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Consequences

by E. M. Delafield · English · Gutenberg #34935 · 606,193 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Consequences

Author: E. M. Delafield


        
Release date: January 12, 2011 [eBook #34935]
                Most recently updated: June 19, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34935

Credits: Produced by Amy Sisson (http://www.girlebooks.com) and Marc D'Hooghe


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONSEQUENCES ***

CONSEQUENCES

By

E.M. DELAFIELD


New York

ALFRED A. KNOPF

MCMXIX



_Dedicated to M.P.P._

_and, in spite of air-raids, to the_

_pleasant memory of our winter_

_in London, 1917-1918_




CONTENTS

    BOOK I
         I THE GAME OF CONSEQUENCES
        II SCHOOL
       III QUEENIE TORRANCE
        IV HOLIDAYS
         V OTHER PEOPLE
        VI THE END OF AN ERA
       VII LONDON SEASON
      VIII GOLDSTEIN AND QUEENIE
        IX SCOTLAND
         X NOEL
        XI ENGAGEMENT OF MARRIAGE
       XII CHRISTMAS PANTOMIME
      XIII DECISION
       XIV BARBARA
        XV DIAMOND JUBILEE
       XVI MOTHER GERTRUDE
      XVII LAWN-TENNIS
     XVIII CRISIS

    BOOK II
       XIX BELGIUM
        XX AFTERMATH
       XXI FATHER FARRELL
      XXII ROME
     XXIII N.W.
      XXIV ALL OF THEM
       XXV VIOLET
      XXVI AUGUST
     XXVII THE EMBEZZLEMENT
    XXVIII CEDRIC
      XXIX FORGIVENESS
       XXX EPITAPH




Book I




I

The Game of Consequences


The firelight flickered on the nursery wall, and the children sat round
the table, learning the new game which the nursery-maid said they would
like ever so, directly they understood it.

"I understand it already," said Alex, the eldest, tossing her head
proudly. "Look, Barbara, you fold the piece of paper like this, and then
give it to Cedric, because he's next to you, and I give mine to you, and
Emily gives hers to me. That's right, isn't it, Emily?"

"Quite right, Miss Alex; what a clever girl, to be sure. Here, Master
Baby, you can play with me. You're too little to do it all by yourself."

"He isn't Baby any more. We've got to call him Archie now. The new
little sister is Baby," said Alex dictatorially.

She liked always to be the one to give information, and Emily had only
been with them a little while. The children's own nurse would have told
her to mind her own business, or to wait till she was asked, before
teaching her grandmother, but Emily said complacently:

"To be sure, Miss Alex! and such a big boy as Master Archie is, too. Now
you all write down a name of a gentleman."

"What gentleman?" asked Cedric judicially. He was a little boy of eight,
with serious grey eyes and a good deal of dignity.

"Why, any gentleman. Some one you all know."

"I know, I know."

Alex, always the most easily excited of them all, scribbled on her piece
of paper and began to bounce up and down on her chair.

"Hurry up, Barbara. You're so slow."

"I don't know who to put."

Alex began to whisper, and Barbara at once said:

"Nurse doesn't allow us to whisper. It's bad manners."

"You horrid little prig!"

Alex was furious. Barbara's priggishness always put her into a temper,
because she felt it, unconsciously, to be a reflection on her own
infallibility as the eldest.

"Miss Barbara," said Emily angrily, "it's not for you to say what Nurse
allows or doesn't allow; _I'm_ looking after you now. The idea, indeed!"

Barbara's pale, pointed little face grew very red, but she did not cry,
as Alex, in spite of her twelve years, would almost certainly have cried
at such a snub.

She set her mouth vindictively and shot a very angry look at Alex out of
her blue eyes. Then she wrote something on the slip of paper, shielding
it with her hand so that her sister could not read it.

Cedric was printing in large capitals, easily legible, but no one was
interested in what Cedric wrote.

There was a good deal of whispering between Emily and little Archie, and
then the papers were folded up once more and passed round the table
again.

"But when do we see what we've written?" asked Alex impatiently.

"Not till the end of the game, then we read them out. That's where the
fun comes in," said Emily.

It was a long while before the papers were done, and most of the
children found it very difficult to decide what _he_ said to _her_, what
she replied, and what the world said. But at last even Barbara, always
lag-last, folded her slip, very grimy and thumb-marked, and put it with
the others into Emily's apron.

"Now then," giggled the nursery-maid, "pull one out, Master Archie, and
I'll see what it says."

Archie snatched at a paper, and they opened it.

"Listen!" said Emily.

"The Queen met Master Archie--whoever of you put the Queen?"

"Cedric!" cried the other children.

Cedric's loyalty to his Sovereign was a by-word in the nursery.

"Well, the Queen met Master Archie in the Park. She said to him, 'No,'
and he answered her, 'You dirty little boy, go 'ome and wash your face.'
Well, if that didn't ought to be the other way round!"

"I wish it was me she'd met in the Park," said Cedric sombrely. "I might
have gone back to Buckingham Palace with her and--"

"Go on, Emily, go on!" cried Alex impatiently. "Don't listen to Cedric.
What comes next?"

"The consequences was--whatever's here?" said Emily, pretending an
inability to decipher her own writing.

"Well, I never! The consequences was, a wedding-ring. Whoever went and
thought of that now? And the world said--"

The nursery door opened, and Alex shrieked, "Oh, finish it--quick!"

She knew instinctively that it was Nurse, and that Nurse would be
certain to disapprove of the new game.

"Don't you make that noise, Alex," said Nurse sharply. "You'll disturb
the baby with your screaming."

For a moment Alex wondered if the game was to be allowed to proceed, but
Barbara, well known to be Nurse's favourite, must needs say to her in an
amiable little voice, such as she never used to her brothers and sister:

"Emily's been teaching us such a funny new game, Nurse. Come and play
with us."

"I've no time to play, as you very well know, with all your clothes
wanting looking over the way they do," Nurse told her complacently.
"What's the game?"

Alex kicked Barbara under the table, but without much hope, and at the
same moment Cedric remarked very distinctly:

"It is called Consequences, and Archie met the Queen in the Park. I wish
it had been me instead."

"Well!" exclaimed Nurse. "That's the way you do when my back's turned,
Miss Emily, teaching them such vulgar, nonsensical games as that. Never
did I hear--now give me those papers this minute."

She did not wait to be given anything, but snatched the little slips out
of Emily's apron and threw them on to the fire.

"I'm not going to have no Consequences in _my_ nursery, and don't you
believe it!" remarked Nurse.

But omnipotent though Nurse was, in the eyes of the Clare children, she
could not altogether compass this feat.

There were consequences of all sorts.

Cedric, who was obstinate, and Barbara, also obstinate and rather sly as
well, continued to play at the new game in corners by themselves,
refusing to admit Alex to their society because she told them that they
were playing it all wrong. She knew that they were not playing it as
Emily had taught them, and was prepared to set them right, although she
felt uncertain, in the depths of her heart, as to whether she herself
could remember it all. But at least she knew more than Barbara, who was
silly and a copy-cat, or than Cedric, who had concentrated on the
possibilities the game presented to him of a hypothetical encounter
between himself and his Sovereign. The game for Cedric consisted in the
ever-lengthening conversation which took place under the heading of what
he said to her and what she replied. When Her Majesty proceeded, under
Cedric's laborious pencil, to invite him to drive her in her own
carriage-and-pair, to Buckingham Palace, Alex said scornfully that
Cedric was a silly little boy, and of course the Queen wouldn't say
_that_. To which Cedric turned a perfectly deaf ear, and continued
slowly to evolve amenities eminently satisfactory to his admiration for
Her Majesty. Alex went away, shrugging her shoulders, but secretly she
knew that Cedric's indifference had got the better of her. However much
she might laugh, with the other children, or sometimes, even, in a
superior way, with the grown-ups, when the children went into the
drawing-room, at Cedric's slowness, and his curious fashion of harping
upon one idea at a time, Alex was sub-consciously aware of Cedric as a
force, and one which could, ultimately, always defeat her own diffused,
unbalanced energies. If any one laughed at Alex, or despised one of her
many enthusiasms, she would quickly grow ashamed of it, and try to
pretend that she had never really been in earnest. In the same way, she
would affect qualities and instincts which did not belong to her, with
the hope of attracting, and of gaining affection.

But Cedric went his own way, as genuinely undisturbed by Nurse's
scoldings and hustlings as by his elder sister's mockery, which had its
origin in her secret longing to prove to herself, in spite of her own
inmost convictions, that she was the dominant spirit in her little
world.

It always made her angry when Cedric left her gibes unanswered, not from
a desire to provoke her further, but simply from his complete absorption
in the matter in hand, and his utter indifference to Alex's comments.

"Don't you hear what I say?" Alex asked sharply.

"No," said Cedric baldly. "I'm not listening. Don't interrupt me, Alex."

"You're playing it all wrong--you and Barbara. Two silly little babies,"
she cried angrily and incoherently. "And it's a stupid, vulgar game.
Nurse said so."

Although Alex had been the most enthusiastic of them all when Emily had
first taught her the game, she had at once begun to think it vulgar when
Nurse condemned it.

She would have nothing more to do with "Consequences." It was quite
likely that in a few days Barbara would get into one of her priggish,
perverse moods, and in a fit of temper with Cedric go and tell Nurse
that he was still indulging in the forbidden pastime. Alex thought she
might as well be out of it.

She was in trouble often enough in the nursery. Nurse always took
Barbara's part against her, and accused her of being violent and
over-bearing, and then Lady Isabel, the children's mother, would send
for her to her room while she dressed for dinner, and say complainingly:

"Alex, why do you quarrel so with the others? I shall send you to
school, if you can't be happy with Barbara at home."

"Oh, don't send me to school, mummy."

"Not if you're good."

"I will be good, really, I will."

"Very well, my child. Now ring for Hawkins, or I shall be late."

"May I stay and watch you put on your diamond things, mummy? Do let me."

And Lady Isabel always laughed, and let her stay, so that Alex
eventually went back to the nursery with an elated sense of having been
very good, and accorded privileges which never fell to the lot of
self-righteous Barbara.

She knew she was her mother's favourite, because she was the eldest, and
was often sent for to the drawing-room when there were people there.
Barbara, of course, was too ugly to go much to the drawing-room. Alex
would toss her own mane of silky brown curls, and draw herself up
conceitedly, as she thought of Barbara's pale face, and thin, attenuated
ringlets. Besides, Lady Isabel had said that Barbara really mustn't come
down again when "people" were there until her second teeth had put in
their tardy appearance. Even Cedric, though acclaimed as "quaint" and
"solemn" by his mother's friends, was too apt to make disconcerting
comments on their sparkling conversation, and would return to the
nursery in disgrace. Alex' only rival for downstairs' favour was little
Archie, who was only four, and at present a very pretty little boy. But
he was too small for Alex ever to feel jealous of him. The new baby,
christened with pomp in the big Catholic Church at the end of the
Square, Pamela Isabel, was, so far, a neglible quantity in the nursery
world.

She slept in the little room called the inner nursery, most of the day,
and was only with the others when they were taken into the Park or to
play in the square garden. Then Emily pushed the big pram that contained
the slumbering Pamela, and Nurse grasped the hands of Barbara and Archie
and dragged them over the crossings.

Cedric, by Nurse's express orders, always walked just in front of her
with Alex, and unwillingly submitted to having his hand held by his
sister.

"Not that I trust Alex for common sense," Nurse was careful to explain,
"not a yard, but so long as they're together I can keep an eye on both
and see they don't get under no hansom's feet. That boy's spectacles are
too downright uncanny for me to let him cross the road alone."

For Cedric was obliged to wear a large pair of round spectacles, without
which he could only see things that were very close to his eyes. He even
had another, different, pair for reading, which seemed to Alex an
exaggerated precaution, likely to increase Cedric's sense of his own
importance.

"Well," said Cedric. "You have a plate, and I haven't."

Alex's plate was an instrument of torture designed to push back two
prominent front teeth. It not only hurt her and kept her awake at night,
but was very disfiguring besides, and she passionately envied Barbara,
who at nine years old still had only gaps where her front teeth should
have been.

"Of course," Alex would sometimes declare grandly, repeating what she
had heard Lady Isabel say, "Barbara is dreadfully backward. She's such a
baby for her age. _I'm_ very old for my age."

But she only said this in the drawing-room, where it would provoke
kindly laughter or perhaps interested comment. In the nursery, Nurse
never suffered any airs and graces, as she called them, and would pounce
on Alex and shake her at the least hint of any such nonsense.

"Just you wait till you're sent to a good strict school, my lady, and
see what you'll get then," she told her threateningly.

"I'm not going to school. Mummy said I shouldn't go if I was good."

"We shall see what we shall see. Children as think themselves everybody
at home, gets whipped when they go to school," Nurse told her severely.

Alex was used to these prognostications. They did not alarm her very
much, because she did not think that she would be sent to school. She
knew instinctively that her father disapproved of ordinary girls'
schools, and that her mother disliked convents, and indeed most things
that had to do with religion.

Alex supposed that this was because Lady Isabel was a Protestant! She
thought that it was much the nicest religion to belong to, on the whole,
since it evidently imposed no obligations in the nature of church-going,
and she often wondered why her mother had let all her children be
Catholics, instead of Protestants like herself. It certainly couldn't be
because father cared which church the children went to, or whether they
went at all.

The only person in the house who did seem to care was Nurse, who took
Alex and Barbara and Cedric to High Mass at the Oratory every Sunday,
where there was a front bench reserved for them, with little cards in
brass frames planted at intervals along the ledge in front of them,
bearing the name of Sir Francis Clare.

Nurse put Barbara on one side of her and Alex on the other, and Cedric
on the outside, and was very particular about their kneeling down and
standing up at the right moment, and keeping the prayer-books open in
front of them. Alex and Barbara each had a _Garden of the Soul_, but
Cedric was only allowed _Holy Childhood_ which had pictures and
anecdotes illustrative of Vice and Virtue at the end.

Alex knew all the anecdotes by heart, and preferred her own
grown-up-looking book with its small, close print. She had long since
discovered that the one matter over which Nurse could be hoodwinked was
print, and that she might quite safely indulge herself in the perusal of
the pages devoted to the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, or to a mysterious
ceremony called Churching after Child-birth, during the many dull
portions of the long service.

The only part of Church that held possibilities was when the little bell
rang at the Elevation, and every one bent his or her head as far down as
it would go over the bench. Alex always looked up surreptitiously, then,
to see if by any chance a miracle was taking place, or to watch Cedric's
invariable manœuvre of hanging on to the ledge by his teeth and hands
and trying to raise his feet from the floor at the same time.

Nurse was always piously bent double, her face hidden in her cotton
gloves, breathing stertorously with Barbara on the other side devotedly
imitating her, even to the production of strange sounds through her own
tightly-compressed lips.

After that, Alex always knew that the end of Church was near, and that
as soon as the priest had taken up his little square headgear and faced
the congregation for the last time, Nurse would begin to poke her
violently, as a sign that she was to get up and to make Cedric pick up
his cap and his gloves.

Then came the genuflection as they filed out between the benches, and
Nurse was always very particular that this should be done properly,
frequently pressing a heavy hand on Alex's shoulder until her knee
bumped painfully against the stone floor. The final ceremony connected
with the children's religion took place at the door, when Cedric had to
make his way through rustling skirts and an occasional pair of black
trousers to the big stone basin of holy water. Into this, standing on
tiptoe with immense difficulty, he plunged as much of his hand as was
necessary to satisfy the sharp inspection of Nurse when he returned,
proffering dripping fingers to her and to his sisters.

The last perfunctory sign of the cross made then, the worst of Sunday,
in Alex's opinion, was over.

Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for dinner was pleasant. Mademoiselle
did not come in the afternoon, and Nurse generally went out and left
Emily in charge. In the summer she took the children to sit in the
Square garden--the Park on Sundays was not allowed--and in the winter
they always walked as far as the Albert Memorial, for which Cedric
entertained a great admiration.

Sunday was Lady Isabel's At Home day and the children, except during the
season, always went down to the drawing-room after tea, Alex and Barbara
in pale, rose-coloured frocks with innumerable frills at throat and
wrists, and a small pad fastened under each skirt so that it might stand
well out at the back. Cedric, like most other little boys of his age and
standing, was forced to wear a Lord Fauntleroy suit, from which his
cropped bullet head and spectacles emerged incongruously.

The half-hour in the drawing-room was not enjoyed by the others as it
was by Alex, especially if there were many visitors. She would lean
against Lady Isabel confidently, and hear people say how like she was to
her mother, which always delighted her. Her mother looked so pretty,
sitting on the sofa with her fringe beautifully curled and a lovely
dress that was half a teagown, the tight bodice coming down into a sharp
point in front and behind, and the skirt falling into long folds, with a
train sweeping the ground, and huge loops and bows of soft ribbon
draping it cross-wise.

Barbara was incurably shy, and poked her head when she was spoken to,
but very few people took as much notice of her as of talkative Alex or
pretty little Archie, who was all blue ribbons and fearless smiles. And
before very long Lady Isabel was sure to say:

"Now, you'd better run back to the nursery, hadn't you, darlings? or
Nurse will be comin' down in search of you. I've got the most invaluable
old dragon for them," she generally added to her friends. "She's been
with us since Alex was a baby, and rules the whole house."

"Oh, don't send them away!" one of the visiting ladies would exclaim
politely. "_Such_ darlings!"

"Oh, but I must! Their father won't _hear_ of my spoilin' them. Now run
along, infants."

Cedric and Barbara were only too ready to obey, though it was understood
that Lady Isabel's "run along" only meant a very ceremonious departure
from the room, Barbara taking little Archie by the hand and leading him
to the door, where they both dropped the obeisance considered
"picturesque," and Cedric making an unwilling progress to execute his
carefully practised bow before each one of the ladies scattered about
the big room.

If Alex, however, was enjoying herself, and getting the notice that her
soul loved, she always said in a pleading whisper, loud enough to be
heard by two or three people besides her mother:

"Oh, do let me stay with you a little longer, mummy. Don't send me
upstairs yet!"

"How sweet! Do let her stay, dear Lady Isabel."

"You mustn't encourage me to spoil her. She ought to go up with the
others."

"Just for this once, mummy."

"Well, just for this once, perhaps. After all," said Lady Isabel
apologetically, "she _is_ the eldest. She'll be comin' out before I know
where I am!"

And Alex would enjoy the privilege of being the eldest, and sit beside
her mother, listening to the conversation, and sometimes joining in with
remarks that she thought might be acclaimed as amusing or original, or
even merely precocious. No wonder that the nursery greeted her return
with disdain. Even Emily called her "drawing-room child," and by her
contempt brought Alex' ready tears of mortified vanity to the surface.
But it was much worse on the rare Sunday afternoons when Nurse was in,
when she would greatly resent the slight to Barbara if she was sent up
from the drawing-room before her sister.

"Working on your mamma to spoil you like that, just because you're a
couple of years older!" Nurse would say, pulling the comb fiercely
through Alex' hair as she went to bed.

"I'm three whole years older."

"Don't you contradict me like that, Alex. I'm not going to have any
showing-off up here, I can tell you. You can keep those airs and graces
for your mamma's friends in the drawing-room."

Alex generally went to bed in tears.

If Nurse had not been scolding her, then Barbara had been quarrelling
with her. They always quarrelled whenever Barbara ventured to differ
from Alex and take up an attitude of her own, or still more when Barbara
and Cedric made an alliance together and excluded Alex's autocratic
ruling of their games.

"But it is for your good," she would tell them passionately. "I want to
show you a better way. It'll be much more fun if you do it my
way--you'll see."

But they did not want to see.

Their obstinacy always brought to Alex the same sense of incredulous,
resentful fury. How _could_ they not want to be shown the best way of
doing things, when she knew it and they didn't? And, of course, she
always did know it. Was she not the eldest?

It was not till Alex was almost thirteen that her belief in her own
infallibility as eldest received a rude shock.

She nearly killed Barbara.

It was the first week of August, and Sir Francis and Lady Isabel had
gone to Scotland. The children were going to the sea with Nurse on the
following day, and took advantage of her state of excitement over the
packing, and the emptiness of the downstair rooms, to play at circus on
the stairs. Emily only said, "Now don't go hurting yourselves, whatever
you do, or there'll be no seaside tomorrow," and then went back to amuse
Pamela, who was crying and restless from the heat.

"I'll tell you what!" said Alex. "We'll have tight-rope dancing. I'm
tired of learned pigs and things like that--" This last impersonation
having been perseveringly rendered by Cedric with much shuffling and
snorting over a pack of cards.

"Give me the skipping-rope, Barbara."

"Why?" said Barbara, whining.

"Because I say so," replied her sister, stamping her foot. "I've got an
idea."

"It's my skipping-rope."

"But if you don't give it to me we can't have the tight-rope dancing,"
said Alex in despair.

"I don't care. Why should you do tight-rope dancing with my
skipping-rope?"

"You shall do it first--you shall do it all yourself, if you'll only let
me show you," Alex cried in an agony of impatience.

