I was
+eighteen, I dressed in Penrhyn’s breeches and stole my father’s
+riding-coat and won the steeplechase at Stone Crosses. My father was for
+sending me away to London after that, but James and Penrhyn rebelled.
+Neither of them would move without me to any ball or gala in the
+countryside; and neither of them would marry, because there was not a
+girl for miles around I could not put to shame in the pride of my
+dancing and for riding the wickedest horse anywhere in the marches. And
+many’s the man that would have tried for me in the face of Penrhyn’s vow
+that the man I married must outride him and then throw him at wrestling.
+But there was not one of them I would put to the test.
+
+“But one night, as we rode home just before harvest, we came to a narrow
+lane that ran along a field of corn, sloping up the hillside. And the
+dawn was breaking and the wind ran up the cornfield in waves and shadows
+like hounds in full cry, and I was riding ahead because of the
+narrowness of the lane. And there, at the end of the lane where the
+hedges ended and the fields lay open, I saw a light before me, and a
+voice coming out of the light called me by name, ‘Elizabeth Armstrong,’
+three times. And my horse heard the voice and saw the light and would
+not go forward. But I said nothing to the boys when they came up with
+me, and we rode home together laughing at the way Penrhyn spoke of what
+my mother had told us the day before. She had told us that she was
+giving the two rooms at the end of the house to a young student from
+Trevecca. The rooms were part of an old cottage that had been built into
+the main part by my grandfather when he married his third wife and had
+more children. My grandfather had twenty-four children, and they all
+lived to grow up. And this young student was coming to finish his study
+for a degree in theology. He was going to the Valley Farm. But smallpox
+had broken out there. And the pest-house was full and they had to keep
+three cases in the house. So my mother said she would be ashamed for a
+young and godly man to go there, to his death maybe, and she with more
+rooms in the house than we could ever fill, and the student should come
+to us and the payment should go just the same to Mrs. Pryce at the Farm
+and be towards the nursing of the sick.
+
+“In my heart I knew that my mother was right; but I joined with James
+and Penrhyn in mocking at her for taking sides with a Methody man. And,
+as we rode on, the sun rose higher, and Penrhyn laughed and said we
+should come into the village a little late for church. It was a Sunday
+morning, and presently we could hear the bells ringing for Morning
+Prayer at ten o’clock. And Penrhyn said, ‘Let us ride into church and
+support the parson. Maybe he is too drunk again this morning to read the
+prayers without aid.’ But James and I would not ride our horses into the
+churchyard. So we got down at the gate and gave our horses to a boy to
+lead home and walked into church as we were, in our riding-things. I had
+on a green habit, with laced frills at the neck, and a black hat with a
+feather in it, and I stood for a moment in the porch to smell the roses
+that grew over it and to wait for the General Confession to be ended and
+the Absolution, so that we could walk into church with less scandal—it
+was bad enough to be going straight from our dancing and in our
+riding-clothes—when the congregation stood up to say the Venite. There
+was no singing in church in those days, my girl, till it came to the
+hymn, and not then if Tom and Harry Pryce had been harvesting all week
+and were too tired to play the flute and the cornet at ten o’clock in
+the morning.
+
+“And as I stood there I saw Evan Mortimer. And he stood up in his place
+when he saw me. And my heart broke within me and my tongue was stiff in
+my mouth, and I walked straight into the church and stood beside him.
+And when we knelt down I prayed to God for the first time since I was a
+child and my mother made me pray at her knee, and my prayer was, ‘O God,
+give me this man.’”
+
+“And was he the Methody student?” said Gillian.
+
+“He was, my girl,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “and he would none of me, knowing
+of my ungodly life. But he had not known who I was when he saw me, and
+by the grace of God, the desire of my flesh inflamed my soul and I
+believed and was saved.”
+
+“But did you love God because of Uncle Evan?”
+
+“God showed me first His creature who had beauty that I might desire him
+and so come to know Him whom no man hath at any time seen. The love of
+man will lead to the love of God, or to the slavery of the Devil. I
+served God, through Evan, and was saved. But my brother Penrhyn, who
+mocked at my love and would never speak to me again after he knew that
+Evan and I had promised marriage to each other, he went a-whoring after
+women and was lost.”
+
+“I thought he went to America,” said Gillian.
+
+“He went to America, with the Squire’s young wife; shamefully, in open
+sin, and died there before I married Evan. Evan had gone to Africa away
+from me, and I was alone, for the grace of God to work in me, when your
+father was born, and James’s wife—a poor and sickly creature who thought
+more of the new book of poems by Robert Browning than of James or of her
+unborn child—died. And I took the child, for the Lord had denied
+children to my body. Sometimes,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “when love is as
+great as it was between Evan and me, there is no child according to the
+flesh, born of it.”
+
+“Why didn’t you go to Africa with Uncle Evan?”
+
+“There was a time when your uncle turned from me, fearing that he was
+losing God in his love for me,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “and until he had
+purged himself of that fear we remained apart. But the Lord blessed his
+ministry and brought us together in it at the end.”
+
+“Goodness,” said Gillian, “it gets more and more difficult. I thought
+love always made people want to live together for ever.”
+
+“Love,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “divides like a sword if it is only of the
+flesh. But when its roots in the flesh come to their flowering in the
+heart and in the soul, it is from everlasting to everlasting; death and
+the grave have no power upon it; it cannot consume away.”
+
+Night had blackened the uncurtained windows, and the fire had died into
+a dull gleam as they talked; but the room was filled with the living
+flame of the old woman’s passion and they needed no grosser light.
+Gillian sat, with her head against her aunt’s knee, and listened to the
+faint ticking of the austere little polished granite clock that, flanked
+by two bronze vases, presided, from the centre of the marble mantelpiece
+over the gaunt, Victorian room. The locked glass doors of the bookcase
+shutting in volumes of sermons and the lives of John and Charles Wesley,
+together with the works of other latter-day saints, reflected the
+firelight and cast a dim flicker on the polished wood of the walnut
+davenport at which Mrs. Mortimer inconveniently conducted her direct and
+concise correspondence. A fine steel-engraving after Rubens, _The
+Descent from the Cross_, hung between the two windows, and a coloured
+print of Turner’s _Golden Bough_ occupied the opposite wall, hanging
+over a Victorian sofa on which the hardiest frame could find no repose
+without the aid of the cushions which Mrs. Mortimer kept upstairs in a
+cupboard, except at such times as illness warranted their temporary
+release.
+
+Gillian knew now why no vestiges of her African life appeared in Mrs.
+Mortimer’s parlour. The carved and woven trophies of heathen art, the
+pink-lipped tropic shells, the plaited mats that proclaimed the past in
+Mrs. Middleton’s flat, were absent from her friend’s retreat. The
+heathen in his blindness had been to Elizabeth Mortimer the necessary
+means through which God had worked to bring peace to Evan Mortimer’s
+soul. She had helped to clothe the negro nakedness; she had taught the
+African girl to read the New Testament and to substitute the name of
+Jesus in her automatic prayers for those of the more awful though not
+less blood-stained deities of her native religion, but she had not let
+her eyes be beguiled by the ingenuous art of her proselytes. Her pupils
+had taught her nothing. She went out to preach the Gospel in a strange
+place, and, that duty accomplished, she returned to wait the day of
+reunion with her husband in surroundings as removed from the wild folly
+of her youth as they were untouched by the missionary adventure of her
+middle life.
