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The Celebrity at Home

by Violet Hunt · English · Gutenberg #41556 · 451,980 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Celebrity at Home

Author: Violet Hunt


        
Release date: December 4, 2012 [eBook #41556]
                Most recently updated: November 27, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CELEBRITY AT HOME ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Google Print project.)









The Celebrity at Home




The Celebrity at Home

BY VIOLET HUNT

AUTHOR OF 'A HARD WOMAN'

_FOURTH EDITION_

LONDON

CHAPMAN AND HALL, LD.

1904




Tempe, a valley in Thessaly, between Mount Olympus at the north, and
Ossa at the south, through which the river Peneus flows into the
Ægean.--_Lemprière._




THE CELEBRITY AT HOME




CHAPTER I


They say that a child's childhood is the happiest time of its life!

Mine isn't.

For it is nice to do as you like even if it isn't good for you. It is
nice to overeat yourself even though it does make you ill afterwards. It
is a positive pleasure to go out and do something that catches you a
cold, if you want to, and to leave off your winter clothes a month too
soon. Children hate feeling "stuffy"--no grown-up person understands
that feeling that makes you wriggle and twist till you get sent to bed.
It is nice to go to bed when you are sleepy, and no sooner, not to be
despatched any time that grown-up people are tired of you and take the
quickest way to get rid of a nuisance. Taken all round, the very nicest
thing in the world is your own way and plenty of it, and you never get
that properly, it seems to me, until you are too old to enjoy it, or too
cross to admit that you do!

I suspect that the word "rice-pudding" will be written on my heart, as
Calais was on Bloody Mary's, when I am dead.

I have got that blue shade about the eyes that they say early-dying
children have, and I may die young. So I am going to write down
everything, just as it happens, in my life, because when I grow up, I
mean to be an author, like my father before me, and teach in song, or in
prose, what I have learned in suffering. Doing this will get me
insensibly into the habit of composition. George--my father--we always
call him by his Christian name by request--offered to look it over for
me, but I do not think that I shall avail myself of his kindness. I want
to be quite honest, and set down everything, in malice, as grown-up
people do, and then your book is sure to be amusing. I shall say the
worst--I mean the truth--about everybody, including myself. That is what
makes a book saleable. People don't like to be put off with short
commons in scandal, and chuck the book into the fire at once as I have
seen George do, when the writer is too discreet. My book will not be
discreet, but crisp, and gossippy. Even Ariadne must not read it,
however much of my hair and its leaves she pulls out, for she will claw
me in her rage, of course. Grammar and spelling will not be made a
specialty of, because what you gain in propriety you lose in originality
and _verve_. I do adore _verve_!

George's own style is said to be the perfection of nervousness and
vervousness. He is a genius, he admits it. I am proud, but not glad, for
it cuts both ways, and it is hardly likely that there will be two
following after each other so soon in the same family. Though one never
knows? Mozart's father was a musical man. George says that to be
daughter to such a person is a liberal education; it seems about all the
education I am likely to get! George teaches me Greek and Latin, when he
has time. He won't touch Ariadne, for she isn't worth it. He says I am
apt. Dear me, one may as well make lessons a pleasure, instead of a
scene! Ariadne cried the first time at Perspective, when George, after a
long explanation that puzzled her, asked her in that particular, sniffy,
dried-up tone teachers put on,--"Did she see?" And when he asked me, I
didn't see either, but I said I did, to prevent unpleasantness.

I do not know why I am called Tempe. Short for temper, the new cook
says, but when I asked George, he laughed, and bid me and the cook
beware of obvious derivations. It appears that there is a pretty place
somewhere in Greece called the Vale of Tempe, and that I am named after
that, surely a mistake. My father calls me a devil--plain devil when he
is cross, little devil when he is pleased. I take it as a compliment,
for look at my sister Ariadne, she is as good as gold, and what does she
get by it? She does not contradict or ask questions or bother anybody,
but reads poetry and does her hair different ways all day long. She
never says a sharp word--can't! George says she is bound to get left,
like the first Ariadne was. She is long and pale and thin, and white
like a snowdrop, except for her reddish hair. The pert hepatica is my
favourite flower. It comes straight out of the ground, like me, without
any fuss or preparation in the way of leaves and trimmings.

I know that I am not ugly. I know it by the art of deduction. We none of
us are, or we should not have been allowed to survive. George would
never have condescended to own ugly children. We should have been
exposed when we were babies on Primrose Hill, which is, I suppose, the
tantamount of Mount Täygetus, as the ancient Greeks did their ugly
babies. We aren't allowed to read Lemprière. I do. What brutes those
Greeks were, and did not even know one colour from the other, so George
says!

I am right in saying we are all tolerable. The annoying thing is that
the new cook, who knows what she is talking about, says that children
"go in and out so," and even Aunt Gerty says that "fancy children never
last," and after all this, I feel that the pretty ones can never count
on keeping up to their own standard.

I cannot tell you if our looks come from our father, or our mother?
George is small, with a very brown skin. He says he descends "from the
little dark, persistent races" that come down from the mountains and
take the other savages' sheep and cows. He has good eyes. They dance and
flash. His hair is black, brushed back from his forehead like a
Frenchman, and very nice white teeth. He has a mouth like a Jesuit, I
have heard Aunt Gerty say. He never sits very still. He is about
thirty-seven, but he does not like us chattering about his age.

Mother looks awfully young for hers--thirty-six; and she would look
prettier if she didn't burn her eyes out over the fire making dishes for
George, and prick her fingers darning his socks till he doesn't find out
they are darned, or else he wouldn't wear them again, and spoil her
figure stooping, sewing and ironing. George won't have a sewing machine
in the house. Her head is a very good shape, and she does her hair plain
over the top to show it. George made her. Sometimes when he isn't there,
she does it as she used before she was married, all waved and floating,
more like Aunt Gerty, who is an actress, and dresses her head sunning
over with curls like Maud. George has never caught Mother like that, or
he would be very angry. He considers that she has the bump of
domesticity highly developed (though even when her hair is done plain I
never can see it?), and that is why she enjoys being wife, mother, and
upper housemaid all in one.

We only keep two out here at Isleworth, though my brother Ben is very
useful as handy boy about the place, blacking our boots and browning
George's, and cleaning the windows and stopping them from rattling at
nights--a thing that George can't stand when he is here. When he isn't
we just let them rave, and it is a perfect concert, for this is a very
old Georgian house. Mother makes everything, sheets, window-curtains,
and our frocks and her own. She makes them all by the same pattern,
quite straight like sacks. George likes to see us dressed simply, and of
course it saves dressmakers' bills, or board of women working in the
house, who simply eat you out of it in no time. We did have one once to
try, and when she wasn't lapping up cocoa to keep the cold out, she was
sucking her thimble to fill up the vacuum. We are dressed strictly
utilitarian, and wear our hair short like Ben, and when it gets long
mother puts a pudding basin on our heads and snips away all that shows.
At last Ariadne cried herself into leave to let hers grow.

The new cook says that if we weren't dressed so queer, Ariadne and me,
we should make some nice friends, but that is just what George doesn't
want. He likes us to be self-contained, and says that there is no one
about here that he would care to have us associate with. Our doorstep
will never wear down with people coming in, for except Aunt Gerty, and
Mr. Aix, the oldest friend of the family, not a soul ever crosses the
threshold!