On this inducement Barbara slowly parted with her skipping-rope, and let
Alex knot it hastily and insecurely to the newel post on the first
landing above the hall.

"Now just get up on to the post, Barbara, and I'll hold the other end of
the rope like this, and you'll see--"

"But I can't, I should fall off."

"Don't be such a little muff; I'll hold you on."

"No, no--I'm frightened. Let Cedric do it."

"No," said Cedric. "I'm being a learned pig." He went down the short
flight of stairs and sat firmly down upon the tiled floor with the pack
of cards out-spread before him.

"Now come on, Barbara," Alex commanded her; "I'll hold you."

Between hoisting and pulling and Barbara's own dread of disobeying her,
Alex got her sister into a kneeling position on the broad flat top of
the newel post.

"Now stand up, and then I'll hold out the rope. You'll be the famous
tight-rope dancer crossing the Falls of Niagara."

"Alex, I'm frightened."

"What of, silly? If you did fall it's only a little way on to the
stairs, and I'll catch you. Besides, you'll feel much safer when you're
standing up."

Barbara, facing the stairs, and with her back to the alarming void
between her perch and the hall-floor, rose trembling to her feet.

"You look splendid," said Alex. "Now then!" She jerked at the rope, and
at the same instant Barbara screamed and tried to clutch at her.

Alex caught hold of her sister's ankles, felt Barbara's weight slip
suddenly, and screamed aloud as a shriek and crash that seemed
simultaneous proclaimed Barbara's fall backwards into the hall.

Cedric and Barbara in a confused struggling heap on the floor--doors
opening upstairs and in the basement--the flying feet of the
servants--all was an agonized nightmare to Alex until Barbara, limp and
inert on Nurse's lap, suddenly began to scream and cry, calling out, "My
back! my back!"

They hushed her at last, and Nurse carried her into the boudoir, which
was the nearest room, and laid her down on the broad sofa. Then Alex
became aware of a monotonous sound that had struck on her ear without
penetrating to her senses ever since the accident happened.

"My spectacles are broken. You've broken my spectacles," reiterated a
lamentable voice.

"You horrid, heartless little boy, Cedric! When poor Barbara--" Sobs
choked her.

"I like that!" said Cedric. "When it was all you that made her fall at
all--and break my spectacles."

"What's that?" said Nurse, miraculously reappearing. "All you, was it? I
might have known it, you mischievous wicked child. Tell me what
happened, this minute."

But Alex was screaming and writhing on the floor, feeling as though she
must die of such misery, and it was Cedric who gave the assembled
household a judicial version of the accident.

The doctor came and telegrams were sent to Scotland, which brought back
Lady Isabel, white-faced and tearful, and Sir Francis, very stern and
monosyllabic.

"Father, my spectacles are broken," cried Cedric earnestly, running to
meet them, but they did not seem to hear him.

"Where is she, Nurse?" said Lady Isabel.

"In the boudoir, my lady, and better, thank Heaven. The doctor says her
back'll get right again in time."

Alex, hanging shaking over the balustrade, saw that Nurse was making
faces as though she were crying. But when she came upstairs, after a
long time spent with Lady Isabel in the boudoir, and saw Alex, her face
was quite hard again, and she gave her a push and said, "It's no use
crying those crocodile tears now. You should have thought of that before
trying to kill Barbara the way you did."

"I didn't, I didn't," sobbed Alex.

But nobody paid any attention to her.

Good-natured Emily was sent away, because Nurse said she wasn't fit to
be trusted, and Cook, who was Emily's aunt, and very angry about it all,
told Alex that it was all her fault if poor Emily never got another
place at all. Everything was Alex' fault.

There was no going to the seaside, even after Barbara was pronounced
better. But Lady Isabel, who, Nurse said, had been given a dreadful
shock by Alex' wickedness, was going into the country, and would take
Archie and the baby with her, if they could get a new nursery-maid at
once.

"And me and Cedric?" asked Alex, trembling.

"Cedric doesn't give me no trouble, as you very well know, and he'll
stay here and help me amuse poor little Barbara, as has always got on
with him so nicely."

"Shall I stay and play with Barbara too?"

"She's a long way from playing yet," Nurse returned grimly. "And I
should think the sight of you would throw her into a fit, after what's
passed."

"But what will happen to me, Nurse?" sobbed Alex.

"Your Papa will talk to you," said Nurse.

Such a thing had never happened to any of the children before, but Alex,
trembling and sick from crying, found herself confronting Sir Francis in
the dining-room.

"I am going to send you to school, Alex," he told her. "How old are
you?"

"Twelve."

"Then I hope," said Sir Francis gravely, "that you are old enough to
understand what a terrible thing it is to be sent from home in disgrace
for such a reason. I am told that you have the deplorable reputation of
originating quarrels with your brothers and sister, who, but for you,
would lead the normal existence of happily-circumstanced children."

Alex was terrified. She could not answer these terrible imputations, and
began to cry convulsively.

"I see," said Sir Francis, "that you are sensible of the appalling
lengths to which this tendency has led you. Even now, I can scarcely
believe it--a harmless, gentle child like your little sister, who, I am
assured, has never done you wilful injury in her life--that you should
deliberately endanger her life and her reason in such a fashion."

He paused, as though he were waiting for Alex to speak, but she could
not say anything.

"If your repentance is sincere, as I willingly assume it to be, your
future behaviour must be such as to lead us all, particularly your poor
little sister, to forget this terrible beginning."

"Will Barbara get well?"

"By the great mercy of Heaven, and owing to her extreme youth, we are
assured by the doctor that a year or two will entirely correct the
injury to the spine. Had it been otherwise, Alex--" Sir Francis looked
at his daughter in silence.

"When thanking Heaven for the mercy which has preserved your sister's
life," he said gently, "I hope you will reflect seriously upon redeeming
this action by your future conduct."

"Oh, I'm sorry--oh, shall you ever forgive me?" gasped Alex, amongst her
sobs.

"I do forgive you, my child, as does your mother, and as I am convinced
that little Barbara will do. But I cannot, nor would I if I could, avert
from you the consequence of your own act," said her father.

Barbara did forgive Alex, in a little, plaintive, superior voice, as she
lay very white and straight in bed. She was to stay quite flat on her
back for at least a year, the doctor said, and she need do no lessons,
and later she would be taken out in a long flat carriage that could be
pushed from behind, then she would be able to walk again, and her back
would be quite straight.

"If she'd been a hunchback, we might have played circus again, and I
could have been the learned pig," said Cedric reflectively.

Alex went to school at the end of September.

And that was her first practical experience of the game of Consequences,
as played by the freakish hand of fate.




II

School


Alex' schooldays were marked by a series of emotional episodes.

In her scale of values, only the personal element counted for anything.
She was intelligent and industrious at her classes when she wished to
gain the approbation of an attractive class-mistress, and idle and
inattentive when she wanted to please the pretty girl with yellow hair,
who sat next her and read a story-book under cover of a French grammar.

Alex did not read; she wanted to make the yellow-haired girl look at her
and smile at her. She thought Queenie Torrance beautiful, though her
beauty did not strike Alex until after she had fallen a helpless victim
to one of those violent, irrational attractions for one of her own sex,
that are apt to assail feminine adolescence.

"I hope that you will find some nice little companions at Liège," Sir
Francis had gravely told his daughter in valediction, "but remember that
exclusive friendships are not to be desired. Friendly with all, familiar
with none," said Sir Francis, voicing the ideal of his class and of his
period.

As well tell a stream not to flow downhill. Nothing but the most
exclusive and inordinate of attachments lay within the scope of Alex'
emotional capacities. She was incapable alike of asking or of bestowing
in moderation.

Theoretically she would tell herself that she would give all, trust,
confidence, love, friendship, and ask for nothing in return. Practically
she suffered tortures of jealousy if the loved one addressed a word or
smile to any but herself, and cried herself to sleep night after night
in the certainty of loving infinitely more than she was loved.

The material side of her life as a _pensionnaire_ at the Liège convent
made very little impression upon her, excepting in relation to the
emotional aspect, of which she was never unaware.

To the end of her days, the clean, pungent smell of a certain polish
used upon the immense spaces of bare _parquet ciré_ all over the
building, would serve to recall the vivid presentment of the tall
Belgian _postulante_ whose duty it was to apply it with a huge mop, and
whom, from a distance only to be appreciated by those who know the
immensity of the gulf that in the convent world separates the novice
from the pupils, Alex had worshipped blindly.

And the acrid, yet not unpleasant taste of _confiture_ thinly spread
over thick slices of brown bread, would remind her with equal vividness
of the daily three o'clock interval for _goûter_, with Queenie Torrance
pacing beside her in the garden quadrangle, one hand of each rolled into
her black-stuff apron to try and keep warm, and the other grasping the
enormous double _tartine_ that formed the afternoon's refection.

Even the slight, steady sound of hissing escaping from a gas jet of
which the flame is turned as high as it will go, stood to Alex for the
noisy evening recreation, spent in the enforced and detested amusement
of _la ronde_, when her only preoccupation was to place herself by the
object of her adoration, for the grasp of her hand in its regulation
cotton glove, as the circle of girls moved drearily round and round
singing perfunctorily.

The tuneless tune of those _rondes_ remained with Alex long after the
words had lost the savour of irony with which novelty had once invested
them.

     _"Quelle horrible attente_
     _D'être postulante...._
     _Quel supplice_
     _D'être une novice_
     _Ah! quel comble d'horreur_
     _Devenir sœur de chœur...."_

Alex' symbols were not romantic ones, but there was no romance in the
life of the Liège convent, save what she brought to it herself. Even the
memory of the great square _verger_, in the middle of gravelled alleys,
brought to her mind for sole token of summer, only her horror of the
immense pale-red slugs that crawled slowly and interminably out and
across the paths in the eternal rains of the Belgian climate. Nothing
mattered but people.

And of all the people in the world, only those whom one loved.

Thus Alex' sweeping, unformulated conviction, holding in it all the
misapplication of an essential force, squandered for lack of a sense of
proportion.

She despised herself secretly, both for her intense craving for
affection and for her prodigality in bestowing it. She was like a child
endeavouring to pour a great pailful of water into a very little cup.

Waste and disaster were the inevitable results.

The real love of Alex' young enthusiasm, fair-haired Queenie Torrance,
was preceded by her inarticulate, unreasoned adoration for the Belgian
_postulante_. But the Belgian _postulante_ was never visible, save at a
distance, so that even Alex' unreasonable affections found nothing to
feed upon.

There was a French girl, much older than herself, for whom Alex then
conceived an enthusiasm. Marie-Angèle smiled on her and encouraged the
infatuation of the curiously un-English little English girl. But she
gave her nothing in return. Alex knew it, and recklessly spent all her
weekly pocket-money on flowers and sweets for Marie-Angèle, thinking
that the gifts would touch her and awaken in her an affection that it
was not her nature to bestow, least of all on an ardent and ungainly
child, six years her junior. Alex shed many tears for Marie-Angèle, and
years later read some words that suddenly and swiftly recalled the girl
who passed in and out of her life in less than a year.

     _"I love you for your few caresses,_
     _I love you for my many tears"_

The lines, indeed, were curiously typical of the one-sided relations
into which Alex entered so rashly and so inevitably throughout her
schooldays.

She was fifteen, and had been nearly three years at Liège, when Queenie
Torrance came. She was Alex' senior by a year, and the only other
English girl in the school at that time. Alex was told to look after
her, and went to the task with a certain naïve eagerness, that she
always brought to bear upon any personal equation. In an hour, she was
secretly combating an enraptured certainty, of which she felt
nevertheless ashamed, that she had found at last the ideal object on
whom to expend the vehement powers of affection for which she was always
seeking an outlet.

Queenie was slight, very fair, with a full, serious oval face, innocent
grey eyes set very far apart, and the high, rounded forehead and small,
full-lipped mouth, of a type much in vogue in England at the time of the
Regency. This was the more marked by the thick flaxen hair which fell
back from her face, and over her shoulders into natural heavy ringlets.
She was not very pretty, although she was often thought so, but she was
charged with a certain animal magnetism, almost inseparable from her
type. Half the girls in the school adored her. Queenie, already
attractive to men, and sent to the convent in Belgium in reality on that
account, nominally for a year's finishing before her début in London
society, was for the most part scornful of these girlish admirers, but
Alex she admitted to her friendship.

She was precociously aware that intimacy with Lady Isabel Clare's
daughter was likely to accrue to her own advantage later on in London.

The genius for sympathy which led Alex to innumerable small sacrifices
and tender smoothings of difficulties for her idol, Queenie at first
received with a graceful gratitude which yet held in it something of
suspicion, as though she wondered what return would presently be exacted
of her.

But it became obvious that Alex expected nothing, and received with
eager thankfulness the slightest recognition of her devotion.

Queenie despised her, but was lavish of gentle thanks and caressing
exclamations. Hers was not a nature ever to make the mistake of killing
the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Finding to her concealed astonishment that Alex only asked toleration,
or at the most acceptance of her ardent devotion, and was transported at
the slightest occasional token of affection in return, Queenie stinted
her of neither. It would have seemed to her the most irrational folly to
discourage a love, however one-sided, that found its expression in
tireless sympathy, endless championship, and unlimited material gifts
and help of any or every description. Alex did all that she could of
Queenie's lessons, made her bed and mended her clothes for her whenever
she could do so undetected by the authorities, spent her pocket-money on
gratifying Queenie's shameless and inordinate passion for sweet things,
and once or twice told lies badly and unsuccessfully, to shield Queenie
from the effects of her own laziness and constant evasion of
regulations.

Alex had been taught, in common with every other child of her upbringing
and nationality, that to tell a lie was the worst crime to which a
self-respecting human being can stoop. She also believed that a person
who has told a lie is a liar, and that all liars go to Hell. Yet by some
utterly illogical perversity of which she was hardly even aware, it did
not shock or very much distress her, to find that Queenie Torrance told
lies, and told them, moreover, with an air of quiet and convincing
candour that placed them in a very different category to Alex' own
halting, improbable fibs, delivered with a scarlet face and a manifest
air of hunting for further corroboration as she spoke.

In the extraordinary scale of moral values unconsciously held by Alex,
there were apparently no abstract standards of right and wrong. Where
she loved, though she might, against her own will see defects, she was
incapable of condemning.

Queenie took a curious, detached interest in coldly gratifying her
vanity, by seeking to test the lengths of extravagance to which Alex'
admiration would go.

"Supposing I quarrelled with every one here, and they all sent me to
Coventry--whose part would you take?"

"Yours, of course."

"But if I were in the wrong?"

"That wouldn't make any difference. In fact, you'd need it more if you
were in the wrong."

"I don't see that!" Queenie exclaimed. "If I were in the wrong I should
have deserved it."

"But that would make it all the worse for you. It's always the people
who are in the wrong who need most to have their part taken," Alex
explained confusedly, yet voicing an intimate conviction.

"I don't think you have much idea of justice, Alex," said Queenie drily.

The conversation made Alex very miserable. It was characteristic of her
want of logic that while she reproached herself secretly for her own
impiety in setting the objects of her affection far above what she
conceived to be the abstract standard of right and wrong, yet she never
questioned but that any love bestowed upon herself would be measured out
in direct proportion to her merits.

And despairingly did Alex sometimes review the smallness of her deserts.

She was disobedient, untruthful, quarrelsome, irreligious. It seemed to
Alex that there was no fault to which she could not lay claim. Her lack
of elementary religious teaching put her at a disadvantage in the
convent atmosphere, and made its frequent religious services and
instructions so tedious to her, that she was in constant disgrace for
her weary, inattentive attitudes, not unjustly designated as irreverent,
in the chapel.

She was not at all popular with the nuns. The "influence" which her
class-mistress wielded over so many of the pupils, or the "interest"
which the English Assistant Superior would so willingly have extended to
her youthful compatriot were alike without effect upon Alex. She was not
drawn to any of these holy, black-clad women, to one or other of whom
almost all her French and Belgian and American contemporaries devoted a
rather stereotyped enthusiasm.

Had the vagrant fancy of Alex lighted upon any one of the elder nuns
charged with the direction of the school, the attraction would have been
discreetly permitted, if not admittedly sanctioned, by the authorities.
It would almost inevitably have led Alex to an awakening of religious
sensibilities and the desirability of this result would have outweighed,
even if it did not absolutely obscure in the eyes of the nuns, the
excessive danger of obtaining such a result by such means.

But the stars in their courses had designed that Alex should regard the
Mesdames Marie Baptiste and Marie Evangeliste of her convent days with
indifference, and devote her ardent temperament and precocious
sensibilities to the worship of Queenie Torrance.

The enthusiasm was smiled upon by no one, and thereby became the more
inflamed.

"Je n'aime pas ces amitiés particulières," said the class-mistress of
Queenie Torrance severely, to which Miss Torrance replied with polite
distress that she was powerless in the matter. It made her ridiculous,
she disliked the constant infringement of rules to which Alex' pursuit
exposed her, but--one could not be unkind. She did not know why Alex
Clare showed her especial affection--she herself had done nothing to
encourage these indiscreet displays. Of course, it was pleasant to be
liked, but one wished only to do right about it. Queenie mingled candour
with perplexity, and succeeded in convincing every one with perfect
completeness of her entire innocence of anything but a too potent
attraction.

"Ce n'est donc même pas une amitié? C'est Alex qui vous recherche malgré
vous!" exclaimed the class-mistress.

Under this aspect the question soon presented itself alike to the
_pensionnat_ and its authorities, rendering Alex ridiculous. In a system
of _surveillance_ which admitted of no loophole for open defiance or
outspoken rebuke, Alex' evasions of that law of detachment which is the
primary one in convent legislation, became the mark of every
blue-ribboned _enfant de Marie_ who wished to obtain a reputation for
zeal by reporting the defection of a companion to her class-mistress.

It was always Alex who was reported. Queenie never sought opportunities
to snatch a hurried colloquy during recreation, or manœuvred to obtain
Alex as companion at _la ronde_, or when they played games in the
garden. She never infringed one of the strictest rules of the
establishment, by giving presents unpermitted, or purchasing forbidden
sweets and chocolate to be given away at the afternoon _goûter_.

Queenie accepted the presents, wrote tiny notes to Alex and skilfully
gave them to her unperceived, and cut Alex to the heart by telling her
sometimes that she made it very hard for one to try and be good and keep
all the rules and perhaps get one's blue ribbon next term.

These speeches were to Queenie's credit, and made Alex cry and worship
her more admiringly than ever, but they did not tend to lower the
transparent, doglike devotion with which Alex would gaze at Queenie's
bent profile in the chapel, utterly unconscious of the scandal which her
manifest idolatry was creating for the severe nun in the carved stall
opposite. She was scolded, placed under strict observation, and every
obstacle placed in the way of her exchanging any word with Queenie,
until she grew to see herself as a martyr to an affection which every
fresh prohibition increased almost to frenzy.

One day she was made the victim of a form of rebuke much dreaded by the
_pensionnaires_. A monthly convocation of the school and mistresses,
officially known as _la réclame du mois_, and nicknamed by the children
"the Last Judgment," was held in the _Grande Salle_ downstairs, with the
Superior making her state entry after the children had been decorously
seated in rows at the end of the long room, and all the other nuns who
had anything to do with the school had placed themselves gravely and
with folded hands against the walls.

They all stood when the Superior came in, followed by the First
Mistress, carrying a sheaf of notes and a great book, which each pupil
firmly believed to be devoted principally to the record of her own
progress through the school.

Then the Superior, with inclined head and low, distinct voice, spoke a
few words of prayer, and settled herself in the large chair behind which
the nuns clustered in orderly rows.

The children sat down at the signal given, and listened, at first with
smiles as the record of the baby class were read aloud and each mite
stood up in her place for all the universe to gaze at her, while the
analysis of her month's work, mental and moral, sounded with appalling
distinctness through the silence.

"Bébée de Lalonde! première en catéchisme, première en géographie ...
calcul, beaucoup mieux ... elle y met beaucoup de bonne volonté!"

"A la bonne heure!"

The Superior is smiling, every one is smiling, Bébée de Lalonde, her
brown curls bobbing over her face, is pink with gratification. Her young
class-mistress leans forward, the white veil of novice falling over her
black habit.

"Ma Mère Supérieure, pour le mois de S. Joseph, elle se corrige de cette
vilaine habitude de mordre ses ongles. Elle a fait de vrais efforts...."

"C'est bien. Faites voir.... Venez, ma petite."

Up the long room marches Bébée, two freshly washed tiny pink hands
thrust out proudly for the Superior's inspection.

"Très bien, très bien. Vous ferez bien attention au pouce droit, n'est
pas?"

The Superior is quite grave, however, every one laughs, and then the
serious part of the proceedings begins.

The very little ones are not nervous. Most of them are good, even the
naughty ones only get a very gentle homily from the Superior. Then their
class-mistress claps her hands smartly and they get up and file out of
the room, it not being considered politic to let _les petites_ hear the
record of that pen of black sheep, _les moyennes_.