+
+Gillian had known for many years that under the rigid performance of
+such duties to society at large and to the members of her own family in
+particular as Aunt Elizabeth felt called upon to discharge there burned
+a deeper, more individual flame. She was accustomed to the sight of Evan
+Mortimer’s portrait, a miniature, faded but still clear with the fine,
+grave beauty the artist had seen in the ascetic face and had transferred
+to the yellowing ivory. It lay, in its worn leather case, beside the
+Bible and the clean, lavender-scented, always folded handkerchief Mrs.
+Mortimer kept with a carafe of cold water on a table by her bedside. She
+knew that her aunt entertained a living belief that her husband, clothed
+in the immortalized flesh of his mortality, answering to his earthly
+name, speaking with his human voice, would be waiting for her when, in a
+glorified but still tangible shape, she, too, should ford the river of
+death (“cross Jordan” was Aunt Elizabeth’s phrase) and be welcomed on
+the farther side, knew, too that it was in the strength of this
+conviction that she was possessing her soul through the years of
+waiting. But in Gillian’s mind, relegated to the class, formed in
+childhood, of impertinent questions which it was not her business to
+ask, the actual nature of the feeling on which this expectation was
+founded had escaped definition. That Aunt Elizabeth should ever have
+been shaken by, that she should still openly admit the dominion of
+physical passion, was to Gillian an amazing discovery. And the most
+amazing part of it was that the revelation left Aunt Elizabeth herself
+untouched, the same emphatic Puritan as she had always been; but love,
+this thing of the body from which she had until now turned her timid
+thought, became exalted and magnified “of a reasonable soul and human
+flesh subsisting one altogether.” What was it she was saying? “And they
+that have done good shall go into life everlasting: and they that have
+done evil into everlasting fire.”
+
+“Aunt Elizabeth. Do you know, you’ve made me think of the Athanasian
+Creed?”
+
+“I daresay, my girl,” said Aunt Elizabeth. But she was sunk in a dream,
+and Gillian was not sure that she had heard her.
+
+And presently Maggie came in and lit the incandescent gas-burners, one
+on each side of the fireplace, and drew, the long, red, repp curtains
+across the windows and stirred the fire and said tea was ready in the
+dining-room, and she hoped Miss Gillian wouldn’t go making her auntie
+talk too much or she’d have another of her bad nights again.
+
+
+                                  III
+
+When she got back to the Club, Gillian crept up to her flat very softly
+so as not to be heard of William, whose cage stood in the outer of the
+double-rooms on the courtyard side, and let herself into the single-room
+on the street side of the building which she still kept as a bedroom,
+though, strictly speaking, she should have given it up when Lilac left.
+She did not want William’s possible song of welcome or the light in one
+of the courtyard windows to announce her return. She wanted, for this
+one evening, to be alone, free from V.V.’s kindness and cherishing, free
+from her interminable chatter, and from the necessity of responding to
+the ardour of her impulsive embraces. She might, of course, find one of
+V.V.’s notes—“Darling, put a light in the window when you come in and
+I’ll come across”—but this she would—she must, for once, ignore. If only
+she did not meet V.V., or find her waiting on the landing.
+
+But there was no eager shadow waiting on the darkened staircase when she
+let herself in after closing-time, no three-cornered note fell out from
+the letters in her letter-box when she unlocked it, almost furtively,
+outside her bedroom door. And, perverse as she felt it to be, Gillian
+was surprised, disappointed, hurt at this failure of the very
+importunity she had tried to avoid.
+
+She had not seen V.V. before going out in the morning: it was quite
+possible that she had gone to Queen’s Hall and that Heinrich had taken
+her back to supper at the studio after the Symphony Concert that
+evening. She hoped so. She hoped so much that Jane was wrong about V.V.
+making Heinrich unhappy. It was strange to think that V.V. and Aunt
+Elizabeth were both women, and that both of them used the same word and
+meant such different things when they spoke of loving. “But, then,” said
+Gillian as she drew the blankets up above her ears, “I suppose Uncle
+Evan must have been extremely unlike Heinrich.”
+
+Yesterday’s threat of fog had established itself in suffocating
+fulfilment when Gillian woke next morning.
+
+By three o’clock it had so blinded the eyes and irritated the throat of
+everybody in the school in Buckingham Palace Road that Miss de Stormont
+declared the last lecture suspended and sent her students home an hour
+and a half before the usual time. Gillian groped her way back to Chelsea
+on foot, all the omnibuses having given up attempting to run at noon.
+She had not had time to see V.V. that morning, but as she came out of
+the fog to the railings by the gateway to the Club she knew that she
+wanted nothing so much as to find V.V. with a huge fire and tea waiting
+for her when she got upstairs. “And if she’s not in my flat, I shall go
+over to Thirty-Six,” said Gillian to herself.
+
+But she was so sure that V.V. would be waiting for her in her own rooms
+that she tried the door on the top landing without unlocking it. It was
+locked. V.V. had not come over. Gillian propped her dispatch-case
+against the wall on her lifted knees as she groped in it for her
+latch-key. A small movement behind the curtain which shut off the
+scullery corridor from the landing made her pause before she could find
+the key in the darkness on which the single gas-jet in its wire cage
+only threw more obscuring shadows.
+
+“Who’s there?” she called, and was a little frightened at the note of
+fear in her own voice.
+
+A shadow detached itself from the gloom.
+
+“It is I,” said a reedy voice.
+
+“Heinrich. What are you doing without an overcoat in this weather?”
+
+“I come for V.V.,” said the thin voice sternly. “You will please give
+her up to me now.”
+
+“Oh, I thought she must be with you,” said Gillian.
+
+“You know she is here,” said Heinrich.
+
+But when the door was unlocked Gillian’s two rooms were dark and
+untenanted. No fire had been lit in either, though fires were laid in
+both.
+
+Gillian lit two candles and put a match to the fire in the outer
+sitting-room.
+
+“Will you stay and have tea here,” she asked, “or will you go over to
+V.V.’s flat? You see she is not in mine.”
+
+“V.V. is somewhere wiz you. She is not in her flat. She has not been
+zere since before yesterday. She is wiz you.”
+
+“Don’t be silly, Heinrich. I haven’t seen V.V. since Sunday. Why—what
+_have_ you got?”
+
+“A pistol—wiz bullets in him.”
+
+“Goodness! Is it yours? Can you work it?”
+
+“No. I do not know how to work it. But I can pull somesing till it works
+himself. It belongs to Larry. I bring it here to frighten you. I am,”
+said Heinrich, “frightened of it myself.”
+
+“Well,” said Gillian, “I’m not exactly frightened. But you’d better put
+it down on the table and have some tea. If it’s Larry’s it won’t be
+loaded. Larry knows better than to let you have loaded pistols to play
+with.”
+
+“Larry does not know I play wiz it. He has gone wiz Jane up the hill out
+of ze fog. And I come here for V.V.”
+
+“I’ve told you V.V. isn’t here. I’ve not seen her since Sunday. What
+makes you think she’s here?”