I am forgetting the house-agent's little girl, round the corner into
Corinth Road. She comes here to tea with us sometimes. She is exactly
between Ariadne and me in age, so we share her as a friend equally. We
got to know her through our cat Robert the Devil choosing to go and stay
in Corinth Road once. At the end of a week her people had the bright
thought of looking at the name and address on his collar, and sent him
back by Jessie, who then made friends with us. George said, when he was
told of it, that the Hitchings are so much lower in the social scale
than we are, that it perhaps does not matter our seeing a little of each
other. She is better dressed than us, in spite of her low social scale.
She has got a real osprey in her hat, and a mink stole to wear to
church, that is so long it keeps getting its ends in the mud. She
doesn't like our George, though we like hers. George came out of his
study once and passed through the dining-room, where Jessie was having
tea with us.

"Isn't he a _cure_?" said she, with her mouth full of his
bread-and-butter.

We told her that our George was no more of a cure than hers, which shut
her up; and was quite safe, as neither Ariadne nor I know what a "cure"
is. She isn't really a bad sort of girl. We teach her poetry, and
mythology, and she teaches us dancing and religion. She has a governess
all to herself every morning, and goes to church regularly. She once
said that her mamma called us poor, neglected children, and pitied us.
We hit her for her mother, and there was an end of that. We love each
other dearly now, and have promised to be bridesmaids to each other, and
godmothers to each other's children. I am going to have ten.

Ariadne went to her birthday party at Christmas, and did a very silly
thing, that Mother advised her not to tell George about. Every one at
home agreed that poor Ariadne had been dreadfully rude, but I can't see
it? I adore sincerity. When Mr. Hitchings asked her what she would like
out of the bran-pie when it was opened, same as they asked all the
other children, Ariadne only said quite modestly, "A new papa, please!"

Their faces frightened her so, that she tried to improve it away, and
explain she meant that she should like an every-day papa, like Mr.
Hitchings, not only a Sunday one, like George. I know of course what she
meant, a papa that one sees only from Saturdays to Mondays, and not
always then, is only half a papa.

Ariadne's real name is Ariadne Florentina, after one of George's
friends' books. She has nice hair. It is reddish and yet soft, but it
won't curl by itself, which is a great grief and sorrow to her. But at
any rate, her eyelashes are awfully long and dark, and she likes to put
the bed-clothes right over her head and listen to her eyelashes
scrabbling about on the sheet quite loud. She has big eyes like nursery
saucers. The new cook calls them loving eyes. On the whole, Ariadne is
pretty, she would think she was even if she wasn't, so it is a good
thing she is. She considers herself wasted, for she is over eighteen
now, and she has never been to a party or worn a low neck in her life.
We have neither of us ever seen a low neck, but we know what it is from
books, and from them also we learn that eighteen is the age when it
takes less stuff to cover you. The new cook says that all her young
ladies at her last place came out when they were only seventeen. What is
outness? I asked George once, and he said it was a device of the
Philistines. I then told him that the new cook said that Ariadne would
never be married and off his hands unless he gave her her chance like
other young ladies, and he said something about a girl called Beatrice
who was out and married and dead before she was nine. Her surname was
Porter, if I recollect. The new cook said "Hout!" and that Beatrice
Porter was all her eye and just an excuse for selfishness!

Anyhow it is Ariadne's affair, and she doesn't seem to care much, except
when the new cook fills her head with ideas of revolt. She walks about
the green garden reading novels, and waiting for the Prince, for she has
a nice nature. I myself should just turn down the collar of my dress,
put on a wreath and go out and find a Prince, or know the reason why!

We keep no gardener, only Ben. Ben is short for Benvenuto Cellini,
another of George's friends. He is thirteen, old enough to go to school,
only George hasn't yet been able to make up his mind where to send him.
It is a good thing Ben has plenty of work to do, for he is very cross,
and talks sometimes of running away to sea, only that he has the North
border to dig, or Cat Corner to clear.

That is the corner George calls The Pleasaunce--it is we who call it Cat
Corner. Not only dead cats come there, but brickbats and tin kettles
with just one little hole in them, and brown-paper parcels that we open
with a poker. I hope there will be a dead baby in one some day, to
reward us. The trees are so dirty that we don't like to touch them, and
the birds that scurry about in the bushes would be yellow, like
canaries, Sarah says, only for the dirt of London. I hardly believe it,
I should like to catch one and wash it. In the opposite corner George
has built a grotto, and we have to keep it dusted, and he sits there and
writes and smokes. The next garden is the garden of a mad-house. The
doctor keeps a donkey and a pony. Once a table-knife came flying over
the wall to us. George's nerves were so thoroughly upset that he could
not bear anything but Ouida and Miss Braddon read aloud to him all the
rest of the day. Mother happens to like those authors and another
Italian lady's books that we are forbidden to mention in this house. She
never reads George's own works; she says she has promised to be a good
wife to him, but that that wasn't in the bond. She knows them too well,
having heard them all in the rough. Behind the scenes in a novel is as
dull as behind the scenes in a theatre, you never know what the play is
about. Aunt Gerty says that all George's things are rank, and quite
undramatic, and George says he is glad to hear it, for he doesn't like
Aunt Gerty.

The other persons in the house are George's cats. There are three. The
grey cat, the only one who has kittens, I call Lady Castlewood, out of
_Esmond_ by Thackeray. George sometimes says "that little cat of a Lady
Castlewood"--it occurred to me that "that little Lady Castlewood of a
cat" just suits ours, for she is a jealous beast, a cantankerous beast,
and goes Nap with her claws all over your face in no time! She hates her
children once they are grown up, and is merely on bowing terms with
them, or you might call it licking terms--for she doesn't mind giving
them a wash and a brush-up whenever they come her way. Robert the Devil
was the one that stayed away a week. He is very big and mild; he can lie
down and wrap himself in his fur till he looks all over alike, and you
couldn't find any particular part of him, no more than if he were a kind
of soft hedgehog. George talks to them and tells them things about
himself.

"I am sure they are welcome to his confidence!" that is what the new
cook said. She likes them better than she likes him. She is quite kind
to cats, though she gives them a hoist with her foot sometimes, when
they get in her way. They are valuable, you see. I wish I was, for then
people care what you eat and give you medecines, which I love. It isn't
often you are disappointed in a new bottle of medecine, except when
there's gentian in it.




CHAPTER II


You don't get a very good class of servant down this way, my mother
says, but then she is so particular. She is the kind of mistress who
knows how to do everything better herself, and that kind never gets good
servants; it seems to paralyze the poor girls, and make them limp and
without an idea in their heads, or what they choose to call their heads,
which I strongly suspect is their stomachs. You can punish or reward a
servant best through its stomach, and don't give them beer, or
beer-money either! Beer makes them cross or cheeky, depending, I
suppose, on the make of the beer. Mother never gives it. They buy it, I
know, but I never tell. It would be as much as my place (in the kitchen)
is worth, and I value my right of free entry.

Mother is terribly down on dust too. She has a book about germ culture,
and sees germs in everything. It doesn't make her any happier. But as
for dusting, so far as I can see, what they call dusting is only a plan
for raising the dirt and taking it to some other place. It gets into our
mouths in the end. I do pity Matter that is always getting into the
wrong place, chivied here and there, with no resting-place for the sole
of the foot. For whenever Mother sees dust anywhere, or suspects it, she
makes a cross with her finger in it, and the servants are supposed to
see the cross and feel ashamed. Though I don't believe any servant was
ever ashamed in her life. 'Tisn't in their natures. They just grin and
bear with it--with the dust, and the scolding too.

"It's 'er little way," I heard Sarah say once, not a bit unkindly or
disagreeably, though, after Mother had come down on her about something.
But once I caught the very same girl shaking her fist at George's back
and calling him "an old beast!"

"Sarah," I said, "whom are you addressing?"