The indictments become more serious. Marie Thérèse, twice impertinent to
a mistress, taking no trouble over her lessons, worst of all, taking no
trouble to cure that trick of which we have complained so often--sitting
with her knees crossed.

"Even in the chapel, Ma Mère Supérieure."

This is very bad! It is unladylike, it is against all rules, it is
extremely immodest.... And what an example!

Marie Thérèse, says the Superior decisively, can abandon all hope of
obtaining the green ribbon of an _aspirante enfant de Marie_ until she
has reformed her ways. The mention of a première in literature gains no
approving smile from any one and Marie Thérèse sits down in tears.

Gabrielle, Marthe, Sadie--all through the three classes of the _moyenne_
division of the school, with very few stainless reports and two or three
disastrous ones.

Then _les grandes_. The first of these, in the lowest section, is a name
to which the reader, a French woman, always takes exception. She finally
compresses her lips and renders it as: "Kevinnie!"

Queenie is always cool and unmoved as she stands up, and Alex always
looks at her. At this particular _séance_, the April one, she took her
glances more or less surreptitiously, miserably aware that she had not
enough self-control to refrain from them and so avoid risking a rebuke
later on.

Queenie held no première. She was always last in her form,
undistinguished at music, drawing, needlework, anything requiring
application or talent alike. But her perfectly serene complacency was
more or less justified by the exaggerated applause of her companions at
her faultless "conduct" marks and the assurance of her class-mistress,
always given readily, that she was "très docile, très appliquée."

Queenie's popularity was independent of anything extraneous to herself.

The Superior leant forward and asked a question in a low voice.

"Non, ma Mère Supérieure, non."

The denial of a possible accusation, of which Alex guessed the purport,
was emphatic. She felt glad and relieved, but had no suspicions as to
the indictment following on her own name.

"Alexandra Clare," said Mère Alphonsine sonorously, and Alex stood up.

She no longer felt self-conscious over the ordeal, and was indifferent
to the habitual litany of complaints as to her unlearnt lessons,
disregard of the rule of silence, and frequent bad marks for disorder
and unpunctuality. But to the accusations which she knew by heart, and
shared with the majority of the _moyenne classe_, came a quite
unexpected addition, hissed out with a sort of dramatic horror by Mère
Alphonsine:

"Alex recherche Kevinnie sans cesse, ma Mère Supérieure."

Only those familiar with the code of _pensionnaire_ discipline in
Belgium during the years when Alex Clare and her contemporaries were at
school, can gauge the full heinousness of the offence, gravest in the
conventual decalogue.

Even Alex, although she had been scolded and punished and made the
subject of innumerable homilies, some of them pityingly reproachful, and
others explanatorily so, on the same question, felt as though she had
never before realized the extent of her own perversion.

She stood up, her hands in the regulation position, pushed under the
hideous black-stuff pèlerine that fell from her stiff, hard, white
collar to the shapeless waistband of her skirt, the whole uniform
carefully designed to conceal and obscure the lines of the figure
beneath it.

Overwhelmed with uncomprehending misery and acute shame, she heard two
or three of the mistresses add each her quota, for the most part
regretfully and with an evident sense of duty overcoming reluctance, to
the evidence against her.

"She seeks opportunity to place herself next to Queenie at almost every
recreation, ma Mère Supérieure."

"I am afraid that even in the chapel she lets this folly get the better
of her--one can see how she lets herself go to distractions all the
time...."

So the charges went on.

The summing up of Ma Mère Supérieure was icily condemnatory. She had
tried every means with Alex, had spoken to her with kindness and
tenderness; in private, had reasoned with her and finally threatened
her, and now a public denouncement must be tried, since all these means
had proved to be without effect.

Alex was principally conscious of the single, lightning-swift flash of
reproach that had shot from the eyes of Queenie Torrance into hers.

How silently and viciously Queenie would resent this public coupling of
her immaculate reputation with Alex' idiotic infatuation, only Alex
knew.

With the frantic finality of youth, she wondered whether she could go on
living. Oh, if only she might die at once, without hearing further blame
or reproach, without encountering the ridicule of her companions or the
cold withdrawal of Queenie's precariously-held friendship. Alex cried
herself sick with terror and shame and utterly ineffectual remorse.

The despair that invades an undeveloped being is the blackest in the
world, because of its utter want of perspective.

Alex could see nothing beyond the present. She felt all the weight of an
inexpressible guilt upon her, and all the utter isolation of spirit
which surrounds the sinner who stands exposed and condemned.

She knew that nobody would take her part. She was young enough to
reflect forlornly that an accusation mattered nothing if unjust, since
the consciousness of innocence would sustain one, serene and
unfaltering, through any ordeal.

But she had no consciousness of innocence. She saw herself eternally
different from her companions, eternally destined to lose her way,
wickedly and shamefully she supposed, without volition of her own she
knew, amongst those standards to which the right thinking conformed, and
which she, only, failed to recognize. With sick wistfulness Alex sought
Queenie's glance as they came one by one into the refectory, after the
_réclame_ was over.

Queenie's fair, opaque face was as colourless as ever, her eyes were
cast down.

Frantically, Alex willed her to cast one look of pity or forgiveness in
her direction, but Queenie passed on to the refectory where the
children's mid-day meal was waiting for them without a sign.

Amidst all the blur of emotions, passionate remorse and hopeless
loneliness, which made up Alex' schooldays, that Saturday mid-day meal
stood out in its black despair.

The choking attempts to swallow a mass of vegetable cooking, made salt
and sodden with her own streaming tears, the sobs that strangled her and
broke in spite of all her efforts into the decorous silence of the
refectory, even the awed and scandalized glances that the younger
children cast at her distorted face, remained saliently before her
memory for years.

At last the nun in charge rose from her place at the end of the room and
came down and told Alex that she might leave the table. The long
progress down the endless length of the refectory destroyed the last
remnants of Alex' self-control.

The tide of emotional agony that swept over her was to ebb and flow
again, and many times again.

But only once or twice was that high-water mark to be reached, that
bitter wave to engulf her, and each time add to the undermining of that
small stability of spirit with which Alex had been endowed.

She left the misery of that black Saturday behind her, and was left with
her childish nerves a little shattered, her childish confidence of
outlook rather more overshadowed, her childish strength less steady,
and, above all, set fast in her childish mind the ineradicable,
unexplained conviction that because she had loved Queenie Torrance and
had been punished and rebuked for it, therefore to love was wrong.




III

Queenie Torrance


School days in Belgium went on, through the steamy, rain-sodden days of
spring to the end of term and the _grandes vacances_ looked forward to
with such frantic eagerness even by the children who liked the convent
best. Alex was again bitterly conscious of an utter want of conformity
setting her apart from her fellow-creatures.

The misery of parting for eight weeks from Queenie Torrance overwhelmed
her. Casually, Queenie said:

"I may not come back, next term. I shall be seventeen by then, and I
don't see why I should be at school any longer if I can get round
father."

"What would you do?"

"Why, come out, of course," said Queenie. "I am quite old enough, and
every one says I look older than I am."

She moved her head about slightly so as to get sidelong views of her own
reflection in the big window-pane. There were no looking-glasses at the
convent.

It was true that, in spite of a skin smooth and unlined as a baby's and
the childish, semicircular comb that gathered back the short flaxen
ringlets from her rounded, innocent brow, Queenie's slender, but very
well-developed figure and the unvarying opaque pallor of her complexion,
made her look infinitely nearer maturity than the slim, long-legged
American girls, or over-plump, giggling French and Belgian ones. Alex
gazed at her with mute, exaggerated despair on her face.

"Your parents will permit that you make your début at once, yes?"
queried Marthe Poupard, as one resigned to the incredible folly and
weakness of British and American parents.

"I can manage my father," said Queenie gently, and with the perfect
conviction of experience in her voice.

As the day of the breaking-up drew nearer, discipline insensibly
relaxed, and Queenie suddenly became less averse from responding in some
degree to Alex' wistful advances.

On the last day, one of broiling heat, the two spent the afternoon alone
together unrebuked, in a corner of the great _verger_ where the pupils
were scattered in groups, feeling as though the holidays had already
begun.

"I shall have the journey with you," said Alex, piteously.

"Madame Hippolyte is taking us over, with one of the lay-sisters," said
Queenie, naming the most vigilant of the older French nuns. "So it will
be much better if we don't talk together on the boat. You know there
will be the three Munroe girls as well, because they are going to spend
their holidays in Devonshire or somewhere."

"How do you know it will be Madame Hippolyte?" said Alex disconsolately.

The authority deputed to conduct pupils on the journey to and from Liège
was one of the many items in the convent curriculum always shrouded in
impenetrable mystery until the actual moment of departure.

"I overheard two of them talking about it, in the linen-room this
morning," placidly said Queenie. "I kept behind the door."

Part of her curious attractiveness was, that she never attempted to
disguise or deny certain practices which Alex had been taught to
consider as dishonourable.

Alex counted this as but one more stone in the edifice erected for the
worship of her idol. It was not until she saw Queenie Torrance long
after, in other relations and other surroundings, that she dimly
realized how much of that streak of extraordinary candour was the direct
product of a magnificently justified self-confidence in the potency of
her own attraction, needing no enhancement from moral or mental
attributes.

"Do you always live in London, Alex?"

"Yes, in Clevedon Square. You know, I told you about it, Queenie."

"Yes, I know, but I only wondered if perhaps you had a house in the
country as well."

"No. Father and mother go to Scotland in the summer, and generally they
send us to the seaside with Nurse and a governess or some one."

"I see," said Queenie reflectively. She had wondered if perhaps the
Clares had a country house to which she, as a favourite school friend,
would be asked to stay.

"Father hates the country," said Alex. "We are sure to be in London for
a little while in September, before I come back here. Would you--would
you--" She gulped and clasped her hands nervously. Certain of Lady
Isabel's rules and recommendations rushed to her mind, but she
desperately tried to ignore them.

"I suppose you would not come to tea with me one day, if I were allowed
to ask you? Oh, if _only_ your mother knew my mother!"

Smoothly Queenie took her cue. "Of course, mother won't let me go to tea
with any one--unless she knows them herself--but I don't know.... What
Club does your father belong to?"

"Two or three, I think," said Alex, surprised. "He often goes to
Arthur's or the Turf Club."

"So does father. Perhaps we could manage it that way," said Queenie
reflectively.

She had every intention of cultivating her friendship with Alex Clare in
London.

"Then you'd like to come, Queenie?" breathed Alex ecstaticly.

"Of course, I would," Queenie told her affectionately. "My dear, you
know I have hated all the fuss here, and our never being allowed to
speak a word to one another. But what could I do?" She shrugged her
shoulders.

Then Queenie had really cared all the time!

Alex in that moment was compensated for all the tears and storms and
disgraces of the year. That afternoon spent under the thick, leafy
boughs of the old apple-trees with Queenie, enabled Alex to face with
some degree of courage the prospect of their approaching separation. She
knew that any sign of unhappiness for such a reason would be imputed to
her as wrong-doing by the authorities, and as unnatural and heartless
indifference to home on the part of her companions.

So Alex, who had no trust in any standards of her own, was ashamed of
the tears which she nightly stifled in her hard pillow, and felt them to
be one more of those degrading weaknesses with which her Creator had
malignantly endowed her in order that she might be as a pariah among her
fellows.

She felt no resentment, only blind wonder and fatalistic apathy.
Nevertheless, all through Alex' childhood and early girlhood, unhappy
though she was, there dwelt within her a curious certainty that,
somewhere, happiness awaited her, which she, and she alone, would have
full capacity to appreciate.

Side by side with that, was her intense capacity for suffering, but that
she was learning to think of as only a cruel, tearing affliction
despised alike by God and man.

Of the immense force latent in the power of intense feeling Alex knew
nothing, nor did any of the teaching which she received vouchsafe to her
any illumination.

She and Queenie and the three Munroe girls made the journey to England
with Madame Hippolyte, who showed Alex a marked kindness not usual with
her.

At fifteen, wakeful nights and storms of crying leave their traces, and
Alex, pale-faced and with encircled eyes, was pitiful in her
propitiatory attempts to join in the eager anticipations of holiday
enjoyment exchanged between her companions.

Perhaps, thought the French nun, the little black sheep had not a very
happy home. A bad report would follow Alex to England she well knew, and
it might be that the poor child was dreading its results.

Her manner to Alex grew gentle and compassionate, and Alex noticed it
with a relieved, uncomprehending gratitude that held something abject in
its surprised, almost incredulous acceptance of any kindness.

Madame Hippolyte, though she sternly rebuked herself for the
uncharitable impulse, felt a certain contempt of the way in which her
advances were received.

She knew nothing of the self-assertive, arrogant manner that would
presently revive, in the childish sense of security in home
surroundings, and would yet be merely another manifestation of the
unbalanced complexity that was Alex Clare.

But as the crossing came to an end and they found themselves in the
train speeding towards London, Alex was silent, her small face white and
her eyes tragical.

The American girls made delighted use of the strip of looking-glass in
the carriage, and exchanged predictions as to the pleased amazement that
would be caused by Sadie's growth, the length of Marie's plait of red
hair, and Diana's added inches of skirt.

Queenie Torrance only glanced at her reflection once or twice, though an
acute observer might have seen that she was not indifferent to the
advantage of facing a looking-glass, after the many weeks in which none
had been available. But she was merely completely serene in the
immutability of her own attractiveness. Queenie did not need to depend
upon her looks, which seldom or never varied from soft, colourless
opacity and opulence of contour. The pale, heavy rings of her fair hair
always fell back in the same way from her open, rounded forehead, her
well-modelled hands, with fingers broad at the base, and pointed,
gleaming nails were always cool and white.

The Americans were all three pretty girls, and something of race that
showed in Alex' bearing and gestures made her remarkable amongst any
assembly of children, but it was at Queenie that every man who passed
the little group in the railway carriage glanced a second time.

Good Madame Hippolyte, as serenely unaware of this as only a woman whose
life had been passed in a religious Order could be, regarded Queenie as
by far the least of the responsibilities on her hands, and did not
conceal her satisfaction when Marie and Sadie and Diana were immediately
claimed at the terminus by a group of excited, noisy cousins, and
hurried away to an enormous waiting carriage-and-pair.

"Et vous?" she demanded, turning to the other two.

"Dad'll come for me," said Queenie confidently, inadvertently uttering a
nickname that would not have been permitted to the Clare children, and
was, in fact, never in those days heard in the class of society to which
they belonged.

Queenie shot an imperceptible glance of confusion at Alex, who was
clinging speechlessly to her hand.

Next moment she had recovered herself.

"There's my father!" she cried.

Colonel Torrance was making his way rapidly towards them, a tall,
soldierly-looking man, a trifle too conspicuously well groomed, a trifle
too upright in his bearing, a trifle too remarkable altogether, with
very black moustache and eyebrows and very white hair.

He raised his tall white hat with its black band, at the sight of his
daughter, expanded his white waistcoat and grey frock-coat with the
_malmaison_ buttonhole yet further, and whipped off his pale grey glove
to take the limp hand extended to him by Alex, as Queenie
self-possessedly introduced her.

Alex hardly heard Colonel Torrance's elaborately courteous allusion to
Sir Francis Clare, whom he had had the pleasure of seeing several times
at the Club, but she wondered eagerly if that introduction would be
considered sufficient to allow of her inviting Queenie to Clevedon
Square.

She felt as though her spirit were being torn from her body when Queenie
said, "Good-bye, Alex, dear. Mind you write. _Au revoir, ma mère_."

Compliments were exchanged between Madame Hippolyte and Queenie's
father, the gentleman flourished his top hat again, and then said to his
daughter:

"My dear, I have a hansom waiting; the impudent fellow says his horse
won't stand. I trust you have no large amount of luggage."

Queenie shook her head, smiling slightly, and in a moment, the brevity
of which seemed incredible to Alex and left her with an instant's
absolute suspension of physical faculties, they disappeared among the
crowd.

Madame Hippolyte grasped the arm of her distraught-looking pupil.

"But rouse yourself, Alex!" she said vigorously. "Who is to come for
you?"

"The carriage," muttered Alex automatically, well aware that neither
would Lady Isabel sacrifice an hour of her afternoon to waiting at a
crowded London station in July, nor old Nurse permit the other children
to do so, had they wished it.

"And where is it, this carriage?" sceptically demanded Madame Hippolyte,
harassed and exhausted, and aware that she had yet to find a
four-wheeled cab of sufficiently cleanly and sober appearance to satisfy
her, in which she might proceed herself to the convent branch-house in
the east of London. But presently Alex came partially out of her dream
and pointed out the brougham and bay horse and the footman in buff
livery at the door.

"But you will not drive alone--in this _quartier_?" cried the nun, in
horrified protest at this exhibition of English want of propriety.

Her fears proved groundless.

The neat, black-bonneted head of a maid appeared at the brougham window,
and with a sigh of infinite relief Madame Hippolyte bade farewell to the
last and most anxiously regarded of her charges.

"How you've grown, Miss Alex!" cried the maid, but her tone was scarcely
one of admiration, as she gazed at the stooping shoulders and pale,
travel-stained face under the ugly sailor hat of dark blue straw. "We
shall have to make you look like yourself, with some of your own
clothes, before your mamma sees you," she added kindly.

Alex scarcely answered, and sat squeezing her hands together.

She knew she must come out of this dream of misery that seemed to
envelop her, and which was so naughty and undutiful. Of course it was
unnatural not to be glad to come home again, and it wasn't as though she
had been so very happy at Liège.

It was only Queenie.

No one must know, or she would certainly be blamed and ridiculed for her
foolish and headlong fancy.

Alex wondered dimly why she was so constituted as to differ from every
one else.

The cab turned into Clevedon Square. Alex looked out of the window.

The big square bore already the look of desertion most associated in her
mind with summer in London. Shutters and blinds obscured the windows of
the first and second floors of many houses, and against one of the
corner houses a ladder was propped and an unwontedly dazzling
cream-colour proclaimed fresh paint.

Some of the houses showed striped sun-blinds, and window-boxes of
scarlet geraniums. Alex saw that there were flowers in their own balcony
as well as an awning.

When the carriage drew up at the front door, she jumped out and replied
hastily to the man-servant's respectful greeting, a slight feeling of
excitement possessing her for the first time at the prospect of seeing
Barbara, and impressing her with her added inches of height.

She ran quickly up the stairs, hoping that Lady Isabel would not chance
to come out of the drawing-room as she went past. On the second landing,
safely past the double door of the drawing-room, she paused a moment to
take breath, and heard a subdued call from overhead.

Barbara was hanging over the banisters with Archie.

"Hallo, Alex!"

Alex went up to the schoolroom landing, and she and Barbara looked
curiously at one another, before exchanging a perfunctory kiss.

Alex suddenly felt grubby and rather shabby in her old last year's serge
frock, which had been considered good enough for the journey, when she
saw Barbara in her clean white muslin, with a very pale blue sash, and
her hair tied up with a big pale blue bow.

Barbara's hair had grown, which annoyed Alex. It fell into one long,
pale curl down her back, and no longer provoked a contrast with Alex'
superior length of shining wave. Deprived of the supervision of Nurse,
with her iron insistence on "fifty strokes of the brush every night, and
Rowland's Macassor on Saturdays," Alex' hair had somehow lost its shine,
and hung limply in a tangled, uneven pigtail.

Alex thought that Barbara eyed her in a rather superior way.

She felt much more enthusiastic in greeting little Archie. He was
prettier and pinker and more engaging than ever, and Alex felt glad that
he had not yet been sent to school, to have his fair curls cropped, and
his little velvet suit exchanged for cricketing flannels.

He pulled Alex into the schoolroom, with the enthusiasm for a new face
characteristic of a child to whom shyness is unknown, and Alex received
the curt, all-observant greeting which she had learnt to know would
always await her from old Nurse.

"So you are back from your foreign parts, are you, Miss Alex?"

Nurse always said "Miss Alex" when addressing her returned charge at
first, and as invariably relapsed into her old peremptory form of
address before the end of the evening.

"My sakes, child, what have they been doing to you? You look like a
scarecrow."

"Has she grown?" asked Barbara jealously. She knew that grown-up people
were always, for some mysterious reason, pleased when one had "grown."

"Grown! Yes, and got her back bent like a bow," said Nurse vigorously.
"An hour on the backboard's what you'll do every day, and bed at seven
o'clock tonight. Have they been giving you enough to eat?"

"Of course," said Alex, tossing her head.

She did not like the convent when she was there, but a contradictory
instinct always made her when at home uphold it violently, as a
privileged spot to which she alone had access.

"You look half-starved, to me," Nurse said unbelievingly.

Nothing would ever have persuaded her of what was, in fact, the truth,
that Alex received more abundant, more wholesome, and infinitely better
cooked food in Belgium than in London.

Barbara sat on the end of the sofa, swinging her legs and fidgetting
with the tassel of the blind-cord.

"Have you brought back any prizes, Alex?" she enquired negligently.