+
+“She tell me so herself. She said to me ‘whenever you cannot find me I
+shall be wiz Gillian.’”
+
+“Oh, she just meant I might know where she was or she might be here. Are
+you sure she is not in her own flat?”
+
+“I know she is not. She tell me she is wiz you.”
+
+Gillian was cross. It was cold and foggy and she wanted her tea and
+Heinrich was being very obstinate and trying.
+
+“Look here, Heinrich,” she began, and then, in the light of the candles
+which were burning higher now, she saw his face. Jane had been right. He
+had a curious look. His eyes _were_ odd, almost squinting, with deep,
+dark hollows on each side of the nose so that they seemed to have grown
+nearer together.
+
+“Let’s go over to the other house and look for her,” she said.
+
+“I will look first for her in the books-room please,” said Heinrich.
+
+So Gillian let him look, and carried a candle into the inner room to
+show him that V.V. was not there. But all it showed them was the empty,
+red chesterfield and the Great Fortuna who danced on her tight-rope in
+the flickering light.
+
+“Come,” said Gillian, “we shall find her in her own room.”
+
+The doors of the large and of the smaller rooms in the house across the
+courtyard were locked and there were several letters visible through the
+glass of V.V.’s uncleared letter-box.
+
+“We’ll ask Mrs. Gordon if she knows where V.V. is,” Gillian decided as
+they came downstairs together. Heinrich shivered a little. He was
+wearing neither overcoat nor hat. “You must put that weapon in your
+pocket though,” Gillian admonished him. “Mrs. Gordon would be scared
+past speech if she were to see such a thing.”
+
+But Mrs. Gordon had seen nothing of V.V. for some days.
+
+“I see her on Saturday wen she paid her book,” said Mrs. Gordon, “and
+yet again at middle-day Monday wen she went out with that ’at with the
+red feather in it, if you take me, miss, the oxydized one like the ’at
+Miss Gordon wears of an afternoon. But since then I’ve seen nothing of
+her and she’s not been having any meals from the kitching.”
+
+“Did she leave her keys with you?”
+
+“’Arry!” screamed Mrs. Gordon suddenly down the kitchen stairs to the
+top of which she had mounted in reply to Gillian’s ring. “Wot abart
+Number Thirty-Six?”
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Gordon always spoke of the tenants as warders are said to
+speak of the convicts in their charge.
+
+“Bin away since Chewsdy,” boomed a voice from below, “left no key
+downstairs neither.”
+
+“There now.” Mrs. Gordon was satisfied that her statements had
+corroboration. “Wot did I say. She’s off after that dog of hers again, I
+suppose. Makes as much trouble as if ’e was a Christian.”
+
+“Thank you, Mrs. Gordon. I dare say that’s what has happened,” and
+Gillian closed the door although Mrs. Gordon betrayed symptoms of her
+being able to continue the conversation further. Gillian did not wish
+Heinrich to be drawn into it, hoped he had escaped Mrs. Gordon’s notice
+altogether, above all did not wish his pistol to be remarked. She didn’t
+for one moment think the pistol was loaded or feel that Heinrich himself
+was dangerous; but he was so agitated and unhappy that she knew he
+couldn’t bear such a fuss and clamour as the discovery that he bore
+firearms would arouse in the Gordons’ domain. “Suppose they set Crack on
+him,” thought Gillian, “as they would have done on that poor little cat.
+He’d break.” Heinrich did indeed look strained and taut; Gillian had
+never before realized what the expression “reaching the breaking-point”
+really meant.
+
+Out in the courtyard, in the angles of lamplight that came down from
+above the doors of the two houses, he was almost invisible, a faint
+shade in the fog which was moving and lifting as the tide set
+down-stream in the river.
+
+“Heinrich dear,” said Gillian, “she’s not here. She’s probably been held
+up in the fog in Essex. Hadn’t you better go back to the studio? Perhaps
+she’s waiting for you there.”
+
+“She told me she will always be wiz you,” persisted Heinrich in the
+thin, high voice.
+
+“I’ll come and tell you or I’ll send her if she’s not too tired, the
+minute she comes, if she does come to me, to-night. But I don’t think
+she will. There’ll be a letter from her in the morning. Perhaps even
+to-night. Perhaps there’s one waiting for you at the studio this very
+minute.”
+
+“I shall find a letter if I go back?” asked the voice anxiously.
+
+“Yes, I think so. Anyway, go and see. And get an overcoat and a muffler
+if you come out again. And a hat, Heinrich.”
+
+Gillian went with him to the gateway of the Club and watched him drift
+away and vanish into the dim mists by the river. Then she went up to her
+own flat again.
+
+The fire she had kindled hastily was out, quenched by the heavy air, and
+the candles burnt sullenly in the yellow stillness. It was getting late;
+a clattering of dishes on the lower landings announced the serving of
+dinner. Gillian decided to leave the fire alone and to eat her dinner as
+quickly as possible without taking off her outdoor clothes. It was a
+lonely, dismal thing to do, but she intended to make up for it by having
+the largest fire her bedroom grate would hold, and a double quantity of
+hot water for her bath and to devote an hour to washing the fog out of
+herself before she went to bed. She would read _Emma_ till the last post
+came. _Emma_ was just the right book for a foggy night. She would enjoy
+getting too hot eating Mr. Knightley’s strawberries, she would avoid the
+long cold drive with the proposing Mr. Elton, and she would look up all
+Mr. Woodhouse’s gruels. She would put on her old, padded, silk
+dressing-gown, shabby but faded into such a satisfying, dim,
+rose-colour, and sit in the big basket-chair which would go on giving
+out companionable creaks all night afterwards, and there would be no
+Lilac to grumble at the noise it made, saying that each creak woke her
+out of a dream it sounded so like a pistol-shot at night. Poor Heinrich
+and his borrowed pistol. She hoped he was all right and that V.V. had
+either gone to the studio or written to him. Anyhow it was warm at the
+studio with that white porcelain stove that Larry had brought home with
+him, each tile painted with a different bird on a flowering branch; and
+the little cat would be there to keep him company. Gillian was glad to
+think he had the little cat.
+
+Mabel, clearing away the dinner-dishes, agreed to bring up two large
+cans of bath-water and volunteered the news that the fog had blowed off
+to Battersea. She also offered to light the bedroom fire seeing that she
+must have laid the sitting-room one badly that morning for it to have
+gone out as it had done. This was kind of Mabel, for it was not her duty
+to light, only to lay the fires in the various rooms she waited on. But,
+ever since the day when Gillian had gone unexpectedly into her scullery
+and had found the postman kissing Mabel behind the curtains and had told
+neither Mrs. Barraclough nor Mrs. Gordon, Mabel had done a great many
+little services of that kind for Number Seven.
+
+So Gillian settled down in the big basket-chair with _Emma_ and _Songs
+before Sunrise_ in the new Pineapple Edition; shrugged her shoulders
+luxuriously up and down in the soft silk of her dressing-gown; toasted
+her feet at the big fire and waited for the last post and for the two
+cans of boiling water that would come up just before the house was
+closed for the night.
+
+But there was no letter from V.V. by the last post and when Mabel
+staggered into the room, wreathed in clouds of steam from the two huge
+cans she had carried upstairs at ten o’clock, she said that Miss
+Vanderleyden’s flat was still empty.