"The doctor's donkey, miss," she said, as quick as lightning, pointing
to it grazing in the doctor's garden next door. People were always
overloading that donkey, and shaking their fists at it.

I must get to the new cook. The last one gave Mother notice, and I never
could find out why, because she was fond of Mother and could stand the
cats.

"Oh, I like _you_, ma'am," I heard her say, just as if she disliked some
one else. Mother took no notice, but left the kitchen, and Cook took a
currant off her elbow and pulled down her sleeves, and mumbled to Sarah,
"It isn't right, and I for one ain't going to help countenance it.
A-visiting his family now and then between jobs, just like a burglar--or
some-think worse!"

What is worse than a burglar? I was passing the scullery window, and
Sarah had just thrown a lot of boiling water into a basin in front of
them both, so that it made a mist and she didn't see me. I knew, though,
she was saying something rude, for when Sarah told her she "shouldn't
reely," she muttered something more about a "neglected angel!" I did
think at first she meant me, or perhaps the doctor's donkey as usual,
but then the words didn't fit either of us? I asked her straight if she
did mean the donkey, just for fun, and she said the poor beast was
minding his own business and I had better do the same.

She left us next month, crying worse than I ever did in my life for
really serious things. Mother patted her on the back as she went out at
the back door, and she kept saying, "A poor girl's only got her
character, mum, and she is bound to think of it--" and Mother said,
"Yes, yes, you did quite right!" and seemed just to want her out of the
house and a little peace and quiet and will of her own. The very moment
Sarah's back was turned, she set to work and turned everything into the
middle of the room and left it there while she and Cook swept round into
every corner. Ariadne and I rather enjoyed clearing our bed of the
towel-horse before we could lie down in it, and having dinner off the
corner of the kitchen-table because the dining-room one was lying on its
back like a horse kicking.

Of course George wasn't allowed home all this time. Mother wrote to him
where he was staying at the Duke of Frocester's for the shooting
(George shooting! My eye!--and the keeper's legs!) and said he had
better not come home till we were straight again. I was in no hurry to
be straight again. It was like Heaven. When I was a child I always built
my brick houses crooked, and Ariadne called me Queen Unstraight, and
that made me cry. But she liked this too. We made all the beds, and
didn't bother to tuck them in. It isn't necessary to do so when we turn
head over heels in the bed-clothes onto the floor every night three
times to make us dizzy and sleepy. We washed up everything with a nice
lather of three things mixed that occurred to me, Hudson's, Monkey Soap,
and Bath Eucryl. In the end there wasn't a speck of dirt, or pattern
either, left on the plates. It looked much cleaner. Why should one eat
one's meat off a fat Chinese dragon or have bees all round the edge of
one's soup plate ready to fall in? It is a dirty idea. We basted the
joints turn and turn about, and our own pinafores. They couldn't scold
us for not keeping clean, any more than they can pigs when they put them
in a sty. We asked no questions or bothered Mother at all, but we
black-leaded the steps and bath-bricked the grates, and washed down the
walls with soda-water. The wallpaper peeled off here and there, but that
shows it was shabby and ready for death.

Mother said afterwards that she couldn't see any improvement anywhere,
but anyhow we enjoyed ourselves and that is everything. We spent money
on it, for we bought _décalcomanie_ pictures, and did bouquets all over
the mantelpieces, but Mother insisted we should peel all these off again
before George came back. He couldn't come back till we got that cook,
for George is most absurdly particular about our servants. Sarah has got
used to him, and there seems to be no idea of her going. She has to
valet him, for he is always beautifully dressed. She has to take the
greatest care of her own appearance, and get her nails manicured and her
hair waved when he is at home. That is about all for her. But the cook
he calls the keeper of his conscience, that is to say, his digestion.
His digestion is as jumpy as he is. Sometimes it wants everything quite
plain, and he will eat nothing but our rice-puddings and cold shapes of
tapioca, etc.; at another time he calls it "apparition," and says the
very name of it makes him shiver. I am used to cold shapes, alas! He
sometimes brings things down from town himself--caviare and "patty de
foy." Children are not supposed to like that sort of thing, but we do,
and George gives them us; he is not mean in trifles. Sometimes it is
pheasants and partridges, that he has shot himself on ducal acres. They
are shot very badly, not tidily, with the shot all in one place as it
ought to be: Mr. Aix explained this to me. They are not to be cooked
till they are ready, and when they are they are a little too ready for
Mother and us, so Papa and Mr. Aix have to eat it all. George belongs to
the sect of the Epicureans; I heard him tell the cook so, also that he
is the reincarnation of a gentleman called Villon.

For a month Mother "sat in" for cooks, and all sorts of fat and lean
women came and went. Our establishment didn't seem attractive. George
bespoke a fat one, by letter, but Mother inclined to lean. These women
sat on the best chairs and prodded the pattern of the carpets with their
dusty umbrellas, and asked tons of questions,--far more than she asked
them, it seemed to me, and this one that we have at last got was the
coolest of all, but in rather a nice way. She was tall and thin, with a
long nose with a dip in it just before the tip, which was particularly
broad. Ariadne said afterwards that a nose like that seemed to need a
bustle. She said she was a north-country woman, and that is about all
she did tell us about herself, except her name, Elizabeth Cawthorne.

She sat and asked questions. When she came to the usual "And if you
please, ma'am, how many is there in family?" Mother answered, "Myself
and my son and my two daughters,--and my sister--she is
professional--and is here for long visits--that is all."

"Then I take it you are a widow, ma'am?"

Mother, getting very red, explained that George is very little at home,
so that in one way he didn't count, but in another way he did, for he is
very particular and has to be cooked for specially. Being an author, he
has got a very delicate appetite.

"A proud stomach, I understand ye. Well, I shall hope to give him
satisfaction." She said that as if she would have liked to add, "or I'll
know the reason why."

She seemed quite to have settled in her own mind that she was going to
take our place. She "blessed Mother's bonny face" before that interview
was over, and passed me over entirely.

She came in in a week, and the first time she saw George she was "doing
her hall." Ariadne and I were there as George's hansom drove up and he
got out and began a shindy with the cabman.

"Honeys, this will be your father, I'm thinking!" she said.

Perhaps she expected us to rush into his arms, but we didn't; we knew
better. We just said "Hallo!" and waited till he was disengaged with the
cabman, who wanted too much, as we are beyond the radius. George didn't
give it to him, but a good talking to instead. The new cook stopped
sweeping--servants always stop their work when there is something going
on that doesn't concern them, and looked quite pleased with George.

"He can explain himself, and no mistake!" she said to Sarah afterwards,
and she cooked a splendid dinner that night, for, says she to Sarah,
"seemed to her he was the kind of master who'd let a woman know if she
didn't suit him."

She doesn't "make much account of childer," in fact I think she hates
them, for when Ariadne showed her the young shoots in a pot of snowdrops
she was bringing up, and said, "See, cook, they have had babies in the
night!" Elizabeth, meaning to be civil, said, "Dis_gust_ing things,
miss!"

Still, she isn't really unkind to children, and admits that they have a
right to exist. She will boil me my glue-pot and make me paste, and lets
Ariadne heat her curling-tongs between the bars of the kitchen fire. She
doesn't "matter" cats, but she gives them their meals regular and
doesn't hold with them loafing in the kitchen, and getting tit-bits
stolen or bestowed. And they know she is just, though not generous, and
never forgets their supper. They were all hid, as it happened, when she
came about the place, but she said she knew she had got into a cat house
as soon as she found herself eating fluff with her tea, and she thinks
she ought to have been told. George laughs at her and calls her "stern
daughter of the north," but he wasn't a bit cross when she told him that
Ben ought to be sent to school. He even agreed, but Ben isn't sent. Ben
is still eating his heart out, and he keeps telling Elizabeth Cawthorne
so. He is much in the kitchen. She is very sensible. She just stuffs a
jam tart into his mouth, and says, "Tak' that atween whiles then, my
bonny bairn, to distract ye." Ben takes it like a lamb, and it does
distract him, or at any rate it distends him; he has got fat since she
came.