And Alex replied with an equal air of indifference:

"One for composition, and I've got a certificate of proficiency for
music."

This was not at all the way in which she had planned to make her
announcements. She had thought that her prizes would impress Barbara
very much, and she had foreseen a sort of small ceremony of display when
she would bring out the big red-and-gilt book. But Barbara only nodded,
and presently said:

"Cedric has got quantities of prizes: the headmaster wrote and told
father that he was a 'boy of marked abilities and remarkable power of
concentration,' and father is going to give him a whole sovereign, but
that's because he made his century."

"When will he be here?"

"Next week. His holidays begin on Tuesday and he's got a whole fortnight
longer than we have."

"We?" asked Alex coldly. "How can _you_ have holidays? You're not at
school."

"I have lessons," cried Barbara angrily. "You know I have, and
Ma'moiselle is going to give me a prize for writing, and a prize for
history, and a prize for application. So there!"

"Prizes!" said Alex scornfully. "When you're all by yourself! I never
heard such nonsense."

She no longer felt wretched and subdued, but full of irritation at
Barbara's conceit and absorption in herself.

"It's not nonsense!"

"It is. If you'd been at school you'd know it was."

"One word more of this and you'll go to bed, the pair of you," declared
old Nurse, the autocrat whom Alex had for the moment forgotten. "It's
argle-bargle the minute you set foot in the place, Miss Alex. Now you
just come along and be made fit to be seen before your poor mamma and
papa set eyes on you looking like a charity-school child, as hasn't seen
a brush or a bit of soap for a month of Sundays."

Useless to protest even at this trenchant description of herself.
Useless to attempt resistance during the long process of undressing,
dressing again, brushing and combing, inspection of finger-nails and
general, dissatisfied scrutiny that ensued. Alex, in a stiff, clean
frock, the counterpart, to her secret vexation, of Barbara's, open-work
stockings, and new shoes that hurt her feet, was enjoined "to hold back
her shoulders and not poke" and dispatched to the drawing-room with
Barbara and Archie as soon as the schoolroom tea was over.

She felt as though she had never been away.

No one had asked her anything about the convent, and all through tea
Barbara and Archie had talked about the coming holidays, or had made
allusions to events of which Alex knew nothing, but which had evidently
been absorbing their attention for the last few weeks.

They seemed to Alex futile in the extreme.

Downstairs, Lady Isabel kissed her, and said, "Well, my darling, I'm
very glad to have you at home again. Have you been a good girl this
term, and brought back a report that will please papa?" and then had
turned to speak to some one without waiting for an answer.

Alex sat beside her mother while she talked to the one remaining
visitor, and felt discontented and awkward.

Barbara and Archie were looking at pictures together in the corner of
the room, very quiet and well behaved. The caller stayed late, and just
as she had gone Sir Francis came in from his Club, the faint, familiar
smell of tobacco, and Russia leather, and expensive eau-de-Cologne that
seemed to pervade him, striking Alex with a fresh sense of recognition
as she rose to receive his kiss. He greeted her very kindly, but Alex
was quite aware of a dissatisfaction as intense as, though less
outspoken than, that of old Nurse as he put up his double eye-glasses
and gazed at his eldest daughter.

"We must see if the country or the seaside will bring back some roses to
your cheeks," he said in characteristic phraseology.

But when the children were dismissed from the drawing-room, Sir Francis
straightened his own broad back, and tapped Alex' rounded
shoulder-blades.

"Hold yourself up, my child," he said very decidedly. "I want to see a
nice flat, and straight back."

He made no other criticism, and none was needed.

Alex had gauged the extent of his dismay.




IV

Holidays


"Mother, may I ask Queenie Torrance to tea?"

Alex had rehearsed the words so often to herself that they had almost
become meaningless.

Her heart beat thickly with the anticipation of a refusal, when at last
she found courage and opportunity to utter the little stilted phrase,
with a tongue that felt dry and in a voice that broke nervously in her
throat.

"What do you say, darling?" absently inquired Lady Isabel; and Alex had
to say it again.

"Queenie Torrance?" said Lady Isabel, still vaguely.

"Mother, you remember--I told you about her. She is the only other
English girl besides me at the convent, and she knows all about father
and you and everything, and her father belongs to the same Club--"

Snobbishness was not in Alex' composition, but she adopted her mother's
standards eagerly and instinctively, in the hope of gaining her point.

"But, my darling, what are you talkin' about? You know mother doesn't
let you have little girls here unless she knows somethin' about them.
Give me the little diamond brooch, Alex; the one in the silver box
there."

Lady Isabel, absorbed in the completion of her evening toilette,
remained unconscious of the havoc she had wrought. Alex felt rather
sick.

The intensity of feeling to which she was a victim, for the most part
reacted on her physically, though she was as unconscious of this as was
her mother.

But with the cunning borne of urgent desire, Alex knew that persistence,
which with Sir Francis would invariably win a courteous rebuke and an
immutable refusal, could sometimes bring forth rather querulous
concession from Lady Isabel's weakness.

"But, mummy, darling, I do want Queenie to come here and see Barbara and
Cedric."

It was not true, but Alex was using the arguments which she felt would
be most likely to appeal to her mother.

"She wants to know them so much, and--and I saw her father at the
station when we arrived, and he was very polite."

"Who was with you? I don't like your speakin' like that to people whom
father and I don't know."

"Oh, it was only a second," said Alex hastily. "Madame Hippolyte was
there, and Colonel Torrance just came up to take Queenie away."

"Torrance--Torrance?" said Lady Isabel reflectively. "Who's Torrance?"

The question made Alex' heart sink afresh. It was one which, coming from
her parents, she heard applied to new acquaintances, or occasionally to
protégés for whom some intimate friends might crave the favour of an
invitation to one of the big Clare "crushes" during the season, and the
inquiry was seldom one which boded well for the regard in which the
newcomer would be held.

"Mother, you'd like her, I think, really and truly you would. She's
awfully pretty."

"Alex!"

Lady Isabel for once sounded really angry.

"I'm so sorry; it slipped out--I didn't mean it--I never really say it.
I never _do_, mother."

Alex became agitated, trying to fend off the accusation which she
foresaw was coming.

"I suppose you learn those horrid slang words from this girl you've
taken such a violent fancy to."

"No, no."

"Well, darling, both father and I are very much disgusted with some of
the tricks you've picked up at the convent, and you'll have to find some
way of curin' yourself before you put up your hair and come out. As for
the way you're holdin' yourself, I'm simply shocked at it, and so is
your father; I shall see about sendin' you to MacPherson's gymnasium for
proper exercises as soon as you get back from the country."

Lady Isabel gazed with dissatisfaction at her daughter.

"You mustn't be a disappointment to us, darling," she said. "You know
you'll be coming out in another two years' time, and it's so
important--"

She broke off, eyeing Alex anxiously. Already she had forgotten the
question of the invitation to Queenie Torrance. Alex, in an agony,
rushed recklessly at her point.

"But, mother, you haven't said yet--may I ask Queenie on Saturday? You
know we shan't be here after Saturday. May I?"

Lady Isabel moved to the door with more annoyance than she often
displayed.

"My dear child, you're old enough to know that these things aren't done,
and besides, I've already said no. Father and I dislike these sudden,
violent friendships, in any case. Run along upstairs, my darling, and if
you and Barbara want a little tea-party on Saturday, you may ask those
nice Fitzgerald children. Tell Nurse that I said you might."

Lady Isabel kissed Alex, and went downstairs, the trailing folds of her
evening dress carefully held up in one hand as she descended the broad,
curving stairs.

From the upper landing Alex watched her for a few moments, her face
burning with mortification and the effort to restrain her tears. Then
she broke into sobs and ran away upstairs.

Mother had not understood in the very least. She never understood, never
would understand.

No one understood.

Alex felt, as so often, that she would barter everything she possessed
for the finding of some one who would understand.

In her craving for self-expression, she talked to Barbara about Queenie
Torrance, but represented their intercourse as that of an equal
friendship, with unbounded affection and confidence on both sides.

Barbara listened believingly enough, and even exhibited signs of a faint
jealousy, and gradually Alex' inventions brought her a slight feeling of
comfort, as though the ideal friendship which she so readily described
to her little sister must have some real existence.

The old sense of supremacy began to assert itself again, and Barbara
fell into the old ways of following Alex' lead in everything. She lost
her shrinking convent manner, born of the sense of helpless insecurity,
and when Cedric's return brought Barbara back to her earliest
allegiance--the league which she and Cedric had always formed against
Alex' overbearing ways in the nursery--her defection was resented by her
sister with no lack of spirit.

"Idiotic little copy-cat! Just because Cedric's come, you pretend you
only care for cricket and nonsense like that, as though he wanted to
play cricket with a little girl like you."

"He doesn't mind playing cricket with me; he says I can bowl very well
for a girl, and it gives him practice. Anyway," said Barbara shrewdly,
"he likes talking about it, and how am I to be his pal unless I
understand what he means?"

"You're not to say that horrid, vulgar word. You know mother would be
very angry."

"I shall say what I like. It's not your business. You're a prig, ever
since you went to that hateful convent!"

"You're not to speak to me like that, you're not!" shouted Alex,
stamping her foot.

The dispute degenerated into one of the furious quarrels of their
nursery days, and Alex, completely mastered by her temper, flew at
Barbara, as she had not done since they were seven and ten years old
respectively, and hit her and pulled her long curl viciously.

Barbara stood stock-still on the instant. She had infinitely more
self-control than Alex, and a strong instinct for being invariably in
the right.

But she uttered shriek upon piercing shriek that brought old Nurse,
heavy-footed but astonishingly swift, upon the scene, and reduced Alex
to dire disgrace for the rest of the day.

She cried again, suffering remorse and shame that seemed almost
unbearable, and told herself hopelessly that she could never be good
anywhere.

"Such an example to your little sister, who's never given me a moment's
trouble all the while you've been away," Nurse declared, at the end of a
long monologue during which Alex learnt and implicitly believed that a
temper like hers, unbridled at the age of fifteen, must have irrevocably
passed beyond one's own control into that of the Devil himself.

"When you remember," Nurse wound up, "how you nearly killed her with
your naughty ways and had her on her back for a year, and she with never
a word of complaint against you, poor lamb, one would think you'd want
to make it up to her, instead of hitting one as never even hits you
back. But you've no heart, Alex, as I've always said and always shall
say about you."

Heart or no heart, old Nurse thoroughly succeeded in working upon Alex'
feelings, and in sobbing abjection she begged Barbara's forgiveness.

Barbara, agreeably conscious of martyrdom, found it easy to grant, with
a gentleness that redoubled Alex' shame, and the incident, except for
Alex' swollen eyes and subdued tones next day, was closed. Cedric,
characteristically, remained oblivious of it throughout.

He had grown into a good-looking boy, not tall for his eleven years, but
sturdy and well set up, with steady, straight-gazing eyes behind the
spectacles that his short sight still necessitated, to the grief of Lady
Isabel. His mind was obsessed by cricket, and from his conversation one
might have deduced that no other occupation had filled the summer term.
Nevertheless, he brought home a large pile of prizes, and a report that
caused Sir Francis to smile his excessively rare smile and utter two
words that Cedric never forgot, and never mentioned to any one else:
"Well done."

Two days after Cedric's return, Sir Francis and Lady Isabel went away
for their annual round of country visits, and old Nurse, with the new,
young nurse who devoted her services exclusively to Pamela, and a
nursery-maid to wait upon them, went with the children to stay at
Fiveapples Farm in Devonshire.

The farm was glorious.

The girls might run about the hay-fields and in the lanes, though Nurse,
mindful of Lady Isabel's injunction as to complexion and the danger of
freckles, always insisted on hats and gloves; and Cedric, followed
everywhere like a little shadow by Archie, rode the farm horses and even
went into Exeter to market with Farmer Young on Fridays.

Alex insensibly began to cease her preoccupied outlook for letters from
Queenie, and the convent life began to relax its hold on her memory and
imagination, as older influences resumed their sway.

Correspondence with Queenie had never been satisfactory.

Although not forbidden, Alex knew that it was considered a foolish and
undesirable practice, and that her letters, although, as a matter of
fact, generally given to her unopened, were always liable to supervision
by the authorities as a matter of course.

Old Nurse might be unable to read, although no one had ever heard her
admit as much, but she always slit open any letter that came for Alex or
Barbara and made a feint of perusing it; unless the envelope, as rarely
happened, bore Lady Isabel's superscription.

"In the absence of your mamma," said old Nurse severely, and she never
failed to refuse unhesitatingly any request from Alex to be allowed to
go to the post office for the purpose of buying stamps.

Queenie had only written twice. The second letter reached Alex at
Fiveapples Farm, when she had nearly given up hope for it.

     "DEAR ALEX,

     "Thank you very much for your letters. It is nice of you to write
     to me so often. Please forgive me for not writing oftener to you,
     but I haven't got much time. It's so hot in London now. You are
     very lucky to be in the country. I think we shall go soon, but I
     don't know yet where we shall go.

     "Do you know that you are quite near where the Munroes are staying?
     Diana wrote to me the other day. Perhaps you will see them. Please
     give them my love. Do you remember how funny Diana was at her
     singing lessons? I often think of the convent, don't you? Now I
     must end, Alex, with fond love from your affectionate school
     friend,

     "QUEENIE.

     "P.S. I am not going back next term. I am very glad, except for not
     seeing you. I hope we shall see each other in London."

Alex read and re-read the postscript, and tried not to think that the
rest of the letter was disappointing.

"Your great friend doesn't write you nearly such long letters as you
write her," observed Barbara, eyeing the four small sheets which
Queenie's unformed, curiously immature-looking writing had barely
succeeded in covering.

"She hasn't got time," said Alex quickly and defensively.

"More like she's got a sensible governess who doesn't let her waste good
pen and paper on such rubbish," old Nurse severely pointed the moral.

"What do girls want to write to one another for?" said Cedric. "They
can't have anything to say."

Barbara, who was secretly curious, seized the opportunity.

"What does she write about, Alex?"

Alex would have liked to tell them to mind their own business, but she
knew that any accusation of making mysteries would bring down Nurse's
wrath upon her, and as likely as not the confiscation of the letter.

She read it aloud hastily, with a pretence of skipping here and there,
leaving out the "dear Alex" at the beginning, and the whole of the last
sentence and the postscript.

"I suppose you've left out all the darlings and the loves and kisses,"
Cedric remarked scornfully, more from conventionality than anything
else.

Alex was not averse to having it supposed that Queenie had been more
lavish with endearments than she had in reality shown herself.

"Who are the Munroes?" asked Barbara. "Are they nice?"

"The American girls who crossed from Liège with me. I remember now, they
were going to spend their holidays with an aunt somewhere in
Devonshire."

"Perhaps we shall see them. How old are they?"

"Sadie and Diana are much older than you," Alex told her crushingly. "In
fact, they're older than I am. But the little one, Marie, is only
twelve."

"Where does the aunt live?"

"How should I know?" said Alex. She reflected bitterly that even if her
schoolmates should ever meet her in Devonshire, it would be impossible
for her to make any advance to them, with old Nurse, even more strictly
mindful of the conventions than Lady Isabel.

But for once it seemed as though fate were on Alex' side.

"I hear," wrote Lady Isabel, in one of her hasty, collective letters,
addressed impartially to "My darling Children," "that Mrs. Alfred
Cardew, who lives at a very pretty house called Trevose, not more than a
few miles from where you are, has her three little nieces with her for
the holidays, and that they are at the same convent as Alex. So if you
like, darlings, as I know Mrs. Alfred Cardew quite well, you may ask
Nurse to let you arrange some little picnic or other and invite the
three children."

Alex, taken by surprise, felt doubtful. She did not know whether she
wanted to expose herself to the criticisms which she thought,
disparagingly gazing round at her brothers and sisters and their
autocratic guardian, they would inevitably call forth from strangers.
Suppose they came, and Barbara was shy and foolish, and Cedric doggedly
bored, and then the Munroes went back to Liège next term and laughed at
Alex, and told the other girls what queer relations she had. And again,
thought Alex, Nurse would probably think the Americanisms, which had
amused Queenie and Alex at the convent, merely vulgar, and Barbara and
Cedric would wonder.

"You _are_ extraordinary, Alex!" said Barbara petulantly. "You're always
talking about your friends at the convent and saying how nice they are,
and then when there's a chance of our seeing them too, you don't seem to
want to have them."

"Yes, I do," said Alex hastily, and consoled herself with the reflection
that very likely the plan would never materialize.

But as luck would have it, Alex, the very next day, saw Sadie Munroe
waving to her excitedly from the carriage where she was driving with a
very gaily-dressed lady, obviously the aunt.

The following week, a charming note invited Alex, Barbara, Cedric and
Archie to lunch and spend the afternoon at Trevose. They should be
fetched in the pony-cart, and driven back after tea.

At least, Alex reflected thankfully, old Nurse would not be there to put
her to shame.

About Archie, with his clean sailor suit and shining curls, she felt no
anxiety. He was always a success.

But she inspected Cedric, and especially Barbara, with anxiety.

The day was a very hot one, and Cedric in cricketing flannels looked
sufficiently like every other boy of his age and standing to reassure
his critical sister.

But Barbara!

Surely the three pretty, sharp-eyed Americans would despise little,
pale, plain Barbara, with her one ridiculous curl of pale hair, and the
big, babyish bow of blue ribbon against which Alex had protested so
vigorously in her own case that Nurse had finally substituted black.

No amount of protest, however, even had Alex dared to offer it, would
have induced Nurse to depart from the rule which decreed that the
sisters should be dressed alike, and Barbara's clean cotton frock was
the counterpart of Alex'.

Alex thought the similarity ridiculous, and hated the twin Leghorn hats,
each with a precisely similar wreath round the crown, of thick, pale
blue forget-me-nots, of which the clusters were unrelieved by any blade
or hint of green.

Even their brown shoes and stockings and brown gauntlet gloves were
alike.

Alex felt disgusted at the aspect which she thought they must present,
and was unable to enjoy the four-mile drive in the pony-cart Mrs. Cardew
had sent over for them. She could not have told whether she was more
apprehensive of the effect Barbara and Cedric might have on the Munroes,
or the Munroes on Barbara and Cedric.

"What do you suppose we shall do all the afternoon?" asked Barbara. She
was in one of her rare moods of excitement, and her futile chattering
and unceasing questions filled Alex with impatience.

The two were on the verge of a quarrel by the time the last hill was
reached.

Then came a long, shady avenue, with two pretty little lodges and a wide
stone gate, and the groom drove the pony smartly round a triangular
gravel sweep which lay before the arched entrance to the big Georgian
house.

Sadie, Marie and Diana were sitting on the low stone wall that divided
the drive from what looked like a wilderness of pink and red roses, and
Alex noticed with relief that they were all three dressed exactly alike
in white muslin frocks, although she also saw that in spite of the
blazing sun they were without hats or gloves. They jumped off the wall
as the pony-cart drew up before the door and greeted the Clare children
eagerly, and with no trace of shyness.




V

Other People


It seemed to Alex that the day was going to be a success, and her
spirits rose.

She was rather surprised to see that Diana Munroe, who was seventeen,
wore her hair in a thick plait twisted round the crown of her head, and
asked her almost at once:

"Have you put your hair up, Diana? Are you going to 'come out'?"

"Oh, no. It'll come down again at the end of the holidays, for my last
term. Only Aunt Esther likes to see it that way. There's Aunt Esther, at
the bottom of the rose garden."

Looking over the terrace wall they saw half-a-dozen grown-up people, men
in white flannels, and youthful-looking ladies in thin summer dresses.
Alex was rather pleased. She had always been more of a success with her
mother's grown-up friends than with her own contemporaries, from the
time of her nursery days, when she had been sent for to the drawing-room
on the "At Home" afternoons.

But though Mrs. Cardew looked up and waved her hand to the group of
children on the terrace, she did not appear to expect them to join the
party, and the interval before lunch was spent in the display of white
rabbits and guinea-pigs.

At first Alex watched Barbara rather nervously, wondering if she would
be shy and foolish, and disgrace her, but Barbara, no longer
over-shadowed by an elder sister who outshone her in every way, had
acquired a surprising amount of self-assurance. Alex was not even
certain that she approved of the ease with which her little sister
talked and exclaimed over the pet animals, asking Diana whether she
might pick up the guinea-pigs and hold them, without so much as waiting
for a lead from Alex.

"Of course, you may!" Diana exclaimed. "Here you are."

She distributed guinea-pigs impartially, and earnestly consulted Cedric
as to the bald patch on the Angora rabbit's head.

As they went back towards the house, Sadie Munroe said to him:

"Do you mind not having any other boys here--only girls? I'm afraid it's
dull for you, but Aunt Esther's boys will be here after lunch, only they
had to go over and play tennis with some people this morning; it was all
settled before we knew you were coming."

But Cedric did not seem to mind at all.

At lunch Archie, as Alex had known he would be, was an immediate
success.

Even Mr. Cardew, who was bald and looked through Alex and Barbara and
Cedric without seeing them when he shook hands with them, patted
Archie's curls and said:

"Hullo, Bubbles!"