+
+“Maybe,” said Mabel hopefully, “she’s met with a haxident. Lots of
+people is run over in these ere fogs you know, miss.”
+
+And William, from under the baize cover which kept him warm and silent
+in his corner for the night, roused by Mabel’s familiar voice, stirred
+on his perch and gave his only too realistic imitation of Mabel’s loud,
+persistent sniff.
+
+
+                                   IV
+
+It was eleven o’clock. Gillian had had her bath and the round shallow
+tin which V.V. had only just re-enamelled pink inside and bright blue
+out, was still full of fragrant soapsuds iridescent in the firelight and
+whispering to themselves with a little, soft, hissing noise of tiny
+bubbles as they coalesced and broke. She had put the lamp on a table by
+the window so that her shadow should not fall on the blind, and she
+stood in front of the fire, her feet rosy on the blue bath-mat, her arms
+raised to take the pins out of her hair.
+
+A few small flames, blue and transparent, moved softly, flowing together
+like liquid mercury across the blackened surface of the still unburnt
+coal that arched the ruddy caverns of the fire from which an even glow
+enveloped her as she stood, supple and tingling from the water. Her
+bath-towel hung drying over a chair on one side of the fireplace, her
+nightgown threaded with two coloured ribbons, mauve and blue this time,
+lay warming on another. She hunched one shoulder and rubbed her chin
+against its rounded smoothness and she saw her shadow cast by the
+firelight on the white wall behind her. She shook her head to free the
+coils of her hair. They slid down her back, two thick ropes warm and
+faintly scented with camomile-flower tea blended with an imprisoned
+memory of the day’s fog. Taking an end in each hand she turned her back
+to the fire and, holding out her arms to their full length, she shook
+out her hair so that it fell slowly and made a great fan-shaped shadow
+on the wall. She ran to the dressing-table to take a comb, stilting
+along on the top of each great-toe like a ballet-dancer, and then,
+returning to the zone of warmth and firelight, she combed and
+disentangled and pulled away the knots until her hair hung straight and
+smooth hiding her breast and shoulders in a moving veil. Her face peered
+at her, laughing at its own reflection in a little mirror framed in
+black, carved ivy-leaves which hung above the fireplace between a white,
+china rabbit and an old, green, glass door-stop, all three cherished
+relics of her childhood. The tick of the falling ash in the grate; the
+creaking of the wicker-chair on the cushions of which _Emma_ still lay,
+open in the middle of the Box Hill party; the swish of a passing taxi in
+the street below muffled by the closed window and drawn curtains, seemed
+like little desultory tunes played to the accompaniment of a silence
+that was, like a ray of light that twists together all the colour of a
+rainbow, only the gathering together of distant, undistinguishable
+clamour of many sounds. Gillian, alone in her closed room, its white
+walls gilded and rosy with lamp- and firelight, its warm air laden with
+the clean scent of soap and water and violet-powder and loosened hair
+which in five minutes would be chased away by the cold night-air when
+she opened her window and got into bed, felt herself caught into a bliss
+of solitude, safe, anonymous, ignored. She was alone, alone. No claims,
+no duty, no criticism could touch her. The disfiguring humiliation of
+the clothes she could never quite wear as other people wore the same, or
+slightly better chosen raiment, was no longer about her. She was free,
+and fine and lovely. She cupped her chin in her hands and saw in the
+mirror how the point of each shoulder broke through the cloud of hair
+hanging over it, like a young moon in an outcast sky. She shook back her
+hair and, with a hand on each hip, bent her body backwards till she felt
+her hair touch her ankles. She stretched up her arms till the shadow of
+her hands on the ceiling almost met the shadow of the chair on which her
+bath-towel hung. She made a rabbit of her hands, as children do, and it
+scampered round the walls; she played tricks with her shadows, the tall
+one on the wall opposite the fire, and the wavering one by the door,
+cast by the lamp which was flickering and dying down because its oil was
+nearly spent. She tried to make them meet and become one shadow. She
+stood on one leg with the palm of her foot over her straightened knee
+and let the light shine through the arch; she tried to look through the
+arch and almost slipped and fell. As she straightened herself again she
+remembered that it was Lilac who did that, and that, even when she was
+twelve, she had never succeeded in doing it three times running,
+herself. “I’m getting too old to do it at all,” she said and put out her
+hand to take her nightgown.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a sudden rush of cold air into the room as the door opened and
+closed quickly again shutting V.V. in.
+
+Gillian clutched at her nightgown and tried to slip it on.
+
+“Don’t, don’t,” laughed V.V., “I love you as you are, you witch,” and
+she slipped across the room and pulled the thin cambric till it tore
+across.
+
+“V.V.! how dare you!” said Gillian, and she wrapped herself from chin to
+toe in the warm bath-towel, folding her hair in with it in her haste and
+indignation.
+
+V.V. sat down in the basket-chair, throwing _Emma_ on the floor beside
+her with no concern for the crumpling pages.
+
+“Have you missed me?” she said.
+
+“Of course I have,” said Gillian, surprised to feel herself trembling as
+she stood holding the bath-towel round her like a shawl. “Have you been
+with Heinrich?”
+
+“No. Not since Monday. I had a quarrel with him on Monday. I’ve kept
+away from both of you on purpose since.”
+
+V.V. was pale and tired. She had evidently been out in the fog all day
+for her hair hung damp and heavy under the brim of her hat and there
+were black smudges on her imperfectly powdered face.
+
+“Poor Heinrich has been here in a dreadful state of anxiety this
+evening,” said Gillian.
+
+“Has he? The little fool.”
+
+“Oh, V.V.! He was really distressed about you. He thought you were with
+me.”
+
+“So I am.”
+
+“Yes, now, but this was between five and six.”
+
+“Well, he knows I’m with you now.”
+
+“Oh, then you have seen him.”
+
+“No, not yet. But I’m going to.”
+
+V.V. got up out of the creaking chair and in two swift strides had
+crossed the narrow room and was at the window. She pulled aside the
+curtains and threw up the sash. “Come here,” she said to Gillian as she
+leaned out over the sill.
+
+Gillian stumbled in her heavy swathing to V.V.’s side.
+
+“Look there. Did you ever see such an idiot,” said V.V.
+
+Gillian leaned out beside her and looked. The fog had cleared off and a
+fine, chill rain was falling. Down on the pavement on the opposite side
+of the street, standing under a lamp-post Heinrich waited looking up at
+the lighted window. He was still without hat or overcoat and even from
+the fifth story Gillian could see how sharp and white his face was.
+
+“Go home, Hinerik,” called V.V. “I told you I’d be here,” and dragging
+Gillian back with her she slammed the window down again and drew the
+curtains.
+
+“V.V., what are you doing?” said Gillian, her teeth chattering with the
+sudden cold.
+
+“Teaching him his place,” said V.V. sullenly. “I told him on Monday that
+you and I were going to live together in a flat of our own——”
+
+“But, V.V.——”
+
+“Yes, we are. You know we are. Well, he didn’t like it.”
+
+“But of course he didn’t——”
+
+“You be quiet. I told him, like it or not, that’s what I was going to
+do. So then he said I thought more of you than I did of him and I said,
+yes, and had done from the beginning——”
+
+“Oh, V.V., how could you?”