She orders Mother about as if she were a child. Mother _does_ look very
young, as I have said. She ought, and so ought Aunt Gerty, considering
the trouble they both take to keep the cloven hoof of age off their
faces. They go to bed with poultices of oatmeal on them, and Aunt Gerty
once tried the raw-beef plaster. But what she does in the night she
undoes in the day, with the grease paint and sticky messes that are part
of her profession.

She lives with us except when she is on tour, and is only here when she
is "resting" in the _Era_, and all that time she is dreadfully cross,
because she would rather be doing than resting, for "resting" is only a
polite way of saying no one has wanted to engage her, and that she is
"out of a shop," which all actresses hate.




CHAPTER III


I have forced George's hand, so I am told, and neither he nor mother
take any notice of me.

But Aunt Gerty hugged me all over when she heard what I had done, and
scolded Mother for not being nice to me.

"I don't see why you need put that poor child in Coventry?" she said.
"You had more need to be grateful to her than not. How much longer was
it going to go on, I want to know? Hiding away his lawful wife like an
old Bluebeard, and me Sister Anne boiling over and wanting to call it
all from the house-tops!"

"Well, Gerty, you seem to have got it a bit mixed!" said Mother. "But,
talking of Bluebeard, I always envied the first Mrs. B. the lots of
cupboard room she must have had! I wonder if she was a hoarder, like me,
who never have the heart to throw anything away? If I do happen to see
the plans for the new house, I will speak up for lots of cupboards, and
that is all I care about."

"See the plans! Why, of course you will! Isn't it your right? You must
make a point of seeing them and putting your word in. Look after your
own comfort in this world or you will jolly well find yourself out in
the cold, and 'specially with a husband like you've got!"

"Bother moving!" said Mother, in her dreary way that comes when she has
been overdoing it, as she has lately. "It is an odious wrench; just like
having all one's teeth out at once."

"Hadn't need! Yours are just beautiful. One of your points, Lucy, and
don't you forget it."

"The life here suited me well enough; I had got used to it, I suppose."

"You can get used to something bad, can't you, but that's no reason you
are not to welcome a change? Oh, you'll like the new life that's to be
spent up-stairs in the daylight, above-board like, instead of this kind
of 'behind the scenes' you have been doing for eighteen years. And a
pretty woman still, for so you are. Cheer up! You are going to get new
scenery, new dresses, new backcloth----"

"You see everything through the stage, Gerty. I must say it irritates
one sometimes, especially now, when----"

"I know what you mean. No offence, my dear old sis. And you can depend
on me not to be bringing the smell of the footlights, as they call
it--it's the only truly pleasant smell there is, to my idea!--into your
fine new house. Pity but _He_ can't get a little whiff of it into his
comedies, and some manager would see his way to putting them on,
perhaps? No, beloved, me and George don't cotton to each other, nor
never shall. He isn't my sort. I like a man that is a man, not a
society baa-lamb! Baa! I've no patience with such----"

"Sh', Gerty. You seem to forget his child sitting messing away with her
paints in a corner so quietly there!"

That was me. Aunt Gerty stopped a minute, and then they went on just the
same.

"We have never minded the child yet" (which was true), "and I don't see
why we should begin now. Tempe is getting quite a woman and able to hold
her tongue when needful. And she knows her way about her precious father
well enough. What you've to think of now, Lucy, is getting your hands
white, and the marks of sewing and cooking off. Lemons and pumice!
Cream's good, too. You have been George Taylor's upper servant too
long--Gracious, who's that at the front-door?"

Aunt Gerty nearly knocked me over in her rush to the window. We were all
three sitting in the front bedroom, which is George's, when he is at
home, and Mother had been washing my hair. It was a dreadfully hot
day--a dog-day, only we haven't any dogs, but the kittens were
tastefully arranged in the spare wash-basin all round the jug for
coolness. They had put themselves there. We humans had got very little
clothes on, partly for heat and also having got out of the habit of
dressing in the afternoons, for no callers ever came to The Magnolias.
But there were some now. There was a big, two-horsed thing at the door
such as I have often seen driving out to Hampton Court, but never, never
had I seen one stop at our gate before. It was most exciting. I hoped
Jessie Hitchings and her mother saw.

There were two ladies inside, one of them old and frumpy, the other was
Lady Scilly, whom I knew, though Mother didn't. I haven't got to her yet
in my story. A footman was taking their orders, and Sarah was standing
at the door holding on to her cap that she'd forgotten to put a pin in.
Lucky she had a cap on at all! Mother doesn't like her to leave her caps
off to go to the door, even when George isn't here, out of principle,
and for once it told.

"For goodness sake get your head in, Gerty, you have got the shade a bit
too strong to-day," cried Mother, pulling my aunt in by her petticoats,
and nearly upsetting the mirror on the dressing-table. Aunt Gerty came
in with a cross grunt, and we all sat well inside till we heard the
carriage drive away and Sarah mounting the stairs all of a hop, skip and
a jump.

"Please m'm!" she cried almost before she got into the room, "there's a
carriage-and-pair just called----"

"Anything in it?" Mother said.

"Two ladies, m'm, and here's their cards."

I took one and Aunt Gerty the other.

"Dowager Countess of Fylingdales!" Aunt Gerty read, as if she was Lady
Macbeth saying, "Out, dammed spot!"

The card I held was for Lady Scilly, and there was one for Lord Scilly,
but it had got under the drawers.

"I said you wasn't dressed, ma'am," Sarah said, looking at Mother's
apron all over egg, and her rolled-up sleeves.

"No more I am," said Mother, laughing. "Don't look so disappointed,
Gerty. I couldn't have seen them."

"But you shouldn't have said your mistress wasn't dressed, Sarah," said
Aunt Gerty. "It isn't done like that in good houses. You should have
said, 'My mistress is gone out in _the_ carriage.'"

"But that would have been a lie!" argued Sarah, "and I'm sure I don't
want to go to hell even for a carriage-and-pair."

"Oh, where have you been before, Sarah," Aunt Gerty sighed, "not to know
that a society lie can't let any one in for hell fire? Well, it is too
late now; they have gone. And it was rather a shabby turnout for
aristocratic swells like that, after all."

"They didn't really want to see me," said Mother. "They only called on
me to please George. He sent them probably. I have heard him speak of
Lady Fylingdales. He stays there. She is one of his oldest friends. She
is lame and nearly blind. Lady Scilly I shall never like from what I
have heard of her. Tempe, run in the garden in the sun and dry your
hair. Off you go!"

"And get a sunstroke," thought I. "Just because she wants to talk to
Aunt Gerty about the grand callers!"

So I stayed, and they have got so in the habit of not minding me that
they went on as if I really had been out broiling in the sun.

Mother began to talk very fast about the new house, and getting
visiting-cards printed, and taking her place in Society. These ladies
coming had given her thoughts a fresh jog. She nearly cried over the
bother of it all, and what George would now go expecting of her, and she
with no education and no ambition to be a smart woman, as Aunt Gerty was
continually egging her on to be, saying it was quite easy if you only
had a nice slight figure, like she has.

"Bead chains and pince-nezs won't do it as you seem to think," Mother
said. "And even if I get to be smart, I shall never get to be happy!"