"Come and sit next to me, you darling," said Mrs. Cardew, "and you shall
have two helpings of everything."

It was a very long luncheon-table, and Alex found herself placed between
Sadie and a grey-headed gentleman, to whom she talked in a manner which
seemed to herself to be very grown-up and efficient.

Barbara was on the same side of the table and invisible to her, but she
saw Cedric opposite, quite eagerly talking to Marie Munroe, which rather
surprised Alex, who thought that her brother would despise all little
girls of twelve.

Quite a number of people whose names Alex did not know asked her about
Lady Isabel, and she answered their inquiries readily, pleased to show
off her self-possession, and the gulf separating her from the
childishness of Barbara, who was giggling almost all through lunch in a
manner that would unhesitatingly have been qualified by her parents as
ill-bred.

Lunch was nearly over when the two schoolboy sons of the house came
rushing in, hot and excited, and demanding a share of dessert and
coffee.

"Barbarians," tranquilly said Mrs. Cardew. "Sit down quietly now, Eric
and Noel. I hope you said 'How d' you do' to every one."

They had not done so, but both made a sort of circular salutation, and
the elder boy dropped into a chair next to Alex, while Eric went to sit
beside his mother.

Noel Cardew was fifteen, a straight-featured, good-looking English boy,
his fairness burned almost to brick-red, and with a very noticeable cast
in one of his light-brown eyes.

Alex looked at him furtively, and wondered what she could talk about.

Noel spared her all trouble.

"Do you ever take photographs?" he inquired earnestly. "I've just got a
camera, one of those bran-new sorts, and a tripod, quarter-plate size. I
want to do some groups after lunch. I've got a dark-room for developing,
the tool-house, you know."

He talked rapidly and eagerly, half turned round in his chair so as
almost to face Alex, and she tried to feel flattered by the exclusive
monologue.

She knew nothing about photography, but uttered little sympathetic
ejaculations, and put one or two timid questions which Noel for the most
part hardly seemed to hear.

When Mrs. Cardew at length rose from her place, he turned from Alex at
once, in the midst of what he was saying, and demanded vehemently:

"Can't we have a group on the terrace now? Do let me do a group on the
terrace--the light will be just right now."

"Dear boy, you really mustn't become a nuisance with that camera of
yours--though he's really extraordinarily clever at it," said his
mother, in a perfectly audible aside.

"Would it bore you all very much to be victimized? You won't keep us
sitting in the glare too long, will you, dear boy?"

Almost every one protested at the suggestion of being photographed, but
while a good many of the gentlemen of the party disappeared noiselessly
and rapidly before the group could be formed, all the ladies began to
straighten their hats, and pull or push at their fringes. Noel kept them
waiting in the hot sun for what seemed a long while, and Alex reflected
rather gloomily that Mrs. Cardew showed a tolerance of his inconvenient
passion for photography that would certainly not have been approved by
her own parents.

At last it was over, and Sadie jumped up, crying, "Now we can have some
proper games! What shall we play at?"

"Don't get over-heated," her aunt said, smiling and nodding as she moved
away.

"Do you like croquet?" Diana asked, and to Alex' disappointment they
embarked upon a long, wearisome game. She was not a good player, nor was
Barbara, but Cedric surprised them all by the brilliant ease with which
he piloted Marie Munroe and himself to victory.

"I say, that's jolly good!" Eric and Noel said, and gazed at their
junior with respect.

Alex felt pleased, but rather impatient too, and wished that it were she
who was distinguishing herself.

When they played hide-and-seek, however, her opportunity came. She could
run faster than any of the other girls at Liège, and when Diana
suggested picking up sides, she added good-naturedly:

"Alex runs much faster than any of us--she'd better be captain for one
side, and Noel the other."

Noel looked as though his own headship were a matter of course, but Alex
felt constrained to say:

"Oh, no, not me--You, Diana."

"Would you rather not? Very well. Cedric, then. Hurry up and choose your
sides, boys. You start, Cedric."

"I'll have Marie," said Cedric unhesitatingly, and the little red-haired
girl skipped over beside him with undisguised alacrity.

"Noel?"

Noel jerked his head in the direction of Alex.

"You," he said.

She was immensely surprised and flattered, connecting his choice with
the same attraction that had made him sit beside her at lunch, and not
with her own reported prowess as a runner.

Cedric's reputation for gallantry suffered somewhat in his next
selections, which fell with characteristic common sense on Noel's
brother Eric, and upon Barbara. Noel took Sadie and Diana, and they drew
lots for Archie.

The game proved long and exciting, played all over the terrace and
shrubbery.

Alex screamed and laughed with the others, and enjoyed herself, although
she found time to wish that Barbara were not so stupid and priggish
about keeping on her gloves, because old Nurse had said she must, and to
wonder very much why Cedric appeared so pleased with the society of
red-haired, chattering Marie, whose side he never left.

Presently, as she was looking for somewhere to hide, Noel Cardew joined
her.

"Come on with me--I know a place where they'll never find us," he told
her, and led her on tip-toe to where a very small, disused ice-house was
half-hidden in a clump of flowering shrubs.

Noel pushed open the door with very little effort, and they crept into
the semi-darkness and sat on the floor, pulling the door to behind them.
Noel whispered softly:

"Isn't it cool in here? I _am_ hot."

"So am I."

Alex was wondering nervously what she could talk about to interest him,
and to make him go on liking her. Evidently he did like her, or he would
not have sat next her at lunch and told her about his photography, and
afterwards have chosen her for his partner at hide-and-seek.

Alex, though she did not know it, possessed a combination that is
utterly fatal to any charm: she was unfeignedly astonished that any one
should be attracted by her, and at the same time agonizedly anxious to
be liked.

She wanted now, wildly and nervously, to maintain the interest which she
thought she had excited in her companion.

She found the silence unbearable. Noel would think her dull, or imagine
that she was bored.

"Is this where you do your developing?" she asked in an interested
voice, although she remembered perfectly that he had said he used a
tool-house for his dark-room.

"No--we've got the tool-house for that. Why, there wouldn't be room to
stand up in here. Sometimes I get my things developed and printed for me
at a shop, you know. Chemists will generally do it for one--though, of
course, I prefer doing my own. But there isn't time, except in the
holidays, and then one's always running short of some stuff or other.
The other day I ruined a simply splendid group--awfully good, it would
have been: mother and a whole lot of people out on the steps--like we
were today, you know--" He paused for sheer lack of breath.

"I hope the one you took today will be good," said Alex, her heart
beating quickly.

"Oh, yes, sure to be, with a day like this. Some fellows say you can get
just as much effect on a dull day, using a larger stop, but, of course,
that's all nonsense really. I say, I'm not boring you, am I?"

He hardly waited to hear her impassioned negative before going on, still
discussing photographic methods.

It was quite true that Alex was not bored, although she was hardly
listening to what he said. But his voice went on and on, and it
flattered her that he should want to talk to her so exclusively, as
though secure of her sympathy.

"... And they say colour-photography will be the next thing. I believe
one could get some jolly good effects down here. Young Eric is all for
messing about with beastly paints and stuff, but I don't agree with
that."

"Oh, no!"

"My plan is to get hold of a real outfit, as soon as they get the thing
perfected, and then be one of the pioneers, you know. I say, I hope you
don't think this is awful cheek--"

"Oh, no!"

"This isn't a bad place for experiments, I will say. You see, you can
get the sea, and quite decent scenery, and any amount of view and stuff.
I say, what ages they are finding us," he broke off suddenly.

Alex felt deeply mortified. Evidently Noel was bored, after all. But in
another minute he began to talk again.

"I shouldn't be surprised if one of these days I tried my hand at doing
sort of book stuff. You know, photographs for illustrations. I believe
it's going to pay no end."

"What sort of things?"

"Oh, scenery, you know, and perhaps houses and things. Sure I'm not
boring you?"

"No, indeed, I'm very interested."

"It is rather interesting," Noel agreed simply.

"Another thing I'm keen on is swimming. Rather different, you'll say;
but then one can't do one thing all the time, and, of course, the
swimming is first class at school. I went in for some competition and
stuff last term; high diving, you know."

"Oh, did you win?"

"Can't say I did. Young Eric got a cup of sorts, racing, but I just
missed the diving. Some day I shall have another try, I daresay. You
know, I've got rather a funny theory about swimming. I don't know
whether you'll see what I mean at all--in fact, I daresay it'll sound
more or less mad, to you--but _I_ believe we do it the wrong way."

"Oh," said Alex, wishing at the same time that she could divest herself
of the eternal monosyllable. "Do tell me about it."

"Well, it's a bit difficult to explain, but _I_ think we're all taught
the wrong way to begin with. It doesn't seem to have occurred to any one
to look at the way _fishes_ swim."

Alex thought that Noel must really be very original and clever, and
tried to feel more flattered than ever at being selected as the
recipient of his theories.

"I believe the whole thing could be revolutionized and done much
better--but I'm afraid I'm always simply chockfull of ideas of that
kind."

"But that's so interesting," Alex said, not consciously insincere.

"Don't you have all sorts of ideas like that yourself?" he asked
eagerly, filling her with a moment's anticipation that he was about to
give the conversation a personal turn. "_I_ think it makes life so much
more interesting if one goes into things; not just stay on the surface,
you know, but go into the _way_ things are done."

Alex thought she heard some one coming towards their hiding-place, and
wanted to tell Noel to stop talking, or they would be found, but she
checked the impulse, fearful lest he should think her unsympathetic.

The dogmatic schoolboy voice went on and on--swimming, photography,
cricket, and then photography again. Alex, determined to feel pleased
and interested, could only contribute an occasional monosyllable,
sometimes only an inarticulate sound, expressive of sympathy.

And at the end of it all, when she was half proud and half irritated at
the thought that they must have been sitting there in the semi-darkness
for at least an hour, Noel exclaimed:

"I say, they _are_ slow finding us. I should think it must be quite
tea-time, shouldn't you? How would it be if we came out now?"

"Yes, let's," said Alex, trying to keep the mortification out of her
voice.

They emerged into the sunlight again, and Noel pulled out his watch.

"It's only a quarter past four. I thought it would be much later," he
remarked candidly. "I wonder where they all are. I expect they'll want
to know where we've been hiding, but you won't give it away, will you?
It's a jolly good place, and the others don't know about it."

"I won't tell."

Alex revived a little at the idea of being entrusted with a secret.

"Do you often play hide-and-seek?"

"Oh, just to amuse the girls, in the summer holidays. They've spent the
last three summers with us, you know. Next year I suppose they'll go to
America, lucky kids!"

"I'd love to go to America, wouldn't you?" Alex asked, with considerable
over-emphasis.

"Pretty well. I tell you what I'd really like to do--I shall do it one
day, too--make a regular tour of England, with a camera. I don't know
whether you'll think it's nonsense, of course, but my idea has always
been that people go rushing abroad to see other countries before they
really know their own. Now, my plan would be that I'd simply start at
Land's End, in Cornwall, just taking each principal town as it came on
my way, you know, and exploring thoroughly. I shouldn't mind going off
the main track, you know, if I heard of any little place that had an old
church or castle or something worth looking at. I don't know whether
you're at all keen on old buildings?"

"Oh, yes," Alex said doubtfully; "I've seen Liège and Louvain, in
Belgium--"

"Ah, but I'm talking about English places," Noel interrupted her
inexorably. "Of course the foreign ones are splendid too, and I mean to
run over and have a look at them some day, but my theory is that one
ought to see something of one's own land first. Now take Devonshire.
There are simply millions of old churches in Devonshire, and what I
should do, would be to have a note-book with me, and simply jot down my
impressions. Then with photographs one might get out quite a sort of
record, if you know what I mean--"

Alex was rather glad that her companion should be talking to her so
eagerly as they came in sight of a group of people on the terrace.

"Here are the truants," said Mrs. Cardew, laughing, and Diana Munroe
exclaimed that Aunt Esther had called them all to tea, and they had
given up further hunt for them.

"Noel always finds extraordinary places to hide in," she added rather
disparagingly.

It was evident that Noel was not very popular with the American cousins.

"That boy would be very good looking if he had not that terrible cast,"
Alex overheard one lady say to another, as the visitors were waiting on
the steps for the pony-carriage to take them away. The grey-haired man
next to whom Alex had sat at lunch, and who evidently did not know any
of the group of children apart, nodded in the direction of little
Archie, flushed and excited, trying to climb the terrace wall,
surrounded by adoring ladies.

"That's the little chap for my money."

"Isn't he a darling? That's one of Isabel Clare's children--so are the
two girls in blue. I couldn't believe anything so tall was really hers."

"Oh, yes--I noticed one of them--rather like her mother?"

Alex felt sure that she ought not to listen, and at the same time kept
motionless lest they should notice her and lower their voices.

She felt eagerly anxious to overhear what the grey-haired gentleman
might have to say after the very grown-up way in which she had made
conversation with him at lunch, and having been a very pretty and
much-admired drawing-room child in her nursery days, could not
altogether divest herself of the expectation that she must still be
found pretty and entertaining.

But the grey-haired gentleman said impartially:

"They are neither of them a patch on Lady Isabel, are they?"

"They are at the awkward age," laughed the lady to whom he was talking.
"One of them sat next to you at lunch, didn't she?"

"Yes. Not quite so natural as the other children. That little,
red-haired American girl, now--a regular child--"

Alex, with a face grown suddenly scarlet, left Barbara, shyly, and
Cedric, briefly, to thank their hostess for the pleasant day they had
spent.

A new, and far more painful self-consciousness than any she had yet
known, hampered her tongue and her movements, until they were safely in
the pony-carriage half-way down the drive.

"They are nice, aren't they?" said Barbara. "I'm sure they are nicer
than Queenie."

"No, they aren't," Alex contradicted mechanically.

"Well, Marie and Diana are, anyway." She looked slyly at Cedric. "Don't
you think so, Cedric?"

"How can I tell whether they are any nicer, as you call it, than another
kid whom I've never seen?" inquired Cedric reasonably.

"But didn't you like Marie?"

"She's all right."

Barbara giggled in the way most disliked by her family, the authorities
of whom stigmatized the habit as "vulgar," and Cedric said severely:

"I shouldn't think decent girls would want to play with you at all, if
you don't leave off that idiotic trick of cackling."

But Barbara, who was not at all easily crushed, continued to giggle
silently at intervals.

"Why are you so silly?" Alex asked her crossly, as they were going to
bed that night.

She and Barbara shared a room at Fiveapples Farm.

Barbara whined the inevitable contradiction, "I'm not silly," but added
immediately, "you wouldn't be so cross, if you knew what I know. I
expect you'd laugh too."

"Well, what is it?"

"I shan't tell you."

Alex was not particularly curious, but she had been the nursery autocrat
too long to be able to endure resistance to her command.

"Tell me at once, Barbara."

"No, I won't."

"Yes, you will. Well, what is it about?" said Alex, changing her
tactics.

"It's about Cedric."

"Is he in a scrape?"

"No, it's just something he did."

"_What?_ Did he tell you about it?"

"Oh, no. He doesn't know I know. He'd be furious if he did, I expect."

"Who told you? Does any one else know?"

"Nobody told me. One other person knows," giggled Barbara, jumping up
and down in her petticoat.

"Keep still, you'll have the candle over. Who's the other person who
knows?"

"Guess."

"Oh, I can't; don't be so silly. I am not going to ask you any more."

"Well," said Barbara in a great hurry, "it's Marie Munroe, then; it's
about her."

"What about her? She didn't take any notice of any one except Cedric,
and I think it was very rude and stupid of her."

"It was Cedric's doing much more than hers," Barbara said shrewdly. "I
think he thinks he is in love with her. I saw them in the shrubbery when
we were playing hide-and-seek; and--what do you think, Alex?"

"Well, what?"

"Cedric kissed her--I saw him."

"Then," said Alex, "it was perfectly hateful of him and of Marie and of
you."

"Why of _me?_" shrieked Barbara in a high key of indignation. "What have
I done, I should like to know?"

"You'd no business to say anything about it. Put out the candle,
Barbara, I'm going to get into bed."

In the darkness Alex lay with her mind in a tumult. It seemed to her
incredible that her brother, whom she had always supposed to despise
every form of sentimentality, as he did any display of feeling on the
part of his family, should have wanted to kiss little, red-haired Marie,
whom he had only known for one day, and who was by far the least pretty
of any of the three Munroe sisters. "And to kiss her in the shrubbery
like that!"

Alex felt disgusted and indignant. She thought about it for a long while
before she went to sleep, although she would gladly have dismissed the
incident from her mind. Most of all, perhaps, she was filled with
astonishment. Why should any one want to kiss Marie Munroe?

In the depths of her heart was another wonder which she never formulated
even to herself, and of which she would, for very shame, have
strenuously denied the existence.

Why had she not the same mysterious attraction as un-beautiful little
Marie? Alex knew instinctively that it would never have occurred, say,
to Noel Cardew--to ask her if he might kiss her. She did not want him
to--would have been shocked and indignant at the mere idea--but,
unconsciously, she wished that he had wanted to.




VI

The End of an Era


No salient landmarks ever seemed to Alex to render eventful the two and
a half years that elapsed between those summer holidays at Fiveapples
Farm and her final departure from the Liège convent to begin her
grown-up life at home.

The re-arrangement of the day's routine consequent on the beginning of
the winter half-year caused her to miss Queenie less acutely than she
had done when she first came home for the holidays, and with Queenie's
absence there were fewer revolts against convent law, and less disfavour
from the authorities.

She made no other great friends. Marie Munroe showed her a marked
friendliness at first, but Alex could not forget that giggling
revelation of Barbara's, and shrank from her advances unmistakably. She
had very little in common with her French contemporaries, and knew that
they thought her English accent and absence of proficiency in
needlework, marks of eccentricity and of bad form, so that she became
self-conscious and aggressive before them.

She was hardly aware of her own intense loneliness--the poignant
realization of it was to come later--but the want of any channel of
self-expression for her over-developed emotional capabilities produced
in her a species of permanent discontent that reacted on her health and
on her spirits, so that she got the reputation, least enviable of any in
schoolgirl circles, of being "a tragedy queen."

Her morose pallor, partly the result of an under-vitalized system, and
partly of her total lack of any interest in her surroundings, were
considered fair game.

"Voyez, Alex! Elle a son air bête aujourd'hui."

"A qui l'enterrement, Alex?"

They were quite good-humoured, and did not mean to hurt her. It was not
their fault that such pin-pricks stabbed her and sent her away to cry
over her own friendlessness until she felt sick and exhausted.

She did not expend on any one else the extravagant worship bestowed upon
Queenie Torrance. For a year she wrote to Queenie throughout the
holidays, and received meagre and unsatisfactory replies, and then
gradually the correspondence ceased altogether, and Alex only looked
forward with an occasional vague curiosity to the possibility of meeting
Queenie again in London, on the terms of equality symbolized by their
both being "grown-up."

During her last year at school, lack of intimate intercourse with any
one, and the languid sentimentality of adolescence, made her take for
the first time some interest in religion as understood at the convent.
She prolonged her weekly confession, which had hitherto been a matter of
routine to be got through as rapidly as possible, in order to obtain the
solace of talking about herself, and derived a certain tepid pleasure in
minutely following and applying to herself the more anecdotal portions
of the New Testament.

For a time, it seemed to her that she had found a refuge.

Then came the affair of the examination. Alex, in her last term, and
taking part in the final midsummer _concours_, could not bear the
penalty of failure which it seemed to her would be displayed in the
mediocrity which had all along been her portion. She had never been
admitted to the virtuous society of the _enfants de Marie_, had never
taken more than one of the less distinguished prizes at the end of any
term, and had no warmly-worded report to display her popularity and the
sense of loss that her departure would leave.

Her place in the half-yearly examination was not a good one. She had
none of Cedric's power of concentration, and her abilities were not such
as to win her any regard in the continental and Catholic system of
education of the middle nineties.

She cheated over the examination.

It was quite easy to copy from the girl next her, who happened to be one
of the best vehicles for carefully-tabulated and quite unconnected
facts, in the school. Alex could read the dates, and the proper names,
and all the principal words on her history paper, and transferred them
to her own, clothing the dry bones in the imaginative fabric of her own
words, for the English girls were allowed to do most of the papers in
their own language.

At the end of the morning she was oddly elated, at the sight of her
well-filled paper, and felt no qualms at all. In the afternoon she was
again next to Marie-Louise, and congratulated herself that the paper
should be the literature one. Arithmetic, she knew, was not the strong
point of Marie-Louise, and besides, it would be almost impossible to
copy the working of problems figure for figure without ultimate
detection.

That night, however, when Alex knelt down to say her prayers, she was
suddenly overwhelmed by remorse and terror.

Her crime came between her and God.