+
+“Well, it’s true—and it’s time Master Hinerik made up his mind to it.
+And I said you knew it.”
+
+“That was a lie, V.V.”
+
+“Oh, was it? Of course you knew it. Haven’t I been with you day after
+day and night after night when he was alone or hanging about in the
+courtyard till old Gordon turned him out——”
+
+“V.V.! V.V.!”
+
+“Well, I said if he couldn’t see what was as plain as the nose on his
+silly face I’d tell him. And I did tell him. I told him I’d always gone
+with girls and that you were worth ten of any boy, let alone a little
+Dago like him. What are you crying about, Gillian? It’s the plain
+truth.”
+
+“It don’t know what you _mean_, V.V. You can’t feel the same about me as
+you did about Heinrich when you were going to marry him.”
+
+“Oh, well, not the same, but I’d sooner live with any girl than with
+him. And I said we were going to Ostend together for Christmas.”
+
+“You know we’re not. It’s the first I’ve ever heard of it.”
+
+“Well, it won’t be the last. I’ve been down to Epping and paid off the
+rent of that flat so’s I can go back there all right—not to the flat,
+we’ll go to an hotel. And I stayed on to make you worry, darling. Did
+you worry about your V.V.?”
+
+It was amazing, it was sickening, but V.V. was clearly unable to realize
+how what she had told was affecting Gillian.
+
+“V.V., what brought Heinrich up here again to-night? How did you know
+he’d be there?”
+
+“He’s there most nights,” said V.V., “and I wrote to him from Epping
+this morning to make sure. I told him I’d be coming home to give you
+your bath. He’d get it by the last post.”
+
+Gillian felt herself turning giddy. She put out one hand to steady
+herself on the back of a chair, and the bath-towel slipped from her
+shoulder loosening a strand of hair with it.
+
+“Oh, you darling,” said V.V., “take off the horrid ugly towel and let
+V.V. brush out your hair and make you all nice and comfy.”
+
+“If you dare to come near me,” said Gillian, and she choked between each
+word. “If you dare to touch me I’ll ring the night-bell and have the
+Gordons and Mrs. Barraclough up to take you out of my room. I’m going to
+dress and go to Heinrich now, myself. He’s ill, he’s nearly mad.”
+
+“Oh, spitfire!” said V.V., still cheerful but a little uneasy, “and you
+can’t go to a man’s studio in the middle of the night, you naughty one.
+Shocking!”
+
+“You shall come too,” said Gillian. “Sit down in the basket-chair and
+wait for me.”
+
+Trembling and sick she dressed hastily, twisting her hair up anyhow and
+pulling a knitted cap over it to keep it together.
+
+“Now,” she said, when she had found the keys of the outside door and
+gate, “are you ready?”
+
+“I’m cold and hungry and tired,” whimpered V.V., “and Hinerik will only
+be cross.”
+
+But Gillian had no pity for V.V.’s weariness.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was some minutes before they could get the high barred gate under the
+archway open. The lock was often hard to deal with when two or three
+people had locked and unlocked it on one evening and V.V., at any rate,
+had come in since it had been closed at ten by Gordon. But Gillian was
+not to be hindered by a lock. Finally the key turned and the gate swung
+open.
+
+“I’ll leave it unlocked in case we can’t get in again,” she said,
+pulling it to gently.
+
+They set off over the bridge, but Gillian could not make V.V. hurry. She
+protested that she was dog-tired and once or twice she stopped and
+leaned against the parapet and really did seem to be exhausted. The
+night-rain on her already rain-soaked clothing was cold and heavy. But
+still Gillian had no pity. There was no room in her aching mind for any
+trouble but Heinrich’s. She had turned him out dazed with misery, had
+let him go wavering off into the fog to find V.V.’s letter. And he had
+stood there under the street-lamp while she was sleeking her skin and
+playing silly games with her shadow, staring up at her window, so numb
+with despair that he had not even seen V.V. herself as she crept into
+the Club an hour ago.
+
+The ragged wooden gate of the studio gardens was unlatched and flapping
+feebly on its hinges in the wind. But there was no light in any of the
+studio windows. Some of them were uninhabited except in the daytime, and
+the occupants of the others were either in bed or abroad on their
+private occasions. The blue door Larry had painted was locked and no
+gleam from within came through any crack over the fanlight.
+
+“He’s gone to bed,” said V.V. “I told you so.”
+
+“He’s not asleep if he is in bed,” said Gillian, and she knocked at the
+door. She knocked first with her knuckles, then hammered with a stone
+she found in the gravel of the path. She called him by name. “Heinrich,
+Heinrich. It’s Gillian. V.V.’s come to you.” She rattled at the
+door-handle; she tried to climb on the ledge of the small high window,
+but it was too narrow to hold her foot. A window was opened by some
+disturbed sleeper in one of the houses that backed on to the studio
+gardens, but the only sound that came from behind the locked and bolted
+door was the faint, melancholy mewing of the little tortoiseshell cat.
+
+“He’s not there,” said V.V. “I knew it was no good coming. He’s prob’ly
+gone off to some other studio where there’s a party. Oh, do come home.
+You’ll catch your death of cold and so shall I.”
+
+“I shall come down again first thing in the morning,” said Gillian. “I
+believe he’s in there all the time.”
+
+“With that screaming cat,” said V.V., “just like him.”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the next morning there was a telegram from Maggie.
+
+“Please come at once. The Mistress has been taken seriously ill.”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Gillian got to Highgate, Aunt Elizabeth was lying dead in her
+chair, her hands stiffening round the leather case in which the
+miniature of Evan Mortimer was closed. And the luminous, still smile
+that the living never wear raised the corners of her mouth and lifted
+her shadowed eyelids into an angel’s beauty.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER SEVEN.
+                          THE FOURTH MOVEMENT
+
+
+                                   I
+
+Queen’s Hall was three-parts full of the regular Saturday Concert
+audience listening to a regular Saturday Concert.
+
+It was almost as foggy inside the hall as it was out in the streets, and
+the light streamed down from the red, silk valances round the great
+chandeliers over the orchestra in straight slanting lines, and cut
+yellow, flat-headed cones of illumination out of the misty dusk.
+
+Gillian sat in the darkness at the back of the two-shilling gallery. How
+she got there was more than she could remember. They had nailed Aunt
+Elizabeth down in her coffin that morning and there was no more to do in
+the house where Maggie held lugubrious tea-parties for the reception of
+all licensed comers in preparation for the funeral on Monday. Lilac had
+missed Gillian’s telegrams at Curragh and would only reach Euston at six
+o’clock that evening, and Gillian, who could neither stay at Highgate
+nor go back to the Club, was waiting till it was time to go to the
+station to meet her.
+
+She could not stay in the house at Highgate now that Aunt Elizabeth’s
+face was hidden in darkness, and she could not go back to the Club and
+sit in the room where Larry had stood and told her that Heinrich was
+dead.
+
+Larry had been waiting for her the night she had gone back after seeing
+the doctor and the lawyer and the men who wanted to know about Aunt
+Elizabeth’s grave. V.V. was with him at first, but they had sent her
+away. Jane had come and taken her away, leaving Gillian and Larry alone.