"Happy!" screamed my Aunt Gertrude. "Who talked of being happy? You
don't go expecting to be happy, unless it makes you happy, as it ought,
to put your foot down on those stuck-up cats who have been leading your
husband astray all these years, and giving them a good what-for. It
would me, that's all I can say. Happiness indeed! It is something higher
than mere happiness. What you have got to do, my dear Lucy, is just to
take your call and go on--not before you've had a trip to Paris for your
clothes, though--and show them all what a pretty woman George Taylor's
despised wife is. There's an object to live for! That's your ticket, and
you've got it. He married you for your looks, now, didn't he?"

"Nothing else," said Mother sadly.

"Nonsense! Weren't you--aren't you as good as he? You are the daughter
of a respectable Irish clergyman. Whose daughter--I mean son--is he? A
French tailor's, I expect. You married him eighteen years ago in Putney
Parish Church by special licence, when he was nothing and nobody cared
whom or what he married. Little flighty, undersized foreign-looking
creature! You have been a good wife to him, borne his children, nursed
him when he was ill, and kept a house going for him to come back to when
he was tired of the others, and if it's been done on the sly, it hasn't
been through any will of yours! And now that the matter has been taken
out of his hands, and a good thing too, and he's obliged to leave off
his dirty little tricks and own you, and send his grand friends to call
on you, and build a nice house to put you in, you want to back out and
hide yourself--lose your chance once for all and for ever! You are
good-looking, your children are sweet--you'll soon catch them all up,
and then you can be as haughty and stuck-up as the rest of them. If it
is _me_ you are thinking of, I shan't trouble you--I have my work and I
mean to stick to it!"

"I shall never disown you, Gerty."

"No, I dare say not, but I shan't put myself in the way of a snub. I've
got one thing that's been very useful to me in this life--that's tact. I
shan't make a nasty row or a talk, but you'll not see more of me than
you want to. I'm a lady--I'll never let anybody deny that--but I've
knocked about the world a bit, and it's a rough place, and that soft
dainty manner people admire so, rubs off pretty soon fighting one's own
battles. The aristocracy can afford to keep it on. Clothes does it,
largely. Where you're wearing chiffon, I'll be wearing linen, that's the
diff. Now I'm off--'on' first act and share a dresser with three other
cats, where there isn't room to swing one. Ta-ta! I'm not as vulgar as
you think!"

She put on her picture-hat carefully with sixteen pins in it, and went
away. Mother asked me why I hadn't been drying my hair in the garden all
this time? Because I wanted to hear what Aunt Gerty had to say, I
answered, and Mother accepted the explanation. But now I went and found
a cool place and meditated on my sins.

I am not what is called a strictly naughty child. I am too busy. Satan
never need bother about me or find mischief for me to do, for my hands
are never idle, and I can generally find it for myself.

On the eventful morning that decided our fate three weeks before this
incident, I was in the drawing-room, where we hardly ever sit, making
devils with George's name with the ink out of the best inkstand. I spilt
it. Why do these things happen? It is the fault of fatality.

There is nothing I hate more than the sickening smell of spilt ink, or
rather, the soapy rags they chose to rub it up with, so I went up to my
room quietly intending to get my hat and go out till it had blown over,
or rather soaked in. Sarah was there, tidying or something, and she said
immediately, "Now whatever have you been up to?" I told her that the
word "ever" was quite surplus in that sentence, and that George objected
to it strongly. Thus I got away from her, wishing I had a less
expressive face.

I found myself in the street without an object. I have got beyond the
age of runaway rings, thank goodness, but they did use to amuse me, till
one day an old gentleman got hold of me and went on about the length of
kitchen stairs generally, and the shortness of cooks' legs, and the
cruel risk of things boiling over. He changed my heart. So this day I
just walked along to a motor-car, that I saw at the end of the next
street but one, standing in front of the "Milliner's Arms," with nobody
in it. I expected the man was having a drink, for it was piping hot. I
got into the car and sat down, and just put my hand on the twirly-twirly
thing in front, considering if I should set the car going. It was the
very first time I had ever been in a motor in my life, and I simply
hadn't the heart to miss the chance.

A lady came out of the Public. I never saw anything so pretty, and her
dress was all billowy, like the little fluffy clouds we call Peter's
sheep in a blue sky, and the hem of it was covered with sawdust off the
public-house floor. Yet I can't say she looked at all tipsy.

"I wanted a pick-me-up so badly, I just had to go in and get it." She
said this in an apologizing sort of way, while I was just wondering how
I should explain my presence in her car. She settled that for me, by
saying with a little sweet smile, "Well, you pretty child, how do you
like my motor-car?"

"It is the first time I----"

"Oh, of course! Would you like to be in one while it is on the move?"

I confessed I should, and she jumped in beside me, saying, "Sit still,
then, child!" and moved the crissy-cross starfish thing in front, and we
were off.

Mercy, what a rate! Policemen seemed to hold up their hands in amazement
at us, and she looked pleased and flattered. We drove on and on, past
the Hounslow turning, through miles of nursery gardens and then miles of
slums, till at last the houses got smarter and bigger, and I guessed
this was the part of London where George lives, only I did not ask
questions. I hardly ever do. I did see a clock once, and I saw it was
nearly our lunch time. I realized that I had missed rice-pudding for
once, and was glad. She talked all the way along, and I listened. I find
that is what people like, for she kept telling me that I was a nice
child, and that she thought she should run away with me.

"You _are_ running away with me," I said.

"And you don't care a bit, you very imperturbable atom! I think I shall
take you home with me to luncheon. You amuse me."

She amused _me_. She was a darling--so gay, so light, as if she didn't
care about anything, and had never had a stomach-ache in her whole life.
If George's high-up friends are like this, I don't wonder he prefers
them to Aunt Gerty. Mother can be as amusing as anybody,--I am not
going to try to take Mother down--but even she can't pretend she is
happy as this woman seemed to be. She was like champagne,--the very dry
kind George opens a bottle of when he is down, and gives Mother and me a
whole glassful between us.

We were quite in a town now, and on a soft pavement made of wood, like
my bedroom floor. The streets, oddly enough, grew grander and narrower.
She told me about the houses as we went along.

"That is where my uncle, the Duke of Frocester, lives," she said, and
pointed to a kind of grey tomb, with a paved courtyard in a very tiny
street. I knew that name--the name of the man George stays and shoots
with--but of course I didn't say anything. Then we passed a funny little
house in a smaller street called after a chapel, and there was a
fanlight over the door, and a great extinguisher thing on the railings.

"You have no idea what a lovely place that is inside," she told me. "A
great friend of mine lives there, and pulled it about. He took out all
the inside of the house, and made false walls to the rooms. One of them
has just the naked bricks and mortar showing, but then the mortar is all
gilt. He always has quantities of flowers, great arum lilies shining in
the gloom, and oleanders in pots, and stunted Japanese trees. He gives
heavenly tea-parties and little suppers after the play. He writes plays,
but somehow they have never been acted that I know of? Bachelors always
do you so well. I declare, if I wasn't going to see him this very
afternoon at my club, I would go in and surprise him, now that I have
got you with me, you little elf! You have certainly got the widest open
eyes I ever saw. He is probably in there now, working at his little
table in the window, getting up the notes for his lecture, so we should
put him out abominably. I will take you to the lecture instead. And
remind me to lend you one of his books,--that is, if your mother allows
you to read novels."

I explained to her that I was a little off novels, as my father kept us
on them.