The vaguely comforting belief that because she was lonely and miserable,
He would vouchsafe to her an especial pity, was destroyed. Between God
and a sinner, so Alex had been told, lay an impassable gulf that only
repentance, confession, atonement and punishment, could bridge--and even
then, an indelible entry against one's name testified to eventual
exposure and shame at some dreadful, inevitable assizes, when sins
hidden and forgotten, large and small, of commission and omission alike,
would be made known to all the world, assembled together for the Last
Judgment. Faced with this inevitable retribution, Alex felt that no
present success was worth it, and wondered whether she could not repair
her wickedness as far as possible on the morrow by confession.

But when the morrow had come, the Day of Judgment seemed far removed
from the hot July morning, and the breaking-up, when the result of the
examinations would be heard, a very present reality indeed.

It was a relief to the hot, tossing sensation of balancing values in her
mind, to remember that it was the day of the Catechism examination,
which would be viva voce.

She acquitted herself very badly, and the temptation to retrieve her
failure in the afternoon was irresistible, when she again found herself
placed next to the prodigy Marie-Louise.

The paper was headed "Histoire de l'Église," and immense value was
attached to proficiency in the subject, strenuously taught to the
convent pupils out of enormous old-fashioned volumes containing much
loyal fiction with a modicum of distorted historical fact.

Alex fell.

She could overlook her neighbour's papers so easily, hardly even turning
her head, that it only struck her as inconvenient, and did not awake in
her any fear of detection, when presently Marie-Louise pulled a piece of
blotting-paper towards her so that it covered the page on which she was
working.

Alex finished the question to which Marie-Louise had unwittingly
supplied her with material for the answer, and looked about her,
subconsciously waiting for the removal of the blotting-paper. Her eyes
met those of a younger child, seated exactly opposite to her, whose
sharp, dark gaze was fixed upon her with a sort of eager, contemptuous
horror. In that instant, when it seemed as though her heart had stopped
beating, Alex knew herself detected.

The colour rushed from her face and she felt cold and giddy.

Lacking the instinctive guard against self-betrayal which is the
hall-mark of the habitual deceiver, her terrified gaze turned straight
to Marie-Louise.

The smooth, dark head was bent low, one hand still clutched at the
covering blotting-paper, and the ear and piece of cheek which were all
that Alex could see, were scarlet.

Marie-Louise knew.

The sharp-eyed child opposite had seen Alex cheat, and had no doubt
conveyed a silent telegraphic warning.

It seemed to Alex that the world had stopped. Accusation, disgrace,
expulsion, all whirled through her mind and left no permanent image
there. Her imagination stopped utterly dead at the horror of it.

She sat perfectly motionless for the remaining hours of the morning,
unconscious of the passage of time, only conscious of an increasing
sense of physical sickness.

It was an absolute relief to her when the bell rang and she found
herself obliged to get up and move across the long class-room with the
others to give up her papers.

"Vous êtes malade, Alexandra?"

"J'ai mal-au-coeur," said Alex faintly.

She was sent to the infirmary to lie down, and the old lay-sister in
charge of it was so kind to her, and commiserated her wan, forlorn
appearance so pityingly, that Alex burst into a flood of tears that
relieved the tension of her body, and sent her, quivering, but
uncomprehendingly sensible of relief, to rest exhaustedly upon the
narrow infirmary bed with little white curtains drawn all round it.

No doubt every one would soon know of her disgrace, and she would be
expelled, to the shame and anger of her father and mother, and the
downfall of all her boastings to Barbara. No doubt God had abandoned one
so unworthy of His forgiveness--but Sœur Clementine was kind, and it
seemed, in the incredible comfort of a little human tenderness, that
nothing else mattered.

And, after all, that hour's anticipation proved to be the worst that
happened to her. She went downstairs for the evening preparation, and
Marie-Louise, a trusted _enfant de Marie_, obtained permission to speak
to her alone, and solemnly conducted her to the lavatory, as the most
private place in the school.

Standing over the sink, with its stiff and solitary tap of cold water,
Marie-Louise conducted her inquiry with business-like, passionless
directness.

Alex made no attempt either to deny her sin or to palliate it. She was
mentally and emotionally far too much exhausted for any effort, and it
did not even occur to her that any excuse could avail her anything.

Marie-Louise was not at all unkind.

She knew all about _la charité_, and was agreeably conscious of
exercising this reputable virtue to the full, when she informed Alex
that no one should ever know of the lapse from her, provided that Alex,
making her own explanation to the class-mistress, should withdraw her
papers from the examination.

"But what can I say to her?" asked Alex.

"Quant à ça," said Marie-Louise, in the detached tones of one who had
accomplished her duty and felt no further interest on the point at
issue, "quant à ça, débrouillez-vous avec vôtre conscience."

To this task she left Alex.

And Alex ended by doing nothing at all. Partly from inertia, partly
because she knew that Marie-Louise would never ask her what she had
done, she shirked the shame and trouble of confession to her
class-mistress, and let her papers go in with the others. She knew that
she would not get a high place, for her work all through the term had
been bad, and would have to be taken into consideration, and over all
the remaining papers she muddled hopelessly. Besides, she was leaving
for good, and no one would know.

She had lost her self-respect when she first realized that she was
cheating, and it was then, as she neared the completion of her
seventeenth year, that the belief was ineradicably planted in Alex' soul
that she had been born with a natural love of evil, and that goodness
was an abstract attitude of mind to which she could never do more than
aspire fruitlessly, with no slightest expectation of attainment. She was
further conscious of an intense determination to hide the knowledge of
her own innate badness from every one.

If she were ever seen in her true colours, no one would love her, and
Alex already knew dimly, and with a further sense of having strange, low
standards of her own, that she wanted to be loved more than anything in
the world.

Far more than she wanted to be good.

The affair of the examination passed, and although Alex did not forget
it, she mostly remembered it as merely the culminating scandal of a
succession of petty evasions and cowardly deceptions.

She left Liège without regret.

She had hated the physical discomfort of the conventual system, the
insufficient hours of sleep, the bitter cold of the Belgian winters and
the streaming rain that defiled the summers; she had hated the endless
restrictions and the minute system of _surveillance_ that was never
relaxed; above all, she had hated the sense of her own isolation in a
crowd, her own utter absence of attraction for her kind.

It seemed to Alex that when she joined the mysterious ranks of
grown-up-people everything would be different. She never doubted that
with long dresses and piled-up hair, her whole personality would change,
and the meaningless chaos of life reduce itself to some comprehensible
solution.

Everything all her life had been tending towards the business of
"growing up." Everything that she was taught at home impressed the
theory that her "coming out" would usher in the realities of life, and
nothing impressed her more with a sense of the tremendous importance of
the approaching change than Lady Isabel's greeting, when she came back
to Clevedon Square after her final term at Liège.

"We've put off Scotland for a week, darling--your father's been so good
about it--so that I may see about your clothes. I've made appointments
with Marguerite and the other places for you, so there'll be nothin' to
do but try on, but, of course, I shall have to see the things myself
before they finish them, and tell them about the colours; they're sure
to want to touch everything up with pink or blue, and white is so much
prettier for a young girl. White with a tiny little _diamanté_ edging, I
thought, for one of your evenin' dresses....

"The first thing, of course, is your hair. Louise must go with you to
Hugo's, and watch them very carefully while they do it in two or three
different styles, then she'll be able to do it for you every evening. I
expect she'll have to do it every day to begin with, but you must try
and learn. I should like you to be _able_ to be independent of a maid in
that sort of way--one never knows quite that some time one mightn't find
oneself stranded for a day or two....

"I don't think your hair will need waving, Alex, which is such a
comfort. So many women have to wear their fringe in curlers every
night--thank Heaven, I've never had to. As a matter of fact, they say
fringes are goin' out now, but I'm certainly not goin' to let yours grow
until we're quite certain about it ... and a bald forehead is always so
unbecomin'."

Alex listened with a sense of importance and excitement, but she was
also rather bewildered. The contrast between all this preoccupation with
her clothes and her appearance, and the austere mental striving after
spiritual or moral results which had permeated the convent atmosphere,
was too violent.

"You'll be interested in it all, my darling, won't you?" asked Lady
Isabel disappointedly. "I couldn't bear to have a daughter who didn't
care about her things--some girls are like that--so disappointin'; after
one's had all the trouble of their upbringin' and is lookin' forward to
a little reward."

Alex could find no words in which to explain what she knew quite well,
that she was as full of eager anticipations as Lady Isabel could wish,
but was too much bewildered by the novelty of it all, as yet, to give
any expression to them.

She became rather boisterous and unconvincing in her endeavours to
express, by means which were not spontaneous, the pleasure and
excitement expected of her.

"You'll learn to move prettily and quietly, darling, and we must see
about some dancin' lessons before next year. Dancin' fashions alter so
quickly now-a-days," said Lady Isabel, her low, gentle tones a shade
lower and more gentle than usual.

"But I shan't go to balls--yet," stammered Alex.

She and Barbara had only been allowed a very few children's parties, and
for the last few years she had been considered too old for these. She
thought of a ball as a prolonged, glorified party.

"Not until after your presentation, of course, and that won't be till
the spring. But there may be one or two affairs in the country at
Christmas, if I take you to stay about, as I hope.

"You see, darling, my plan is to let you have the next two months in the
country with little Barbara, just as usual--only you must take great
care not to let yourself get freckled in the sun--and then, when you
come back to town in October, you can have your hair properly put up,
and come about with me, so as to get to know people and make a little
beginnin' before there's any question of really doing the season
properly next summer."

Alex began to feel vastly important. She had never been the centre of so
much attention before.

Evidently this affair of coming out was the culminating point to which
all life had hitherto been tending.

Even Barbara treated her with a rather envious respect now.

Only Cedric remained unimpressed, and treated his eldest sister's marked
tendency to assume airs of extreme maturity with silent indifference.

His school career was proceeding more triumphantly than ever, and his
"removes" succeeded one another with a rapidity only less startling than
his increasing reputation as a cricketer.

He spent most of his holidays with a schoolfellow, and showed himself
rather scornful of girls in general and of his sisters in particular,
although he played willingly enough with little Pamela, who had grown to
an attractive and talkative age.

Barbara asked him once, with the touch of slyness characteristic of her
in certain moods, whether he remembered Marie Munroe.

"Red-haired American kid? Oh, yes," said Cedric loftily. "Didn't she
have a sister who was bosom friends with Alex at Liège, or some rot of
that kind?"

And Alex had felt unaccountably relieved at the implication of the
evanescent character of Cedric's whilom admiration.

They spent August and September at the seaside on the Cornish coast.

Alex enjoyed the daily bathing, and scrambling over the rocks
barefooted, and the picnic teas in any sheltered cove that old Nurse
judged sufficiently protected from the profane gaze of possible
trippers. But she had all the time the sense that these hot, leisurely
days were only a time of waiting, and even when she enjoyed herself most
she was conscious of a gnawing impatience for the next step.

The week in London before Lady Isabel and Sir Francis started for
Scotland had rather disappointed Alex, although she did not own it, even
to herself.

Perpetual "tryings on" in hot weather had proved a tiring performance,
and her feet ached from standing and from the hot pavement, so that she
dragged herself rather than walked, or stood on one foot so as to save
the other, which had vexed Lady Isabel, and led to a long admonition as
to the importance of moving properly and always holding oneself upright.

Moreover, Alex, although she did not give very much thought to her own
looks as a rule, had always expected that as soon as she grew up she
would almost automatically become very beautiful, and it vexed and
surprised her to find that her new frocks, still in a very incompleted
stage, did not at once produce any startling change in her appearance.
It was also disappointing that her mother and her mother's dressmaker
should so often seem to find in her hitherto unsuspected deficiencies.

"Mam'selle won't be able to wear elbow-sleeves just at present, Móddam,
I'm afraid--at least, not until we've got rid of that redness."

"Dear me, no! I suppose that comes from keepin' her elbows on a school
desk--how very vexin'. Really, the nuns must have been very careless to
let you get into the way of it, Alex. And it's made your shoulders
round, too."

"Mam'selle _must_ keep her shoulders well back if that white chiffon is
to look like anything at all," chimed in Madame Marguerite most
impressively. "It will simply be ruination to let it drop like that in
the front ... takes away all the smartness from it."

Alex straightened herself uneasily.

"It's such a simple little frock, the whole thing is how it's worn...."

Which made Alex feel miserably unequal to the responsibility laid upon
her.

"Her neck is very thin," sighed Lady Isabel, and Madame Marguerite, her
large head with its weight of elaborate yellow waves well on one side as
she gazed at Alex, had looked very disparaging indeed as she said, in
tones more consolatory than hopeful:

"Of course, Mam'selle may fill out a bit before next year."

Alex, in her heart, had been thankful when it was all over, and she had
gone back to the old blue cotton frocks that were to be worn out at the
seaside.

Her only responsibility there was the daily struggle of putting up her
hair.

To her disgust, and to Barbara's derision, the hair-dresser had insisted
upon a large, bun-like frame, which made her head ache, and, pinned on
by her unskilful hands, displayed a strong tendency to slip down the
back of her neck. And however much she might brush and pull her hair
over it, there always appeared a hiatus sooner or later, through which a
large patch of what Barbara jeeringly called "false horsehair," might
plainly be seen.

In spite of it all, however, Alex enjoyed those last schoolroom days of
hers more than any she had yet known.

Real life was going to begin, and though Alex had no idea as to how the
transformation would be effected, she was convinced that everything
which she had longed for, and utterly missed, throughout her schooldays,
would now be hers.




VII

London Season


Alex' first London season, from the very extravagance of her
expectations, was a disappointment to her.

Her own appearance, indeed, in her first ball-dress, surprised and
delighted her, and she stood before the great pier glass in the
drawing-room, under the chandelier which had been specially lit for the
occasion, and gazed at her reflection with incredulous admiration.

Her dress, in the height of the prevailing fashion, had been the subject
of Lady Isabel's minute and careful consultations with Madame Marguerite
of New Bond Street. Of stiff white satin, the neck was cut into a hard
square, and the bodice, as it was still called, unsoftened except for a
small draping of pleated white chiffon held on the left shoulder with a
cluster of dead-white roses, which were repeated at the side of the
broad, white-ribbon belt. The most prominent feature of the dress was
the immensity of the sleeves, stiffened within by strips of petersham,
and standing well up from the shoulders. Thence, the monstrous,
balloon-shaped things narrowed imperceptibly, and were gathered in just
below the elbow, leaving no hiatus visible between them and the
_mousquetaire_ white-kid gloves.

The skirt had no train, but fell into plain, heavy folds, sweeping the
ground, and with a slight additional length of "tail," and a
considerable additional fulness behind. A white ostrich-feather fan hung
by white satin ribbon from her waist.

"It looks charming," said Lady Isabel delightedly. "Better than your
presentation frock."

The servants, who had respectfully petitioned through Lady Isabel's maid
to be allowed to see Miss Clare in her ball-dress before she started,
were grouped in the doorway, the long white streamers of the maids' caps
contrasting sharply with their neat black dresses.

Old Nurse, a privileged personage, was right inside the drawing-room,
inspecting critically.

"I never thought you'd look so well, Miss Alex," she observed candidly.
"They've hid your failings something wonderful, and your hair and
complexion was always good, thanks to the care I've took of them--that I
will say."

"Don't those shoes pinch, Alex?" asked Barbara, looking on enviously in
her plain schoolroom frock and strapped shoes, with her hair still
hanging down her back.

Alex did not care whether her pointed, white satin shoes pinched her
feet or not. She was too happy in her first triumph.

It was not quite a solitary triumph, for Sir Francis, after a prolonged
gazing through his double eye-glasses that made her flush more than ever
from nervousness, gave one of his rare smiles of gratification and said:

"Very pretty indeed. I congratulate you on your appearance, my dear
child."

But it was to Lady Isabel that he turned next moment, with that sudden
softened glance that he never bestowed elsewhere.

"How beautifully you've dressed her, my dear. You will be taken for
sisters, now that she is in long dresses."

The compliment was not ill-deserved, and Alex, watching her mother's
exquisite flush, felt a vague dissatisfaction with her own immaturity.

She might be pretty, with youthful colouring and smooth skin, but she
lacked the poise that added charm to her mother's beauty, and a
struggling consciousness of that lack disturbed and vexed her.

"I think she's better without any ornament, don't you, Francis?" asked
her mother critically. "Some girls wear pearls, I know, but I never
quite like it--not the first year, anyway."

Her opera cloak over her shoulders, its cape-like outline and heavy,
turned-back collar of swan-down adding to the already disproportionate
width of the upper part of her person, Alex followed Lady Isabel into
the carriage.

She wore nothing over her head, for fear of disarranging the light
Princess-of-Wales' fringe curling on her forehead.

That first ball remained in her mind as a medley of valse tunes,
quadrilles and jigging polkas, blazing lights and red and white flowers
everywhere, and a sequence of strange young men brought up in rapid
succession by the daughters of her hostess and introduced in an
unvarying formula, to which each responded by a bow and a polite request
for the pleasure of a dance with her. Alex danced readily enough, but
found conversation strangely difficult, expecting she knew not what
profundities of intercourse which were never forthcoming. Her chief
gratification was that of seeing Lady Isabel's pretty, pleased smile at
the sight of her daughter dancing.

"Are you enjoying yourself, darling?" she asked several times, as Alex
returned between each dance to the row of gilt chairs against the wall.

Alex said "Yes" sincerely enough, but she was all the time reminded of
that strange, disconcerting experience that had been hers a year or two
earlier, when she had sought to persuade herself of a great success with
the boy Noel Cardew.

She boasted of her enjoyment of the ball to Barbara next day, and said
that she had been so busy dancing that she had never gone down to supper
at all.

"But that must never happen again," Lady Isabel said, horrified. "Girls
do that sort of thing at first, when they're foolish, and then they get
over-tired and lose all their looks and have no more good times."

It seemed the omega of disaster.

Nevertheless, there were other balls when Alex did not go down to
supper, sometimes because no one had asked her to do so.

She nearly always had partners, for she danced reasonably, though not
superlatively, well, and introductions were still the fashion. But the
number of her partners depended very largely upon the attentiveness of
her hostess or of her hostess's daughters. Young men did not always
claim dances from her, although they had been amongst her partners at
the ball of the week before. Nor did many of them ask for two or three
dances in one evening.

Lady Isabel had said, "Never more than three dances with the same man,
Alex, at the very _outside_. It's such bad form to make yourself
conspicuous with any one--your father would dislike it very much."

Alex bore the warning carefully in mind, and was naïvely surprised that
no occasion for making practical application of it should occur. She was
intensely anxious to be liked and admired, and she strangely confounded
the two issues in her own mind. Attributes such as her clear skin, her
exquisitely-kept hair, or her expensive frocks, she thought would
promote interest in her amongst her fellow-creatures, and to the same
end she simulated an enthusiasm--which was so entirely foreign to her
real feelings that it lacked any semblance of body--for the crazes of
her immediate generation, centred in Planchette and in the publication
of _Barabbas_. She was full of preconceived ideas as to that which
constituted attractiveness, and in her very ardour to realize the
conventional ideal of the day failed entirely to attract. In intercourse
with other girls, still in their first or second season, she slowly
began to suspect the deficiencies in herself.

"I'm engaged for nearly every single valse at the Duchess's ball on
Tuesday already!" a very young, childish-looking little creature
exclaimed in Alex' hearing.

Alex was astounded. What could the little thing mean?

"Nearly all my last night's partners will be there, and they've all
asked me for dances, and some for two or three," said the child with
ingenuous pride.

Alex was frankly amazed. Lady Mollie was not particularly pretty, and
her conversation was the veriest stream of prattle. Yet she was asked to
reserve the favour of her dances three days or four days in advance, and
the experience was evidently no new one to her, although she had only
come out a few weeks earlier than Alex!

It was the same little Lady Mollie who gave Alex a further shock by
demanding of her very seriously:

"Do you know a girl called Miss Torrance, a girl with very fair hair?
She says she was at school with you."

"Queenie Torrance? Oh, _yes!_" said Alex, the old fervour rushing to her
voice at the sudden memory of Queenie, who had left her letters
unanswered--of whom she had heard nothing for two years.

"She's tremendously admired by _some_ people," said Lady Mollie, shaking
her head with a quaint air of sapience. "I know two or three who rave
about her. Mother says she's rather inclined to be fast. I think people
don't like her father very much, and he generally takes her about. You
don't know them very well, do you?"

Alex hastily disclaimed any intimacy with Queenie's unpopular parent.
She felt disloyal to Queenie for the eagerness with which she did so.

Two nights later, at one of the big evening receptions that Alex enjoyed
least of any form of entertainment, Miss Torrance's name was again
mentioned to her.

She was listening to the conversation of a brilliantly-good-looking
young German Jew, whose name of Goldstein, already spoken with bated
breath in financial circles, conveyed less to her inexperience than did
the dark, glowing eyes, swarthy skin and the Semitic curve of his
handsome nose. His voice was very slightly guttural, and he slurred his
r's all but imperceptibly as he spoke.

She found that conversation with him was exceedingly easy, and
translated the faint hint of servility in his deference, as did most
women not of his own race, into sympathy with her utterances.