+Larry had told her what had happened and presently Jane had come back
+and had said to Larry:
+
+“Dearest, you will have to give evidence at the inquest to-morrow. But I
+think we shall be able to keep her out of it.”
+
+But they weren’t keeping V.V. out of it because they loved her or were
+sorry for her, only because it was the decent thing to do. And Gillian
+was to be kept out of it as well. Nobody, not even Mrs. Gordon, had seen
+Heinrich in the fog on Wednesday afternoon looking for V.V.
+
+“All the mud will be splashed on Larry,” said Jane, her face one set and
+constant glare. “V.V. will be his broken-hearted _fiancée_ who was away
+at the time, and you—you won’t come into it at all.”
+
+It was Mr. Quist who had found Heinrich on Thursday evening. He had gone
+down to the studio to get a book Jane had left there and wanted to have
+sent to Felday, and the people in the studio next door had said that the
+mewing of the cat had disturbed them all day long. So Mr. Quist had got
+a ladder and had broken the skylight and had looked in. He had seen
+Heinrich sitting queerly in a chair in the middle of the studio. And
+Heinrich had torn up all Larry’s studies of V.V.; the drawings and
+sketches for the fire-picture he was going to paint; and he had broken
+the little figure of Gillian, the Rapunzel statue Jane had made and
+given to Larry to take care of just before they went away, the figure
+Gillian had never seen which was to be a surprise for her at Christmas.
+He had piled the ruined fragments in a heap in front of the dais. He had
+put on his blue overall and had swept all the dust and rubbish from the
+floor and had covered the fragments with it. He had pulled out the big
+Italian chair and had sat in front of the pile of rubbish and had put
+the barrel of the pistol he was so frightened of into his mouth and
+pulled the trigger. And the pistol had been loaded after all. And the
+little cat was sliding round his feet mewing, mewing....
+
+“He must have done it just before we got there,” said Gillian.
+
+“Or just after you had gone away; it doesn’t much matter now,” said
+Larry.
+
+“Larry, did you know that he minded about me?”
+
+“Of course I knew. I minded myself.”
+
+“But I didn’t. I didn’t dream—why didn’t you warn me?”
+
+“Jane did. I spoke to Jane about it. She wouldn’t believe me at first.
+She said she’d ask you.”
+
+“She did, but only the day before—two days before—and besides, I didn’t
+understand.”
+
+“You should have understood,” said Larry. “Everybody else did. Are you
+going to live with her?”
+
+“With V.V.? No. I never was. She talked about it a lot. But I thought it
+was only talk.”
+
+“It was a good deal more than talk to him.”
+
+“How did you know? Did he say anything?”
+
+“I loved him, that’s how I knew. But that, again, is something I don’t
+suppose you would understand.”
+
+The sick trouble in his face had deepened as he looked away from Gillian
+out into the courtyard and at the staircase window of the other house
+which Jane was passing on her way down from V.V.’s flat.
+
+And then Jane had come and taken Larry away.
+
+Gillian did not see V.V. again. The Jacky who shared the flat with her
+had returned from South Africa and was looking after her. She appeared
+to be a very sensible and decent creature, and quite equal to V.V., who,
+said Jane coldly, was really very much distressed, and as Gillian was in
+trouble herself she had better leave V.V. to her own friends.
+
+That was last night. And this morning she had found a list of the
+Saturday concerts. Heinrich had given it to her because she said she
+wanted to know what she’d be likely to hear before she went to any of
+them. And she had been to none. And now Heinrich’s place in the second
+violins was already filled by some other player, someone to whom his
+failure was probably a godsend, and she was there because in some
+aching, remorseful fashion she knew that if there were any knowledge or
+remembrance in the dim places where his eager soul had exiled itself, he
+would be eased of some part of his torment because she had gone there
+for his sake.
+
+She had slept heavily all night, numb with the fatigue of the past three
+days, but she had wakened unrefreshed and it had not been worth the
+trouble to get herself any breakfast. It was Mabel’s week in the other
+house and the maid on duty on Gillian’s floor had upset her milkcan,
+being new to the flats and consequently unable to retain her hold upon
+any object that happened to be in her grasp when William addressed her
+as “Pretty Dear” out of the darkness of seven o’clock in the morning.
+Kind Mrs. Middleton, hearing the clatter, had come in with a cup of
+early tea and had stayed to condole and confer with Gillian and to be
+scandalized that Gillian had made no effort to get black raiment for the
+funeral.
+
+“But I shan’t go to the funeral,” said Gillian. “Aunt Elizabeth wouldn’t
+think it right. Only the men of the family—that’ll be Toby and Old
+Cousin Mortimer from Ludlow—will go. Lilac and I will stay at Highgate,
+with you and her other friends.”
+
+But Mrs. Middleton would argue, and Gillian had slipped out to escape
+the questions she knew must come as soon as the news of Heinrich’s death
+travelled up from the kitchens, where it must already be known, and came
+to Mrs. Middleton’s ears.
+
+She had wandered on the Embankment with no bread to give to the gulls
+who wheeled out of the mist, their red legs hanging straight like
+coral-branches from their down-white bodies as they screamed past her
+face. Their broken, mewing cries seemed like a devil’s echo of that
+other mewing, the thought of which drove all the blood of her body in a
+cold flood back to her sickened heart.
+
+There, by the river, where she had so often found comfort, where she had
+escaped so often from her small, half-imagined griefs, the real and
+awful sorrow, the harrowing remorse for her own share in the disaster
+she was facing, broke in upon her with wave after wave of mounting
+desolation. All the beauty she had ever found by the river was gone;
+washed away by this horror. The ash-grey water, sluggish under the
+hidden sky, lapped against the pier by the bridges with a cold
+reiterated syllable—“dead—dead—dead.” Gillian drifted on to the flat
+sound till she came to Vauxhall. For half an hour she wandered in the
+Tate Gallery. All the pictures there seemed to repeat the sound of the
+river in paint. Ophelia floating on the flower-encumbered stream; Icarus
+livid among the soaring feathers of his wings; the child in Luke Fildes’
+life-size bestseller; Chatterton, dead at his attic window; the
+sickening giants struggling or gloating over corpses in the symbolism of
+Watts; the anatomical perfection of Leighton’s Sea giving up its dead;
+the bird crushed in the grip of the Minotaur—could they paint nothing
+but this? Did the men who put paint on canvas with such hideous
+competence know anything about the crazed disillusionment that had
+killed Heinrich? Had they ever imagined the ineffable, almost
+contemptuous peace which Death had set upon Elizabeth Mortimer’s smiling
+mask?
+
+And then the memory of the faint, ironic curve into which the dead mouth
+had fallen before they shut it away from sight, came back to Gillian,
+terrifying, abasing her with the thought that Aunt Elizabeth knew of her
+folly and condemned her from the grave to which she herself had gone in
+righteousness and joy.
+
+Out past Westminster and up Whitehall she wandered. She did not pause in
+Trafalgar Square to look with derision at dead painters’ crucifixions
+and _pietàs_. Her mind was heavy with refusal of the consolations their
+very existence implied. Her eye had offended and she had not plucked it
+out. She was fit to be eternally cast into the outer darkness where she
+was now wandering. She could not enter any Christian church and pray for
+the pagan Heinrich; and no prayer of hers need reach the heaven for
+which Aunt Elizabeth had saved her own soul.