"Oh, does he? How interesting! I love authors! You must introduce him to
me some day. Bring him to one of my literary teas. I always make a point
of raising an author or so for the afternoon. It pleases my crowd so,
far better than music and recitations, and played-out amusements of that
kind; and then one doesn't have to pay them. They are only too glad to
come and get paid in kind looks that cost nothing. The queerer they are,
the more people believe in them. I used to have Socialists, but really
they were _too_ dirty! Some authors now are quite smart, and wear their
hair no longer than Lord Scilly, or so very little longer. Now, there is
Morrell Aix, the man who wrote _The Laundress_. I took him up, but he
had been obliged, he said, to live in the slums for two years to get up
his facts, and you could have grown mustard and cress on the creases of
his collar. And I do think, considering the advertisement he gave them,
the laundresses might have taken more trouble with the poor man's
shirts!"

I knew Mr. Aix, of course, and I have often seen Mother take the
clothes-brush to him, but I said nothing, for I like to show I can hold
my tongue. Knowledge is power, if it's ever so unimportant. We didn't go
far from the house with walls like stopped teeth, before she pulled up
at another rather smart little door in a street called Curzon.

"Here we are at my place, and there's Simmy Hermyre on the doorstep
waiting to be asked to lunch."

It was a nice clean house with green shutters and lovely lace curtains
at the windows, that Ariadne would have been glad of for a dress, all
gathered and tucked and made to fit the sash as if it had been a person.
The young man standing at the front door had a coat with a waist, and a
nice clean face, and a collar that wouldn't let him turn his head
quickly. He helped us out, and she laughed at him as if he was hers.

"Are you under the impression that I have asked you to lunch? Why, I
don't suppose there is any!"

Imagine her saying that when she had brought me all the way from
Isleworth to have it! I didn't, of course, say anything, and she made me
go in, and the young man followed us, quite calm, although she had said
there wasn't anything for him to eat.

"I would introduce you to this person" (I thought it so nice of her not
to stick on the offensive words little or young!) "only it strikes me I
don't know her name." She didn't ask it, but went on, "It's a most
original little creature, and amused me more in an hour than you have in
a year, my dear boy!"

Now, had I said anything particularly amusing? I hadn't tried, and I do
think you should leave off calling children "it" after the first six
months. Mothers hate it. Still, though I didn't think her quite polite,
I told her my name--Tempe Vero-Taylor--in a low voice so that she could
introduce me to her great friend, as we were going to lunch at the same
table. I thought there wouldn't be a children's table, as she didn't
speak of children, and I was glad, for children eat like pigs and have
no conversation.

Her eyebrows went up and her mouth went down, but she soon buttoned up
her lips again, though they stayed open at the corners, and didn't
introduce me to Mr. Hermyre at all. I didn't suppose I should ever meet
him again, so it didn't matter.

We went in and had lunch, and it was quite a grand lunch, hot, and as
much again cold on a side-table. But I was actually offered
rice-pudding! I wouldn't have believed it, in a house like this. I
refused rather curtly, but she ate it, and very little else. I generally
take water at home, but I did not see why I shouldn't taste champagne
when I had the chance, and I took a great deal, quite a full glass full,
and when I had taken it, I felt as if I could fight a lion. George often
says when he comes back from London that he has been fighting with wild
beasts at Ephesus. I wondered if I might not meet some this afternoon
at the lecture at the Go-ahead Club? Lady Scilly (that's her name) said
she must take me, and I knew I should be bored, but I couldn't very well
say no.

"You may come too, Simmy," she said to the young man; "it will be
exciting, I can promise you!"

"Not if I know it," he said. Then he tried to be kind and said, "What is
the lecture about?"

"The Uses of Fiction."

"None, that I can see, except to provide some poor devil with an
income."

"That's a man's view."

"It is," he said, "a man, and not a monkey's. You don't call your
literary crowd men, do you?"

I was just wondering what he did call them, when Lady Scilly shut him
up, and I thought she looked at me. Presently he went on--

"You're quite spoiling your set, you know, Paquerette. I used to enjoy
your receptions."

"I don't see why you should permit yourself to abuse my set because
you're a fifth cousin. That's the worst of being well connected, so many
people think they have the right to lecture one!"

"All the better for you, my dear! Do you suppose now, that if you were
not niece to a duke and cousin to a marquis, that Society would allow
you to fill your house with people like Morrell Aix and Mrs. Ptomaine
and Ve----"

Lady Scilly jumped up and said she must go and dress, and if he wouldn't
come to the lecture he must go, and pushed me out of the room in front
of her and on up-stairs.

"Good-bye!" she called to him over the bannisters. "Let yourself out,
and don't steal the spoons."

That was a funny thing to say to a friend, not to say a relation! We
went up into her bedroom, and her old nurse--I suppose it was her nurse,
for she wore no cap and bullied her like anything--came forward.

"Put me into another gown, Miller!" she said, flopping into a chair.
Miller did, putting the skirt over her head as if she had been a child,
and even pulling her stockings up for her. Then she had a try at tidying
me.

"Don't bother. The child's all right. She's so pretty she can wear
anything."

I think personal remarks rude even if she does think me pretty, but I
said nothing. She looked at herself very hard in the glass, and we went
down-stairs and got into the motor again. Lady Scilly sat with her hand
in mine, and a funny little spot of red on the top of the bone of her
cheek that I hadn't noticed there before. It was real.




CHAPTER IV


We went into a house and into a large empty room with whole streets of
coggley chairs and a kind of pulpit thing in the middle. A jug of water
and a tumbler stood on it. There was a governessy-looking person
present, presiding over this emptiness, whom Lady Scilly immediately
began to order about. She was the secretary of the club, and Lady Scilly
is a member of the committee.

"Where will you sit, Lady Scilly?" said this person, and she asked a
good many other questions, using Lady Scilly's name very often.

"I shall sit quite at the back this time," Lady Scilly answered. "Too
many friends immediately near him might put the lecturer out!" As she
said this she looked at me wickedly, but I could not think why.

We then went away and read the comic papers for a little until the place
had filled. In the reading-room we met a gentleman, who seemed to be a
great friend of Lady Scilly's. He spoke to me while she was discussing
some arrangement or other with the secretary, who had followed her.

"How do you like going about with a fairy?" he asked me.

"I'm not," I said. "She's a grown-up woman, old enough to know----"

"Worse!" he interrupted me. "She is what I call a fairy!"

"What is a fairy?" I asked, though he seemed to me very silly, and only
trying to make conversation.

"A fairy is a person who always does exactly as she likes--and as other
people sometimes don't like."

"I see," I said, as usual, although I did not see, as usual, "just as
grown-up people do."

"But she isn't pretty when she is old! I wonder if you will grow up a
fairy? No, I think not, you don't look as if you _could_ tell a lie."

"I beg your pardon," I said. He then remarked that Lady Scilly had sent
him to take me into the room where the lecture was to be given, and we
went. Of course I politely tried to let age go first, but he didn't like
that, and said "_Jeunesse oblige_," and "_Place aux dames_," and
"_Juniores ad priores_"--every language under the sun, winding up with
that silly old story about the polite Lord Stair, who was too polite to
hang back and keep the king waiting.

"Oh yes, I know that story," I said, just to prevent him going on
bothering. "It's in Ollendorff."

The lecture-room was quite full, and we--Lady Scilly and I--squeezed
ourselves in at the back in a kind of cosy corner there was, and we were
almost in the dark.

"Sit tight, child, whatever happens!" she kept saying, and held my hand
as if I should run away. When among a rain of claps the lecturer came in
I saw why, for it was George!

Lady Scilly grabbed my arm, and said, "Don't call out, child!"