"You think so, you really think so?" he inquired gently, when she
expressed a _banale_ admiration for the prettiness of some girl whose
entry, preceded by that of an insignificant couple, had made a slight
stir round the huge open doorway of the reception-room.

"Yes," said Alex, emboldened by the interested look in the dark eyes
which he kept upon her face, as though finding it more worth while to
gaze upon her than upon the entering beauty.

"I have seen more beautiful faces than hers, nevertheless," he
responded.

The eloquence of his look made Alex feel as though she had received a
compliment, and she blushed. As though to cover her shyness, the young
Jew went on speaking. "I wonder if you know Miss Torrance--Miss Queenie
Torrance?"

She noticed that his throaty voice lingered over the syllables a little.

"She was my great friend at school."

"Indeed! What a delightful friendship for both, if I may say so. I think
I may say that I, also, have the privilege of counting myself amongst
the friends of Miss Torrance."

"I haven't seen her since she left school," said Alex wistfully. "I
should like to see her."

"You spoke of beauty just now," said the young Jew deliberately. "To my
mind Miss Torrance was the beauty of the season, when she came out last
year."

She felt faintly surprised, but spoke hastily lest he should think her
jealous, although he had carefully emphasized the date of Queenie's
appearance into society.

"I heard only the other day how much she was admired."

Goldstein's dark face grew darker. "She is very much admired indeed," he
said emphatically.

"Perhaps she will be here tonight," Alex suggested, thinking that she
would like to see Queenie grown-up.

"She is not coming tonight," said Goldstein with calm assurance. "Are
you going to the Duchess's ball on Tuesday? But I need not ask."

Alex felt unreasonably flattered at the homage implied, rather than
expressed, in the tone, and replied in the affirmative.

"Then you will see Miss Torrance."

"Oh, I'm glad," said Alex. She felt rather elated at the success which
her friend must have undoubtedly met with, to be so much admired, and
she remembered with added resentment Lady Isabel's old inquiry:
"Torrance--Torrance--who is Torrance?"

"Did you know that the girl I was at Liège with, Queenie Torrance, came
out last year, and every one says she's lovely?" she demanded of her
mother.

"I'd forgotten you were at school with her. I remember now," said Lady
Isabel thoughtfully. "Who says she is lovely?"

"Oh, Lady Mollie and every one. That Mr. Goldstein I was talking to."

"Goldstein!" exclaimed her mother with infinite contempt. She was silent
for a little while and then said, "I've heard about the Torrance girl.
Men--of a sort--admire her very much indeed, but I should be sorry if
you copied her style, Alex."

Alex felt more curious than ever. Blindly though she had adored Queenie,
it had not occurred to her that she would be considered very pretty, and
she wondered greatly concerning the development of her old playmate.

When she did see Queenie, at the Duchess's ball as Goldstein had
predicted, Lady Isabel was not with her. Excess of fatigue had
unwillingly constrained her to stay at home, while Sir Francis, bored
but courteous, escorted his eldest daughter in her stead.

They arrived late, and stood for a few minutes in the doorway, watching
the kaleidoscopic scene of colour and movement in the great illuminated
ballroom.

Alex' attention was attracted by a group of men all gathered near the
door, and prominent among them Goldstein, his eager, searching gaze
fixed upon the broad stairway without, up and down which innumerable
figures passed and re-passed. From the sudden lightning flash in his
ardent black gaze, not less than from a sort of movement instantly
communicated to the whole group, Alex guessed that he had focussed the
object of his quest.

The announcement made at the head of the stairs was inaudible amid the
crashing of dance music, but Alex recognized the entering couple in a
flash.

Colonel Torrance, white-haired, with black moustache and eyebrows,
upright and soldierly still, had changed less than Queenie. She looked
much taller than Alex had imagined her, and her graceful outline was
fuller, but she moved exquisitely.

Her very fair hair, at a time when every woman wore a curled fringe, was
combed straight back from her rounded brow, leaving only the merest
escaping curls at either temple, and gathered into the ultra-fashionable
"jug-handle" knot on the top of her head. She wore a wreath of tiny blue
forget-me-nots that deepened the tint of her grey-blue eyes, and the
colour was repeated freely in the deep frills and ruchings of her white,
_décolletée_ dress, of an elaboration that Alex instinctively knew her
mother would not have countenanced. Turquoises were twisted round the
white, full column of her throat, and clasped her rounded arms.

Alex watched her eagerly.

Every man in the little waiting group was pressing round her, claiming
first possession of her attention.

The faint, remotely smiling sweetness of Queenie's heart-shaped mouth
recalled to Alex with extraordinary vividness the schoolgirl at the
Liège convent.

Goldstein, his eyes flaming, stood demonstratively waiting, with
insolent security in his bearing, while she dispensed her favours right
and left, always with the same chilly, composed sweetness.

The music, which had ceased, broke into the lilt of the _Blue Danube_,
and on the instant Goldstein imperiously approached Queenie. She swayed
towards him, still smiling slightly, and they drifted into the throng of
dancers. Alex turned round with a sort of gasp.

What must it feel like to be the heroine of a ballroom triumph, to know
that a dozen men would count the evening worth while for the privilege
of dancing once with her, that they would throng in the doorway to watch
and wait for her coming?

Some of them remained in the doorway still, watching her dance, the
folds of her dress and her great white fan gathered into one hand, her
white, heavy eyelids cast down under her pure, open forehead, and
Goldstein's arm encircling her waist as he guided her steps skilfully
round the crowded room. Alex saw that Sir Francis, his double eyeglass
raised, was also watching the couple.

"I wonder who that remarkably pretty woman is, of whom young Goldstein
is very obviously enamoured?"

Alex felt oddly that Sir Francis supposed Queenie to be of maturer years
than she in reality was.

"It's Queenie Torrance, father. She was at school with me," Alex
repeated. "I've not seen her since she grew up--but she's only about a
year older than I am."

"Indeed!"

Curiosity as to the unanimity of masculine judgment made Alex appeal to
him with a question.

"Do you think she's pretty, father?"

"Exceedingly striking--beautiful, in fact," said Sir Francis.

Queenie was not beautiful, and Alex knew it, but the glamour of her
magnetic personality was evidently as potent with older men as with
young Goldstein and his contemporaries. Alex felt a curious pang, half
of envy and half of wonder.

Sir Francis put down his glasses. "A pity," he said deliberately, "that
she is not--altogether--" And raised his grizzled eyebrows.




VIII

Goldstein and Queenie


Queenie Torrance spoke to Alex that night with characteristic suavity,
and showed pleasure at meeting her again.

"Those old convent days seem a long way off, don't they?" she asked,
smiling a little.

Her glance, sweeping the big ballroom, seemed to appraise its glories
and claim them for her own.

It was the glance, rather than the words, to which Alex replied.

"You're having a splendid time, aren't you, Queenie? You like being
grown-up?"

"I adore it," said Miss Torrance, her eyes gleaming like stars.

Alex did not wonder at it.

Night after night she watched Queenie Torrance accepting as her right
the homage of innumerable men, halving the favour of her dances at
crowded balls where "wall-flowers" were too numerous to be rescued from
oblivion by the most determined of hostesses, going down to supper on
the arm of young Goldstein and lingering with him in prolonged
_tête-à-tête_. Goldstein, at the little round table across which he
leant, recklessly oblivious of comment, endeavouring, often fruitlessly,
throughout a whole evening, to obtain one direct look from those
widely-set, downcast eyes under their flaxen lashes.

It was not easy, Alex found, to talk to Queenie. They often met at
entertainments, and once or twice in the Park, but Queenie never rode in
the mornings, as Alex sometimes did, and Lady Isabel did not allow her
daughter to take up the fashionable practice of bicycling in Battersea
Park, at which Queenie Torrance, in the neatest and most daring of
rational costumes, was reported to excel. Once Alex, as she had said
before in her childish days, asked Lady Isabel:

"Mother, may I ask Queenie Torrance to tea here? We meet everywhere, and
it will be so odd if I never ask her to come here. Besides, I should
like to have her."

"I'm sorry, Alex, but I'd rather you contented yourself with meetin' her
in society--if you do."

"Why?" said Alex unwisely, urged by some mysterious unreason to provoke
the answer which she already anticipated with resentment.

"She's not the sort of girl I should care about you being friends with
very much," said Lady Isabel without heat. "I hear she's already bein'
talked about."

Alex knew what the words meant, uttered by her mother and her mother's
circle of intimates.

"Why is she being talked about?" Alex asked rebelliously.

"Any girl who goes in for being fast gets talked about," said Lady
Isabel severely. "And it does them no good in the long run either. Men
may flirt with girls of that sort, and like to dance with them and pay
them attention, but they don't marry them. A man likes his wife to be
simple and well-bred and dignified."

"I'm sure heaps of people would like to marry Queenie."

"How do you know?" Lady Isabel asked quickly.

Alex did not reply. She only knew that men looked at Queenie Torrance as
they did not look at other women, and, true to the traditions of youth
and of the race to which she belonged, the admiration of a man for a
woman, to her inexperience spelt a proposal of marriage.

"I don't want to be hard on a girl who is, after all, very young," said
Lady Isabel. "And, of course, her father doesn't look after her. She is
allowed to go to restaurants with him and every sort of thing.... It's
not the girl's fault exactly, though I don't like the way she dresses,
and a wreath of artificial flowers, or whatever it is she wears in her
hair, is thoroughly bad form. But one can't be too particular, Alex, and
I _do_ want you to make a success of things, and have the right friends
and not the wrong ones."

The wistful anxiety in her mother's voice, no less than in her glance at
her daughter, made Alex wonder sensitively if, perhaps, she were
secretly somewhat disappointed.

Certainly no overwhelming triumph had attended Alex' social career. She
was merely the newly-come-out daughter of a charming and popular mother,
less pretty than many of the season's débutantes, alternately
embarrassingly self-conscious, or else, when she found herself at her
ease, with an unbecomingly dictatorial manner. She had been led to
expect, from constant veiled references to the subject, that as soon as
she grew up, opportunity would be afforded her to attain the goal of
every well-born girl's destiny--that of matrimony. Girls who became
engaged to be married in their first season were a success, those who
had already twice, or perhaps thrice, been the round of London gaiety
with no tangible result of the sort, had almost invariably to give way
to a younger sister, in order that she, in her turn, might have "the
chances" of which they had failed to profit.

Of young women of twenty-two or twenty-three years old, still going
yearly through the season, Lady Isabel merely said matter-of-factly:

"What a pity!"

For the first time, a disquieting twinge seized Alex, lest the same
words should apply to her. No one had shown her the faintest inclination
to ask her in marriage, or even express any particular admiration for
her. She could not imagine any of the men whom she knew falling in love
with her.

At balls or dinner-parties, she made conversation with her partners.
They never grew to know one another more intimately. Sometimes she had
heard girls talk of looking forward to some forthcoming entertainment
because they knew that their particular friends would be there.

She herself did not care. She was on the same terms with all of
them--polite, impersonal, mutually rather bored and boring.

The nearest approach to intercourse other than merely surface that she
attained to, was with Queenie's most openly declared worshipper, Maurice
Goldstein. His manner to all women verged upon the effusive, and Alex
was secretly faintly ashamed of feeling slightly, but perceptibly,
flattered at the deference which he showed her, and even at his
favourite mannerism of gazing straight into her eyes as he shook hands
with her on meeting or parting.

Although Lady Isabel never invited him to Clevedon Square, and sometimes
spoke of him as "that dreadful young Jew who seems to get himself asked
everywhere," she did not forbid Alex to dance with him, and he was the
only young man of her acquaintance who invariably asked her to keep a
second dance for him later in the evening.

She felt greatly curious as to his sentiment for Queenie, partly from
youth's love of romance, partly from a desire to find out, if she could,
both the cause and the effect of the process known as "falling in love."

If she knew more about it, she felt dimly, perhaps it might happen also
to her.

One night, towards the end of the season, at the last big ball she was
to attend that year, Alex was taken down to supper by Maurice Goldstein.

She was surprised, and for a moment flattered, for Queenie was also
present, although she had apparently vouchsafed him neither word nor
look.

Goldstein gave Alex his arm and conducted her ceremoniously downstairs
to the supper-room.

It was late in the evening, only four or five couples, or an occasional
group of three or four, lingered at the small, round, flower-decked
tables.

"Shall we come here?" said Goldstein rather morosely.

He selected a table in a remote corner, and as she took her seat, Alex
perceived that they were within sight of the alcove where sat Queenie
Torrance with her partner, a young Danish diplomat whom Alex knew only
by sight.

"Who is that?" she asked almost involuntarily, as Goldstein's lowering
gaze followed the direction of her own.

The young man beside her needed no more to make him launch out into
emphatic speech.

Alex was half frightened, as she watched the glow in his eyes and the
rapid gesticulations of his hands, as though emotion had startled him
into a display of the racial characteristics that he habitually
concealed so carefully.

He told her crudely that he adored Queenie, and that it drove him nearly
mad to see her in the company of other men.

"But why don't you ask her to marry you?" exclaimed Alex innocently.

Goldstein stared at her.

"I have asked her fourteen times," he said at last with a slight gasp.

"Fourteen times!" Alex was astounded.

According to her preconceived notions a proposal was carefully led up
to, uttered at some propitious moment, preferably by moonlight, and then
and there either definitely accepted or rejected.

"But I shouldn't have thought you'd even seen her fourteen times," she
remarked naïvely.

"I see her every day," Goldstein said gloomily. "It's playing the deuce
with my business. You won't give me away, I know--you're her friend,
aren't you?--and people are so stupid and conventional, they might
talk."

Alex remembered Lady Isabel. Was this what she had meant?

"I can always manage to see her. I know her movements, and when I can
meet her, and when I may take her out to lunch or tea--some quiet place,
of course."

Alex was puzzled.

"But are you engaged?"

"Yes, a thousand times!" he answered in low, vehement tones, and then
appeared to recollect himself. "She has never said no, although I can't
induce her to say yes," he admitted; "and I have to see her surrounded
and admired everywhere she goes, and have no hold on her whatever. If
she would only marry me!" he made a gesture of rather theatrical
despair, indicating the far corner where the young Dane still sat,
oblivious of everything but Queenie, drooping over the small round table
that separated them.

"Cad! he's going to smoke," Goldstein muttered furiously below his
breath.

The room had emptied, and Alex saw Queenie deliberately glance over her
shoulder, as though to make sure of being unobserved. Her eyes moved
unseeingly across Alex and Maurice Goldstein. The rest of the room was
empty. With a little half-shrug of her white shoulders she delicately
took a cigarette from the case that the diplomat was eagerly proffering.

It was the first time that Alex had seen a woman with a cigarette
between her lips. She felt herself colouring hotly, as she watched, with
involuntary fascination, Queenie's partner carefully lighting the
cigarette for her, his hand very close to her face.

She dared not look at Goldstein. The cheap vulgarity of Queenie's
display of modern freedom shocked her sincerely, nor could even her
inexperience blind her to the underlying motive governing Queenie's
every gesture.

She fumbled hastily for her fan and gloves.

"Shall we come upstairs again?" she asked in a stifled voice.

Goldstein rose without a word.

Alex, venturing to cast one glance at him, saw that his face had grown
white.

As he took her back to Lady Isabel, he spoke in a quick, low, dramatic
voice between clenched teeth:

"You saw? She knows she is driving me frantic; but after this--it's all
over."

Alex was frightened and yet exultant at playing even a secondary rôle in
what seemed to her to be a drama of reality.

An hour later, sitting, for the time being partnerless, beside her
mother, she saw Queenie re-enter the ballroom, followed by the Dane.

Queenie's widely-set eyes were throwing a glance, innocent, appealing,
the length of the long room. At once her eyelids dropped again. But in
that instant Maurice Goldstein had left the wall against which he had
been leaning, listless and sulky-looking, and was making his way through
the lessening crowd.

Alex, wondering, saw him reach the side of the tall, white-clad figure,
and claim her from the young diplomat.

He gravely offered Queenie his arm, and Alex saw them no more that
night. She herself drove home to Clevedon Square beside Lady Isabel with
her mind in a tumult.

She felt that for the first time she had seen love at close quarters,
and although a faint but bitter regret that the experience had not been
a personal one underlay all her sensations, she was full of excitement.

"No more late nights after this week," said Lady Isabel, her voice
sleepy. "A rest will do you good, Alex. You are losing your freshness."

Alex scarcely listened. She stood impatiently while the weary maid,
whose duty it was to sit up for her mistress's return, undid the
complicated fastenings of her frock, and took the pins out of her hair.

"I'll brush it myself," said Alex hastily. "Good-night, mother."

"Good-night; don't come down till lunch-time, Alex--we are not doing
anything."

Alex carried her ball dress carefully over her arm and went up one more
flight of stairs to her own room, wrapped in her pink dressing-gown, and
with her hair loose on her shoulders.

Sitting on the edge of her bed and gazing at her own reflection in the
big, swinging mirror, she made personal application of the small
fragment of human drama that she had just witnessed.

What man would speak and think of her as Maurice Goldstein spoke and
thought of Queenie Torrance?

When would any man's ardent glance answer hers; any man make his way to
her through a crowd in response to the silent summons of her eyes?

She fell into one of the idle, romantic dreams evoked by a highly-strung
imagination, untempered by any light of experience. But the hero of the
dream was a nebulous, shadowy figure of fiction. No man of flesh and
blood held any place in the slender fabric of her fancies.

It occurred to her, more with a sense of disconcertment than of that
panic which was to come later, that she did not possess the power of
drawing any reality from her communion with others, and that no intimacy
other than one of the surface had as yet ever resulted from any
intercourse of hers with her fellow-creatures. Her nearest approach to
reality had been that one-sided, irrational adoration of her schooldays
for Queenie Torrance, that had met with no return, and with so much and
such universal condemnation.

Alex did not doubt that the condemnation was justified. The impression
left upon her adolescent mind remained ineradicable: it was wrong to
attach so much importance to loving; it was _different_, in some
mysterious, culpable way, to feel as she did--that nothing mattered
except the people one loved, that nothing was so much worth while as the
affection and understanding which one knew so well, from oneself, must
exist, and for the bestowal of which on one's own lonely, ardent spirit
one prayed so passionately; and all these desires, being wrong and
unlike other people, must at all costs be concealed and denied. Thus
Alex, placing the perverted and yet unescapable interpretation of her
disconsolate youth upon such experience of life as had been vouchsafed
to her.

Still sitting on the side of the bed and facing the looking-glass, she
sought in her own reflection for traces of the spell wielded by Queenie
Torrance. She had not yet outgrown the belief that beauty and the power
to attract should be synonymous.

Was she as pretty as Queenie?

Her colour was bright and pure, and her hazel eyes reflected the brown
lights gleaming in her soft, tumbled hair, that fell no lower than her
shoulders. She reflected disconsolately on the undue prominence of the
two, white front teeth that the plate which had tormented her childhood
had just failed to render level with the others.

Straight brows added to the regularity of her features, only the corners
of her mouth habitually drooping very slightly. The angularity which
Lady Isabel so regretted was sharply manifested in the exposed
collar-bones just above the open dressing-gown, and in the childishly
thin arms and wrists. With an odd, detached shrewdness, she appraised
the prominent attributes of her own appearance, its ungraceful
immaturity.

As she got slowly into bed, she passed other, moral, attributes, in
fleeting review.

Alex believed that one might be loved for one's goodness, if not for
one's beauty. But she could not suppose herself to be good. The
tradition of the nursery black sheep still clung to her.

Should love come to her, she had nothing but the force of the answer
within her to bring to it, and that force she had been taught to think
of in the light of an affliction to be overcome.

Yet Alex Clare fell asleep smiling a little, nursing the foolish,
romantic fancies that usurped the place of realities, and unaware that
the temperament which craves to give all, is often that of which least
will ever be asked.




IX

Scotland


Queenie's engagement to young Goldstein was formally announced at the
beginning of the year following that one in which Alex made her début.

"A most suitable match, I should imagine," was Lady Isabel's emphasized
comment.

Alex was romantically delighted, and hoped for an opportunity of
obtaining first-hand impressions.

Queenie, however, sent only the most conventional of notes in reply to
Alex' eagerly written congratulation, and Alex had only a glimpse of her
at the crowded wedding, exquisitely pale and pure under her veil, with
Goldstein, his swarthy face radiant and illuminated, at her side.

Remembering the night when the young Jew had spoken to her freely of his
adoration for her friend, Alex, with awkward fervour, addressed a few
words of ardent congratulation to him.

He showed his remarkably white teeth in a quick smile, brilliant with
triumph and happiness, and wrung her hand warmly; but alas! his eyes
failed to answer her gaze, and it was obvious that no deeper issues
between them held any place in his recollections.

Alex went away vaguely disappointed and humiliated.

She, who so longed for a first place, seemed doomed to relegation to the
ranks. Even at home there was no longer any excitement such as that
which had surrounded her launch into the great world, and Lady Isabel
occasionally betrayed a hint of disappointment that no family council
had as yet been required on the subject of Alex' future, such as those
which had punctuated the epoch of her own brief girlhood.