+
+After a time she had found herself waiting in the gallery-queue on the
+staircase outside Queen’s Hall; and finally, jostled and elbowed by
+enthusiasts who would not, if struggling could avail their eyes, miss
+any turn of the conductor’s wrist, any wafture of his expressive hair or
+necktie, she had found a seat high up in a corner against the wall.
+
+She did not trouble about a programme. The orchestra played one of the
+well-known overtures. A violinist executed some Dvorák; there was a
+Martial work—Elgar, Gillian thought, and another violin solo, and the
+first part of the programme was over.
+
+Gillian was only musical at second hand. For the most part she was
+content to feel without understanding what she heard. Unless she had a
+score to read she could not follow any orchestrated music at all. But
+both by taste and training she was happier listening to a symphony she
+knew well, or hearing chamber-music with which she had some acquaintance
+than she was where any but the greatest artists sang. Words were spoilt
+by music to Gillian, though she often turned the music she knew into
+words. It was one of the secret personal idiosyncrasies she discovered
+to Heinrich, that when she had learnt to know any great music by ear she
+remembered it in a notation of words, just as in her childhood she had
+done as Jane Bird did and had made profane verses to hymn-tunes.
+Heinrich had not been musical in this same secondary, literary sense,
+though he knew and loved the tunes in what he played. But once,
+following her lead, he too had set a melody to words. Nothing in the
+first part of the programme had gone to any words for Gillian; but,
+after the first item on the second half was over, there was a longish
+pause, and then the orchestra gave forth the first subject of
+Tchaikowsky’s B Minor Symphony. And Heinrich, his great eyes laughing
+with pleasure, his fiddle tucked under his ear, stood before her singing
+in his voice that was almost the voice of the strings from which he drew
+the tune, singing at Gillian’s bidding, but singing for V.V., who hardly
+listened to him, his one absurd, exotic phrase:
+
+“_Wir sollen nicht mehr auseinander gehen_”—the phrase repeated itself,
+_nicht auseinander, nicht auseinander_ soared the violins, and the whole
+orchestra repeated it like an oath, _Wir sollen nicht mehr auseinander
+gehen_. Was it only of V.V. Heinrich had been thinking when the melody,
+the perfect love-phrase of the music, had drawn this sentimentalism up
+from the recesses of his polyglot vocabulary? It might have been. And
+yet Heinrich was better than that. He was not, like V.V., incapable of
+any idea that had not a direct personal implication—_Nicht mehr
+auseinander gehen_—that was the ideal of all lovers. Would any German
+girl, Gillian wondered, hearing it exotic and appealing from Heinrich’s
+impish lips have loved him as V.V. could not imagine doing? Or would she
+have laughed at his queer passion as V.V. had done. It was a terrible
+thing to face—that claim—love me or I die. After all it was almost what
+V.V. had said to her, and she had turned away from it with all the force
+within her. You couldn’t let another human being set up a right in you
+like that. Larry hadn’t. He had said it was the primal curse.
+
+The orchestra marched on until the time and the key had changed and the
+first bars of the five-four allegro were racing along the wood-wind and
+up and down the strings. Heinrich had made no words for that, only a
+funny little laughing song that had run against the tune. There was more
+music in Heinrich than in Gillian—she could not have pointed any melody
+like that. She could not even quite remember how Heinrich had done it.
+It flickered in her mind as the movement danced on: presently it would
+flicker out altogether—and be just a little, forgotten trick, like his
+way of getting the sparrows together in his hand and throwing them out
+into the ivy on the wall beyond the studio window.
+
+Heinrich had refused to make words for the rest of the symphony, and as
+it rioted on melodiously Gillian’s attention flagged and she half-dozed
+in her airless corner, her eyes dazzled by the angles of light which cut
+one another just within her line of vision. And then the descending
+chords of the fourth movement, the Adagio Lamentoso, broke heavy with
+anger and despair. And they made words so plain that Gillian felt the
+whole hall was ringing with them. “O poor Larry Browne,” they called, “O
+poor Larry Browne.” Like a foolish, tragic, nursery rhyme. And it was
+Jane’s voice, and Lilac’s, and even V.V.’s heaping anger upon her
+because of what had been done to Larry and to Heinrich. What was it Jane
+had said? “Spattering mud on Larry.” She had done that. It was clear
+that in some horrible way, which was a part of the things she did not
+even now quite understand, Larry was being laid under an imputation of
+which she, Gillian, had been the source.
+
+He was, she knew, almost Heinrich’s guardian. He had meant to take his
+faun to the warmth and light in which his frail and delicate nature
+could flourish and grow in joy. But Larry would never be able to take
+Heinrich to Taormina now. Larry had not saved him from the vultures
+after all. He could never bear to live in the studio again. Perhaps,
+even now, at the inquest Larry was being blamed—censured was the
+word—the coroner censured the witness—for leaving his pistol loaded—for
+leaving Heinrich alone with a loaded pistol. For leaving Heinrich alone
+with his anger and his fear.
+
+Suddenly the lights grew together, they began to revolve like rockets,
+and the music swelled and increased to an intolerable shouting, and
+everyone in the galleries leaned forward and pointed at her, and they
+all shouted in time to the chords—they all shouted Larry’s name. Gillian
+stood up in her place—“Larry, Larry”—she shouted with them; and then the
+reeling lights and the shouting voices became one black confusion into
+which she was falling, falling——
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Someone—she did not know who it was—was holding her by the arm on the
+pavement outside. A taxi with the door open stood by the kerb.
+
+“Where shall I take you?” said a strange, kind voice.
+
+“To Euston, to meet the Irish Mail,” said Gillian.
+
+And then she fainted.
+
+
+                                   II
+
+The curtains were of the richest satin and they were so voluminous that
+even when they were drawn right across the windows they fell in close
+corrugation to the velvet pile of the carpet which covered the floor.
+But carpet and curtains were plain and of a very soft, dull,
+rose-colour, and there was not an inch of fringe or an attempt at a
+true-lover’s knot to be seen on them. And the room, though large, was
+not very high, and there were no mirrors on the plain cream walls nor in
+the doors of the plain walnut cupboard that ran along the wall opposite
+the fireplace. And the only picture in the room was a large
+uncompromising water-colour of a race-horse in a flat, wooden frame
+which hung over the fireplace. A huge photograph of Old Winona, framed
+in silver, stood on a writing-table between the windows, but the frame
+was quite plain, and the bed in which Gillian lay, though it was
+deliciously comfortable with sheets of heavy, cool linen, smooth as silk
+and blankets as light as the down quilt above them, was narrow, with
+plain head- and foot-boards, to match the wardrobe.
+
+She was in Toby’s room on the top-floor at Knightsbridge, which was for
+the moment, so Lilac had explained to her, the only spare room in the
+house, Toby having moved down to the room with a dressing-room on the
+floor below next door to Lilac’s temporary quarters.
+
+“When we get into Norfolk Street you shall have a whole floor to
+yourself,” said Lilac.
+
+But Gillian had refused the installation saying she would rather go back
+to the Club if Mrs. Barraclough would tolerate William there after all.