As if I was going to! But now I saw why she had kept calling him the
lecturer instead of saying his name whenever she had spoken of him
before. Now I saw why she was so full of nods and winks and grins, and
had brought me to the lecture so particularly. Now I saw why the old
gentleman had called her a fairy--that meant a tease, and I wasn't going
to gratify her by seeming upset or anything. Not I! So I sat quite still
as she told me, and George began.

I borrowed a pencil of the Ollendorff man, and put down some notes to
remind me of what George said, for Ariadne. It took me some time to get
used to the funny little voice George put on to lecture with, quite
different to his Isleworth voice. Presently when I began to catch on a
little I found that the lecture was all about novels and the good of
them, as Lady Scilly had said. This is the sort of thing--

"_A novel_," said my father, "_is apt to hold a group of quite ordinary,
uninteresting characters, wallowing in their clammy, stale environment,
like fishes in an aquarium, held together by a thin thread of narrative,
and bounded by the four walls of the author's experience. His duty is to
enlarge that experience, for to novels we go, not so much for amusement
as for a criticism of Life. That portion of life which comes under the
reader's own observation is naturally so restricted, so vastly
disproportionate, to the whole great arcana_." (I do hope I got this
down right!) "_The novelist should be omniscient and omnipotent._" (Once
I got these two great words, all the rest seemed child's play.) "_A
great responsibility lies with the purveyors of this necessary panorama
of existence, the men who monopolize the furnishing and regulating of
the supply._" (Loud applause.) "_The right man, or peradventure, the
right woman_" (he bowed at Lady Scilly), "_knows, or ought to know, so
many sides, while the reader, alas, knows but one, and is so tired of
that one!_"

Everybody sighed and groaned a little to show how tired they were, and
George went on--

"_I see my audience is in touch with me. It works both ways._" (What
works both ways? I must have left something out.) "_A Duchess of my
acquaintance said some poignant, pregnant words--as indeed all her words
are pregnant and poignant_" (he bowed to an old corpulent lady in
another part of the room)--"_to me the other day. She said that her
novel of predilection was not a society novel. 'I know it all, don't I,
like the palm of my hand?' she objected. 'I know how to behave in a
drawing-room and how not to behave in a boudoir!' So she complained. The
substance of her complaint, as I understand it, is this;--what she wants
is worlds not realized! She wants to see the actress in her
drawing-room, the flower-girl in her garret, the laundress at her tub,
the burglar at his work_----"

Here George made a little bob at Mr. Aix in the audience, for there he
was, and there was another fit of clapping. Then he went on--

"_I mean to say that what we mostly seek in fiction is to be taken out
of our own lives, and put into somebody else's--to temporarily change
our moral environment. High life is deeply interested in what is going
on below stairs. Bill Sykes and 'Liza of Lambeth, if they have any time
for reading, want to know all about countesses and their attendant
sprites._" (Fancy calling Simon Hermyre that!) "_The Highest or the
Lowest, but no middle course, is the novelist's counsel of perfection.
There is no second class in the literary railway._

"_Yet there is a serious issue involved in this proposition. If, for
instance--only for instance, for I am very sure that most of us here
will have to rely on imagination, not fact, to support my
illustration--if our home is a suburban one, and our wildest actual
dissipation a tea-party in Clapham or Tooting--even Clapham Rise or
Upper Tooting--we must transport ourselves in seven-league boots to the
better quarters of London, to visualize the giddy cultured throng in the
halls of Belgravia, and set down accurately the facile inaccuracies of
the small talk of Mayfair. It is the tale of the mad, bad great world
that sets the heart of the matron of Kennington Common aflame, and makes
her waking dreams 'all a wonder and a wild desire.' Que voulez vous? She
is our staple standing reader. She does not want to bend her chaste
thoughts towards Hornsey Rise and Cricklewood, to envisage, stimulated
by the novelist's art, its bursten boilers, its infant woes, its humdrum
marrying and giving in marriage. No, she prefers, in her grey unlovely
Jerry-built parlour, to gloat over the morbid, rose-coloured sins that
are enacted in the halls of fashion; the voluptuous sorrows of the
Bridge-end of the week; the mystery of Royal visits postponed are her
chosen pabulum. To all these novelists whose ways are cast in safe and
humdrum middle-class places I would say that they had best ignore their
entourage as a help to local colour. In this case, character drawing,
like charity, should not begin at Home. Go out, go out, young man, from
thy homely nest in the suburbs, where the females of thy family hang
over their flaccid meat teas in faded blouses----_"

I think it was about here that I half got up, quite determined, and Lady
Scilly pinched me in several places at once.

"Don't nip me, please," I said. "I think somebody ought to get up and
tell George he's drivelling, and if nobody else does, I will."

"Bless the child!" she said. "You may answer him when he's done, if you
like, and can. It will be quite amusing."

I think that she really was a fairy, but never mind! I did think
somebody ought to stop George, and take Mother's side. So I waited,
though I stopped my ears and would not listen to any more till George
sat down and the secretary lady asked if some one would care to answer
Mr. Vero-Taylor's speech? Lady Scilly poked me up, and I got up so that
George and all of them could see me, and I didn't feel a bit shy--no,
for I had something to say, and off I went, to speak up for Mother who
wasn't there to speak up for herself.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," I said--I noticed that George began like
that--"I don't agree at all with what the gentleman--who is my
father--has been saying about Tooting--Upper Tooting, I mean. He ought
to be more patriotic, as he lives at Isleworth, which is pretty nearly
the same thing, part of his time anyhow, and I suppose he needn't do it
unless he likes. And as for what he says about Mother, why, I can tell
everybody that Mother doesn't read novels about Duchesses or anybody.
She hasn't time, she's much too busy in the house, bringing us up, and
cooking specially for George, and so on. That's all!"

I sat down with a bump. George seemed to subside, and I lost him, but I
hardly expected him to come and hug me. Lady Scilly went and comforted
him, perhaps! I don't know what happened, except tea and coffee, but I
didn't feel inclined, and I asked Mr. Aix to take me home.

He did, in a hansom. He held my hand all the way. We didn't talk, but I
am sure he wasn't cross with me, and held my hand to show it. He seemed
to know I was going to have a bad time.

I did. Even Mother scolded me.

Papa didn't come near us for a week, and when he was due I asked if I
might have a cold and be in bed. God sent me a real cold to make me
truthful. Aunt Gerty nursed me. It wasn't so bad. She read to me about
Thumbelina and Boadicea, my two favourite heroines, one big and the
other little, and poetry about my painted boy, which I love and that
always makes me go to sleep. I believe it is spelt with a u, and doesn't
mean a child at all. But, I like it best my way--

    "We left behind the painted buoy
       That tosses at the harbour-mouth,
     And madly danced our hearts with joy
       As fast we fleeted to the South."

While I was ill, though, I missed all the discussions about moving, and
the results of the lecture and all that. Ariadne reported what she
could. She said that Mother and George never mentioned me, but talked as
if the drains had gone wrong, or a pipe had burst, or as if George had
lost a lot of money somehow. Everything is to be altered and the world
will be topsy-turvey when I get down-stairs again. Though I don't
suppose that even if I did get a chance of putting my word in, I could
alter anything as I wished it? These grown-ups, once they get the bit
between their teeth----!




CHAPTER V


It is no fun for George now, when everybody knows he is a married man.
Lady Scilly took care of that, and told everybody as a good joke, and
all her friends at the Go-ahead Club told their friends how George
Vero-Taylor's little girl had burst into the middle of his lecture there
and given him away--such fun, don't you know! It wasn't fun for me, for
I had nothing but the consciousness of a bad action to support me in
Coventry, where they all put me for a month. It wouldn't have mattered
so much if George hadn't been at home a good deal about that time. I
think I prefer George as a visitor, and so does Elizabeth Cawthorne,
though she says it is more natural perhaps for a gentleman to stop with
his family, though wearing to the servants.