Indeed it was rather Barbara who was the centre of attention.

She still suffered from backache and general languor, consequent upon
over-rapid growth during the year she had spent on the flat of her back.
Old Nurse pitied and was much inclined to spoil her, dosed her
religiously with a glass of port at eleven o'clock every morning, and
supported her whining assertions that lessons with Mademoiselle made her
ill.

"I want to go to school," said Barbara inconsistently. "Alex went to
school, so why shouldn't I?"

"Darlin' child, you know very well that your father won't hear of girls
goin' to school. A convent is quite different--but I certainly shan't
send you to that sort of establishment, after the trick they played me
with Alex, sendin' her back round-shouldered, and with her hands all
chapped and red and covered with chilblains. _Never_ again," said Lady
Isabel.

Barbara sulked.

She sulked so long and so effectively that the unfortunate Mademoiselle
came of her own accord to implore that Barbara might be released from
the schoolroom. She was not learning anything, and her example was
making little Pamela naughty and defiant.

"What a plague children are!" Lady Isabel said helplessly.

She consulted her friends, drawing a plaintively humorous picture of the
recalcitrant young person, which, to the annoyance of Alex, caused a
certain amount of amused sympathy to be expressed in Barbara's favour.

At last some one suggested that she should be sent abroad. Not to a
school or a convent, certainly not--every one was unanimous on that
point excepting one or two ultra-Catholic old aunts of Sir Francis--but
to a charming Marquise, living at Neuilly, and desirous of companionship
for her only child, a girl of about the same age as Barbara.

"She will learn to speak French like a native, and have dancing and
singing lessons with the Hélène child, and go to all the art galleries
and places.... That girl of the Duchess went there to be finished just
before she came out, and _loved_ it, and she came back so much
improved--knowing how to put on her clothes, you know ... just the sort
of thing that makes all the difference."

So spoke Lady Isabel's enthusiastic friends.

Barbara was not consulted, but when the plans had been finally settled
upon and everything arranged, she was told, in accordance with the usage
of her day, that as she was so discontented and troublesome at home, her
parents felt obliged, for the sake of the younger children, to send her
away from them. Barbara, following her wont, said nothing at all, and
did not relax her pouting expression, but once back in the schoolroom
again, she jumped up and down on the sofa in a manner denoting
extravagant glee.

"I knew they'd have to give in," she chanted. "I knew they would, I knew
they would."

For a long while she teased Archie and Pamela by refusing to give them
any explanation, and at the same time exciting their curiosity by her
continual reference to an approaching triumphant emancipation for her,
until Cedric, home for the Easter holidays, and expert in the
administrations of schoolboy tortures, ruthlessly made use of them to
reduce his sister to her proper position of inferiority.

Barbara was sent to Neuilly early in April, and Alex proceeded to enter
upon the second phase of her social career.

It was less of a success than her first season had been.

It was assumed that she had by this time made her own friends, and her
mother's contemporaries accordingly took less pains in the matter of
introductions on her behalf.

If it be true that nothing succeeds like success, it is truer still that
nothing fails so completely as a failure.

When Alex had sat out four or five dances at a ball, partnerless, her
conviction of her own social degradation was absolutely overwhelming.
Her surroundings only interested her as a background to her own
personality, and as she derived no pleasure, but only disappointment and
mortification, from the majority of the functions at which she was
present, her young, expressive face unconsciously advertised both her
vexation and the cause of it.

Her youth and her vanity alike were in rebellion against the truth,
which she more than half divined, that she, who so longed to please and
to attract, was as utterly devoid of that magnetic charm possessed by
other girls in a lesser, and by Queenie Goldstein in supreme, degree, as
it was possible for a reasonably pretty and healthy young girl to be.

Neither her health nor her beauty improved, moreover.

Late hours, in her case, uncounteracted by the vivid sparkle of
enjoyment, drew unbecoming dark circles beneath her eyes, and the
physical fatigue always engendered in her by boredom was most
unmistakably manifested in her slouching shoulders and mournful pallor.

"_Alex a son air bête aujourd'hui_."

Memory mercilessly recalled to her the old gibe of her schoolmates
sometimes, as she felt, against her own will, her features stiffening
into the stupid "tragedy-queen" look which had met with the mocking of
her companions.

"Do try and cheer up, darlin'," Lady Isabel sometimes said, with more
impatience than compassion in her voice, as she glanced at her daughter;
and the implication that her looks were betraying her feelings made Alex
more wretched and self-conscious than ever.

She often saw Queenie Goldstein, as much surrounded as in the days
before her marriage, and her excessive _décolletage_ now enhanced by the
jewels showered upon her by her husband.

Queenie once invited her to a dinner-party at her little house in Curzon
Street, but Alex knew that she would not be allowed to go, and showed
the invitation with great trepidation to her mother.

"Very impertinent of her! Why, she's never been introduced to me. I
shouldn't dream of allowin' any daughter of mine to go and dine with
people whom I didn't know personally, even if they were _absolutely_ all
right."

Lady Isabel, so easy-going and tepidly affectionate towards her
children, was adamant where her social creed was concerned.

"In any case, Alex, I've told you before that I don't want you to go on
with the acquaintance. That Goldstein woman is gettin' herself talked
about, unless I'm very much mistaken."

Again that mysterious accusation! Alex said no more, but wondered
naïvely how the phase that had been used in connection with Queenie
Torrance could still be applicable to Maurice Goldstein's wife.

Surely married women did not flirt? The term, to Alex, symbolized she
knew not what of offensive coquetry, and of general "bad form."

This belief had been inculcated into her as a precept but, nevertheless,
she could not divest herself of a secret suspicion that, although Lady
Isabel might have rebuked, she would not have been altogether averse
from a lapse or two in that direction on the part of her daughter.

But Alex embarked upon no flirtation. The men who danced with her or
took her in to dinner never seemed desirous of talking personalities.
They made perfunctory remarks about the decorations of the tables, the
quality of the floor and the music, and the revival of the Gilbert and
Sullivan operas.

The sense that the intercourse between them must be sustained by
conversation never left her for an instant.

There had been one occasion when she had actually forgotten to think of
herself and of the effect she might be producing, and had joined with
real interest in a discussion about books with a man a great deal older
than herself, who happened to be placed next to her at a big dinner
party. Lady Isabel, opposite, had glanced once or twice at her
daughter's unusually animated expression.

"You seemed to be gettin' on very well with the man on your other
side--not the one who took you down, but the oldish one," she said
afterwards in a pleased voice.

"I never found out his name," said Alex. "He told me he wrote books. It
was so interesting; we were talking about poetry a lot of the time."

Her mother's face lost something of its smile. "Oh, my darling!" she
exclaimed in sudden flattened tones, "don't go and get a reputation for
being _clever_, whatever you do. People do dislike that sort of thing so
much in a girl!"

Alex, her solitary triumph killed, knew that there was yet another item
to be added to that invisible score of reasons for which one was loved
or disliked by one's fellow-creatures.

Without formulating the conviction to herself, she believed implicitly
that in the careful simulation of those attributes which she had been
told would provoke admiration or affection, lay her only chance of
obtaining something of that which she craved.

Dismayed, wearied, and uncheered by success, she continued to act out
her little feeble comedies.

At the end of her second season she felt very old, and very much
disillusioned. This was not real life as she had thought to find it on
leaving schooldays behind her.

There must be something beyond--some happy reality that should reveal
the wherefore of all existence, but Alex knew not where to find it.

Morbidity was a word which had no place in the vocabulary of her
surroundings, but Lady Isabel said to her rather plaintively, "You must
try and look more cheerful, Alex, dear, when I take you about. Your
father is quite vexed when he sees such a gloomy face. You enjoy things,
don't you?"

And Alex, in her complicated disappointment at disappointing her mother
and father, answered hastily in the affirmative.

In the autumn, in Scotland, she met Noel Cardew again.

They were staying at the same house. Alex felt childishly proud of
saying, when her hostess brought the young man to her side, with a word
of introduction:

"Oh, but we've met before! I know him _quite_ well."

She wished that she had spoken less emphatically, at the sight of Noel's
politely non-committal smile. It was evident that he had not the
faintest recollection of the meeting at his mother's house in
Devonshire. She reminded him of it rather shyly.

"Oh, yes, of course. You were at school with my young cousins. I
remember you coming over to see us quite well, with your brothers. We
all played hunt the slipper or something, didn't we?"

"Hide-and-seek," said Alex literally. She wondered why encounters which
remained quite vividly in her own memory should always appear to present
themselves so indistinctly and trivially to other people.

"I haven't heard from your cousins for a long while. Are they in
America?"

"Diana is in India, of course. She married, you know--a fellow in the
Indian Police."

"I remember," said Alex, determined to ignore the tiny prick of jealousy
that now habitually assailed her almost every time that she heard of the
marriage of another girl.

"Are the other two married?" she made resolute inquiry.

"Oh, no. Why, Marie isn't properly grown-up yet. They are both in
America. I've some idea of going over to New York myself next year, and
I suppose I shall stay with their people. My uncle's at the Embassy, you
know."

"It would be splendid to see New York," said Alex, with the old
imitation of enthusiasm.

"I should like the journey as well," young Cardew remarked. "Board ship
is an awfully good way of studying human nature, I fancy, and I'm rather
keen on that sort of thing. In fact, I've a mad idea of perhaps writing
a book one of these days, probably in the form of a novel, because it's
only by gilding the pill that you can get the great B.P. to swallow
it--but it'll really be a kind of philosophy of life, you know, with a
good deal about the different sides of human nature. It may sound rather
ambitious, perhaps, but I believe it could be done."

Alex assented eagerly, and wondered what the initials that he had
used--"the great B.P."--represented. She glanced at him sideways.

He was even better-looking than he had been as a boy, his sunburn of a
deeper tan, and the still noticeable cast in one eye adding a certain
character to the straightness of his features. He had grown a little,
fair moustache, contrasting pleasantly with his light brown eyes. The
boyish immaturity of the loosely knit figure was obscured to her eyes by
the excellence of his carriage and his five foot eleven inches of
height.

She was inwardly almost incredulously pleased when he chose the place
next to hers at breakfast on the following morning, and asked whether
she was going out to join the guns at lunch on the moors.

"I think so," said Alex. She would have liked to say, "I hope so," but
something within her attached such an exaggerated importance to the
words that she found herself unable to utter them.

"Well," said Noel, "I shall look out for you, so mind you come."

Alex's gratification was transparently evident. She was the only girl of
the party, which was a small one; and Lady Isabel, declaring herself
obliged to write letters, sent her out at lunch-time under the care of
her hostess.

They lunched on the moors with the five men, two of whom had only come
over for the day.

Noel Cardew at once established himself at Alex' side and began to
expatiate upon the day's sport. He talked a great deal, and was as full
of theories as in their schoolroom days, and Alex, on her side, listened
with the same intense hope that her sympathy might continue to retain
him beside her.

She answered him with eager monosyllables and ejaculations expressive of
interest. Without analysing her own motives, it seemed to her to be so
important that Noel Cardew should continue to address his attention
exclusively to her, that she was content entirely to sink her own
individuality into that of a sympathetic listener.

When she dressed for dinner that evening and looked at herself in the
big mirror, it seemed to her that for the first time her own appearance
was entirely satisfactory. She felt self-confident and happy, and after
dinner, when the elders of the party sat down to play cards, she
declared boldly that she wanted to look at the garden by moonlight.

"Rather," said Noel Cardew.

They went out together through the open French window.

Alex held up her long-tailed white satin with one hand, and walked up
and down with him under the glowing red globe of the full moon. Noel
talked about his book, taking her interest for granted in a manner that
flattered and delighted her.

"I think psychology is simply the most absorbing thing in the world," he
declared earnestly. "I hope you don't fight shy of long words, do you?"

Alex uttered a breathless disclaimer.

"I'm glad. So many people seem to think that if any one says anything in
words of more than two syllables it's affectation. Oxford and that sort
of thing. But, of course, you're not like that, are you?"

He did not wait for an answer this time, but went on talking very
eagerly about the scheme that he entertained for obtaining material for
his book.

"It might revolutionize the whole standard of moral values in the
country," he said very simply. "You know, just put things in a light
that hasn't struck home in England yet at all. Of course, on the
continent they're far more advanced than we are, on those sort of
points. That's why I want to travel, before I start serious work. Of
course, I've got a mass of notes already. Just ideas, that have struck
me as I go along. I'm afraid I'm fearfully observant, and I generally
size up the people I meet, and then make notes about them--or else
simply dismiss them from my mind altogether. My idea is rather to
classify human nature into various _types_, so that the book can be
divided up under different headings, and then have a sort of general
summing up at the end. Of course, that's only a rough sketch of the
whole plan, but you see what I mean?"

"Yes, I do," said Alex with conviction. "I've always, all my life,
thought that _people_ mattered much more than anything else, only I've
never found anybody else who felt like that too."

"It's rather interesting to look at things the same way, don't you
think?" Noel enquired.

"Oh, yes," Alex answered with shy fervour, her heart beating very fast.

She was only anxious to prolong the _tête-à-tête_, and had no idea of
suggesting a return to the drawing-room, in spite of the damage that she
subconsciously felt the damp ground to be doing to her satin slippers.
But presently Lady Isabel called to her from the window, and she came
into the lighted room, conscious both of her own glowing face and of a
certain kindly, interested look bent upon her by her seniors.




X

Noel


In the ensuing days, Alex met that look very often--a look of pleased,
speculative approval, pregnant with unspoken meanings.

Noel sought her company incessantly, and every opportunity was given
them of spending time in one another's society. For five glowing,
heather-surrounded days and five breathless, moonlit evenings, they
became the centre of their tiny world.

Then Lady Isabel said one night to her daughter:

"You've enjoyed this visit, haven't you, darlin'? I'm sorry we're movin'
on."

"Oh," said Alex faintly, "are we really leaving tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow morning, by the early train," her mother assented cheerfully.

The true instinct of the feeble, to clutch at an unripe prize lest it be
taken from them, made Alex wonder desperately if she could not postpone
her departure.

But she dared not make any such suggestion, and Lady Isabel, looking at
her dismayed face, laughed a little as though at the unreason of a
child. Alex blushed with shame as she thought that her mother might have
guessed what was in her mind. That evening, however, Lady Isabel came
into her room as she was dressing for dinner.

"I thought you'd like to put _this_ over your shoulders, Alex," she said
negligently. "It will improve that cream-coloured frock of yours."

It was a painted scarf that she held out, and she stood gazing
critically while the maid laid it across Alex' shoulders.

"You look so nice, darling child. Are you ready?"

"Yes, mother."

They went downstairs together.

Alex was acutely conscious of a certain maternal pride and tenderness,
such as she had not experienced from Lady Isabel since the first days of
her return from Liège, when she had finally left school. She did not let
herself speculate to what such unusual emotion might portend.

But at the sight of Noel Cardew, better-looking than ever in evening
clothes, a chaotic excitement surged up within her in anticipation of
their last evening together.

Almost as she sat down beside him at the dinner-table, she said
piteously, "I wish we weren't going away tomorrow."

"You're _not?_"

"Oh, yes. Didn't you know?"

"I hadn't realized it," said Noel, and although she avoided looking at
him, she noted with a feeling of triumph the dismay in his voice.

"Oh, I say! What a shame. Must you really go?"

"We're going to pay two more visits and then leave Scotland altogether."

"I shan't stay much longer myself," observed Noel nonchalantly.

Alex was conscious of keeping the words as it were at the back of her
mind, with the implication which she attached to them, while the
conversation at the small table became general.

As she followed her hostess and Lady Isabel from the room, Noel, holding
open the door, said to her in a rapid, anxious tone, very low:

"You'll come out into the garden afterwards, won't you?"

An enigmatic "perhaps" was not in Alex' vocabulary.

She gave him a quick, radiant smile, and nodded emphatically.

It never occurred to her eager prodigality that she ran any risk of
cheapening the favours that so few had ever coveted.

In the garden she moved along the gravelled walk beside him, actually
breathless from inward excitement.

"There was heaps more I wanted to say to you about the book," Noel
remarked disconsolately. "I shan't have any one to exchange ideas with
now. They're all so old--and besides, I don't think English people as a
rule care much about psychology and that sort of thing. They're so keen
on games. So am I, in a way, but I must say it seems to me that the
study of human nature is a good deal more worth one's while."

"People are so interesting," said Alex. She was perfectly aware of the
futility of her remark as she made it, but in some undercurrent of her
consciousness there floated the conviction that one need not put forth
any great powers of originality in order to obtain response from Noel
Cardew.

"I can be perfectly _natural_ with him--we think alike," She defended
herself against her own unformulated accusation with inexplicable anger.

"I think they're frightfully interesting," said Noel with conviction.
"Of course, men are far more interesting than women, if you don't mind
my saying so, simply from the psychological point of view. I hope you
don't think I'm being rude?"

"Oh, _no_."

"You see, women, as a general rule, are rather shallow, though, of
course, there are a great many exceptions. But you know what I mean--as
a rule they're rather shallow. That's what I feel about women, they're
shallow."

"Perhaps you're right," said Alex, rather discouraged. She would not
admit to herself that his sweeping assertion awoke no echo whatever
within her.

To her immaturity, the essence of sympathy lay in complete agreement,
and abstract questions meant nothing to her when weighed in the balance
against her desire to establish, to her own satisfaction at least, the
existence of such sympathy between herself and Noel Cardew.

"I've got another mad plan," said Noel slowly. "You'll think I'm always
getting insane ideas, and this one rather depends on you."

"Oh, what?"

"I hope you won't mind my suggesting such a thing--" He paused so long
that Alex' imagination had time for a hundred foolish, ecstatic
promptings, such as her reason knew could not be forthcoming, but for
which her whole undisciplined sense of romance was crying.

"Well, look here: what should you think of collaborating with me over
the book? I'm sure you could write if you tried, and anyway, you could
probably give me sidelights on the feminine part of it. It would be most
awfully helpful to me if you would."

"Oh," said Alex uncertainly. She was invaded by unreasoning
disappointment. "But how could we do it?"

"Oh, well, notes, you know--just keep notes of anything that struck us
particularly, and then put it in together later. We should have to do a
good deal of it by correspondence, of course.... I say, are you a
conventional person?"

"Not in the least," said Alex hastily.

"I'm glad of that. I'm afraid I'm rather desperately unconventional
myself. Of course, in a way it might be rather unconventional, you and
me corresponding--but would that matter?"

"Not to me," said Alex resolutely.

"That's splendid. We could do a lot that way, and then I hope, of
course, that you'll let me come and see you in London."

"Of course," Alex cried eagerly. "I don't know the exact date when we
shall be back, but I could let you know. Have you got the address?"

"Clevedon Square--"

She hastily supplied the number of the house.

"Oh, that's all right. I'm sure to forget it," said Noel easily; "but I
shall find you in the books, I suppose."

"Yes," said Alex, feeling suddenly damped.

She herself would have been in no danger of forgetting the number of a
house wherein dwelt any one whom she wished to see, but with disastrous
and quite unconscious humility, she told herself that it was, of course,
not to be expected that any one else should go to lengths equal to her
own. In her one-sided experience, Alex had always found herself to be
unique.

That Noel Cardew was not in despair at the idea of her departure was
evident. But he repeated several times that he wished she were not going
so soon, and even asked whether she would stay on if invited to do so.

"I'm sure they'd all love you to," he assured her. "Then Lady Isabel
could pay the other visits and call for you on her way back."

"I'm sure I shouldn't be allowed to stay on by myself," said Alex
dolefully.

"There you are! Conventionality again. _My_ daughters," said Noel
instructively, "if I ever have any, shall be brought up quite
differently. I've made up my mind to that. I daresay you'll laugh at all
these theories of mine, but I've always been keen on ideas, if you
remember."

But for once Noel did not receive the habitual ready disclaimer called
for by his speech.

His easy allusion to his hypothetical daughters had reduced Alex to
utter silence.

Afterwards, alone in the darkness of her own room, she wondered why such
a startling sense of protest had revolted within her at his words, but
her mind shied away instinctively from the question, and she found
herself unable to pursue it.

The next morning, in the unromantic atmosphere induced by an early
breakfast, and Sir Francis' anxiety to make sure of catching the
connection, politely concealed, but quite evident to the perceptions of
his wife and daughter, Noel Cardew and Alex exchanged their brief and
entirely public farewell.

"I'll write about the book," was his cheerful parting assurance.

"Don't forget," said Alex.

Lady Isabel was rather humorous on the subject of _fin de siècle_
emancipation, amongst the house party in the midst of which she and her
daughter found themselves that evening.

"What are boys and girls coming to? I hear young men gaily promisin' to
write to Alex on all sorts of subjects, and making private assignations
with her," she declared amusedly. "Aren't you and that nice-looking
Cardew boy writin' a book in collaboration, or something, darling?"

The slight jest was made popular amongst her seniors, and Alex was
kindly rallied about her modern freedom and assumption of privileges
undreamed of by the older gene

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