+
+“It would be awkward for you to have a wage-earning sister in the
+house,” said Gillian, “and wages I intend to earn after Christmas.”
+
+And Lilac had not argued with Gillian, though she had tried to make Jane
+Bird do so when Jane had come to tea that afternoon. Jane, however,
+sided with Gillian.
+
+“She’s quite right. She’d ruin herself, living up to your standard in
+hats and gloves alone, in Norfolk Street,” said Jane, “even if she did
+live rent- and food-free. Whereas at the Club with me and Larry as
+social outlets she’ll be affluent, and you can provide her with the
+right kind of trimmings when you feel she won’t quite do as she is for
+special occasions.”
+
+Gillian, from her pillows, expressed her gratitude to Jane, and when
+Lilac left them alone together Jane said more.
+
+“You wouldn’t be happy with them anyhow,” she said; “they don’t want the
+same things as you do. Toby may have wanted some of them once, but he’s
+forgetting. You’d better let Lilac go. She’ll be a Leader of London
+Society in three years and Toby’ll be in the House of Lords before she’s
+done with him. You’d come quite as bad a cropper there as you did with
+your Vanderleyden. It’s no use being intimate out of your own class.”
+
+“But I haven’t got a class,” protested Gillian.
+
+“Oh yes, you have. But it isn’t a very large one. I’m in it. That’s why
+I’ll never be rich, though my figures are getting quite degradingly
+fashionable. And Larry’s really in it. I think I shall keep him there.
+We’re married, you know.”
+
+“Goodness!” said Gillian, “has this been going on for long?”
+
+“Since he came back from Dinkelsbühl. It was the white porcelain stove
+that made me see I could not allow him, with it, to pass out of my life.
+And we were afraid Heinrich was gone beyond recall to the Vanderleyden.”
+
+“Oh, Jane!”
+
+“Yes. I know. She’s gone off to Ostend with someone called Mick or Nick.
+A female. Mrs. Barraclough has let her rooms to a real missionary this
+time: false teeth and no mean moustache. She tilled the Chinese vineyard
+in her day, I’m told.”
+
+“I don’t believe you till vineyards,” said Gillian. “Where are you and
+Larry going to live?”
+
+“In a converted mews, behind Brompton Oratory. It looks out on the
+greenest of green gardens and we’re painting it Reckitt’s blue and
+orange in our spare time.”
+
+“What do you do with the rest of your time?”
+
+“Gillian,” said Jane firmly, “we kiss each other.”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jane had gone. She had left a single Christmas rose behind her. It stood
+on a table by the fire, in a toothbrush-glass full of water which Jane
+had fetched for it from the dressing-room before she left, and it was
+unfolding its pinky-yellow petals so quickly in the heat that Gillian
+could already see the pollen-soft stamens at its heart. Presently the
+petals would fall on the polished wood, just as the petals of the gloire
+de Dijon roses had fallen on the table in V.V.’s room last July on the
+day when the idea of their living together in the same flat had first
+been suggested.
+
+Gillian did not remember that she had assented to it even then, but that
+did not lessen her sense of guilt. What was it Aunt Elizabeth had said?
+Love must blossom in the spirit. There had been no spiritual blossoming
+in all her infatuation for V.V. She had known that all the time. She had
+gone on taking all the pleasure, breathing the heady incense, yielding
+to the senseless spell of that haunting, physical charm that never once
+fulfilled the promise it always half suggested. What it was that had so
+lured her mind and stirred her senses Gillian had never known. She had
+followed blindly, but her blindness had been wilful. Always she might
+have opened her eyes.
+
+And now the waking dream was over. Heinrich was dead. Larry might have
+gone after him if it had not been for Jane who had seen and known all
+the time.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was Jane who had made many dark things clear to Gillian a few days
+earlier. Lilac had sent for Jane, not understanding the confused and
+shaken trouble of Gillian’s state.
+
+“She says you are angry with her,” said Lilac.
+
+“So I was,” said Jane, “but, I admit, she can’t have known what she was
+really in for. But now this dreadful thing has happened she ought to be
+told.”
+
+And Jane had told Gillian. And in telling her Jane had lost the
+bitterness of her anger against Gillian and found her love there still.
+And Gillian had seen the morning of her ignorance melt into a hard,
+bleak, unenchanted day.
+
+The only person who had escaped unhurt was V.V. But she was unhurt
+because, and this Gillian knew now, because long ago V.V. had been so
+maimed, her soul had been so warped and stunted by some influence she
+could still recall though she was too vitiated to resent it, that
+nothing that happened to her now would make very much difference. You
+cannot shipwreck a derelict.
+
+V.V. had gone her own way, and Gillian could not follow her. She had
+taken the first steps on the road down which V.V. was disappearing, and
+had come back again to the place where it started.
+
+And now that road was closed.
+
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+   OLD GUARD HOUSE
+   NOVEMBER, 1925
+
+
+
+
+                                THEODORE
+                               DREISER’S
+                         FIRST NOVEL SINCE 1915
+
+                              An American
+                                Tragedy
+
+   It is a great moment in American literature that sees the
+   publication of Theodore Dreiser’s first novel in nine years. Mr.
+   Dreiser’s strict standards of artistic rectitude are ever
+   untouched by alien influences. What he writes must square with
+   the artist’s loftiest vision. We have been Mr. Dreiser’s
+   publishers since 1917. Our rather long period of suspense in
+   waiting for a new Dreiser novel has more than justified itself in
+   _An American Tragedy_. 2 vols. boxed.
+
+                                                              $5.00
+
+                                SHERWOOD
+                               ANDERSON’S
+
+                                  Dark
+                                Laughter
+
+                           [ FIFTH EDITION ]
+
+   “The first chapter is as consummate a piece of art as the first
+   chapter of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and the rest of the book is
+   keyed up to that pitch.”—Stuart P. Sherman, _N. Y. Herald
+   Tribune_.
+
+   “Anderson has wrought a masterpiece.”—Laurence Stallings, _N. Y.
+   World_.
+
+   “There is life in Sherwood Anderson’s work; life that bubbles and
+   surges—life and vigor and crude poetry.”—_New York Eve. Post._
+
+   “This is the chosen or Godgiven field of Sherwood Anderson—the
+   revelation of human minds, of our own minds.”—Edwin Bjorkman, _N.
+   Y. Sun_.
+
+                                                              $2.50
+
+
+
+
+                          Transcriber’s Notes
+
+
+The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
+and punctuation errors as well as variations in hyphenation were
+silently amended. All other changes are shown here (before/after):
+
+   [p. 27]:
+   ... of your school, as I have taken due precaution  ...
+   ... of your school, as I have taken due precaution to ...
+
+   [p. 108]:
+   ... was no reason, in Mrs. Mordaunt’s self-disciplining ...
+   ... was no reason, in Mrs. Mortimer’s self-disciplining ...
+
+   [p. 125]:
+   ... a woodland air. The face narrowed on either side a ...
+   ... a woodland air. The face narrowed on either side of a ...
+
+   [p. 128]:
+   ... raven in the aviary in the maze everything that was  ...
+   ... raven in the aviary in the maze everything that was left ...
+
+   [p. 139]:
+   ... wore a hat a minute longer than she need, and not ...
+   ... wore a hat a minute longer than she needed, and not ...
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78428 ***