George is a philosopher. He has been forced to own up to a family, and
thus has lost a certain amount of prestige, but he is now trying a new
line. At any rate, he has been a good deal talked about, and got into
the newspapers, and that will sell an edition, I should think. He has a
volume on the stocks. Misfortunes never come single-handed, luckily. He
settled to build a house--a house that should express him and shelter
his family as well. Mother didn't want to build. If we _had_ to move,
she wanted a dear little house on the river at Datchet, or even at
Surbiton, and she and I used to go down for the day third-class to see
if there were any to let. We used to take a packet of sandwiches and a
soda-water bottle full of milk for us both. Mother never hardly touches
spirits. In this way we looked over heaps of little earwiggeries trimmed
with clematises and pots of geraniums hanging from the balconies, with
their poor roots higher than their heads, and manicured lawns right down
to the water's edge. George didn't stop our doing this and taking so
much trouble; I believe he thought it amused us and did him no harm. But
all the time, he was hansoming it backwards and forwards to St. John's
Wood, where he meant to settle. He quietly chose a site, and bought it,
and was his own architect, though a little Mr. Jortin he discovered,
made the plans from his dictation. He got no credit, except for the
blunders. George, being a man of the widest culture, wanted to show the
world that he can do other things than write books. In _Who's Who_, he
doesn't mention writing as one of his occupations, not even as one of
his amusements. These are Riding, Driving, Shooting, Fishing, Fencing,
Polo, Rotting and Log-rolling, or at least, that's what his friend Mr.
Aix read out to us one afternoon he came to see us, out of the very
newest edition, and George was in the room too, and laughed.

All this time Ariadne and I were kept hard at it copying things. George
talked of nothing but atriums and tricliniums and environments. I only
interrupted once, when I said that they had never mentioned a main
staircase, and was it going to be outside, like those wooden ones you
see in the country, with the fowls stepping up to bed on them? They
thanked me, and added an inside stairs to the plan at once.

As soon as we get into the new house, George intends to raise his
prices. He expects to get ten pounds per "thou." He told Middleman, his
literary agent, so. Up to now his price was four pound ten per "thou."
for articles, and the royalties on his last book are going to pay for
the new house. Middleman says George will be quite right to charge
establishment charges. Middleman is supposed to have a faint, very faint
sense of humour, and that's the only way people get at him. Mr. Aix says
Middleman can run up an author's sales twenty per cent. in no time, if
he fancies you personally, or thinks there's money in you.

George's new book is going to be not mediæval this time; people have
imitated him and _The Adventures of Sir Bore and Sir Weariful_ was
brought out just to plague him, so he is going to quit that for a time.
He thinks that the Isles of Greece would be a good place to dump a few
English aristocrats and tell their adventures on. He will go abroad
soon, but is waiting for some of the aristocrats to make up a party and
pay his expenses.

Meanwhile Cinque Cento House, as it is to be called, rose like a thief
in the night, and as it grew higher and higher Mother's face grew longer
and longer. She refused to go near it, and it was Lady Scilly who helped
George to arrange the furniture.

Aunt Gerty, however, is practical, and tried to get Mother to take some
interest in her own mansion.

"I do," Mother said, "but at a distance. I couldn't be of any use
advising, and whatever I advised, George would still take his own way.
That odious woman, whom I thank God I have never set eyes on, is always
about, and would put my back up if I met her there, and I should say
things I should be sorry for after. No, Gerty, let them arrange it as
they like, and buy furniture and set it up. It is George's own money. He
earned it."

"Not by the sweat of his brow, at all events!" sneered my aunt.

"I came to him without a penny, and I haven't the right to dictate so
much as the position of a wardrobe."

"You're the man's lawful wife," said Aunt Gerty, as she always did. One
got tired of the expression.

"Yes, unfortunately," said Mother. "Or I'd have a better chance! But I
am _not_ going to fight over George with that minx!"

How Mother did hate Lady Scilly, to be sure, a person she had never
seen! I once told her she needn't be cross with Lady Scilly, and how
harmless she was, and how very little she really thought of
Papa--snubbed him even, and treated him like dirt; and then she was
cross with _me_, and said George was a man of whom any woman might be
proud.

Ariadne and I went over to the new house often, to get measurements for
blinds and curtains and things at home. Mother made them, and then we
took them round. Lady Scilly was always there, from twelve to two, and
George generally met her and they shut themselves into first one room
and then another, discussing it. Vanloads of furniture kept coming in,
and all George's furniture from his old rooms in Mayfair. She kept
saying--

"Oh, that dear old marquetry cabinet! How I remember it in Chapel
Street, and how the firelight caught it in the evenings!" or else--"That
sweet little pair of Flemish bellows? Do you remember when you and
I"--something or other?

She marched about and settled everything. George took it quite mildly,
and made jokes, at least I suppose they were jokes, for he made her
laugh consumedly, so she said. It's extraordinary how he can make people
laugh--people out of his own family!

She is very friendly to me and Ariadne, and has promised to present
Ariadne at the next Court. It's to please George, if she does remember
to do it. But if I were Ariadne I should refuse till my own mother had
been presented first, so that she could introduce me herself. George
ought to insist on it, but he always says "Let them rave!" and that
means, Do as you like, but don't bother me. What he won't like will be
forking out forty pounds for Ariadne's dress, and it will end by her
staying at home. Ariadne wants to be presented badly; she is practising
curtseys already, and longing for the season to begin. I would not
condescend to owe even a pleasure to Lady Scilly, but Ariadne is so
poor-spirited, and Aunt Gerty continually advises her to take what she
can get, and make what she can out of George's "mash," when well
disposed.

About Easter, George got his chance. Lady Scilly proposed a month's
yachting trip in the Mediterranean in somebody's yacht that they were
willing to lend her, on condition she invited her own party and included
them. If I had a yacht, I would ask my own party, that is all I can say.
She asked George to go with them--"We shan't see more of Mr. Pawky (i.e.
the owner) than we can help, and you can have a study on board and write
a yachting novel, like William Black's, and put old Pawky in. He is
quite a character, you know, with a gilded liver, as they say--dyspeptic
and all that. I can't stand him, but you might bear with him a little in
the interests of Art!" George had no objection to visiting the scene of
his new book at Mr. Pawky's expense, in the company of his own pals, and
accepted at once. I wonder if they will batten down the hatches on Mr.
Pawky as soon as they get out to sea, and keep him there for the rest of
the voyage? It would be just like them.

George proposed to Mother that she should move in while he was away. He
said somebody must go in to get the painters out. Then he would come
home fresh and full of material, and find his study organized and
everything ready for him to begin. He said there would be ructions,
inseparable from a first installation, and that would put him off work
abominably, and spoil the whole brewing!

"Dear," said Mother, "I fear we shall do badly without you--you are a
man, at least--but I'll be good, and spare you cheerfully!"

So he went. Then Mother set to work, and was perfectly happy. There was
to be a sale in this house, because the furniture in it would not go
with what George and Lady Scilly had chosen for Cinque Cento House, but
there were some old pieces Mother could not do without. Her nice brass
bedstead, and the old nursery fender that Ariadne nearly hanged herself
on once in a fit of naughtiness, and of course all the bedding and linen
and kitchen utensils from "The Magnolias"--one could hardly suppose Lady
Scilly had troubled herself about that sort of thing? The greengrocer
"moved" us for two pounds. Mother and Aunt Gerty and the cook saw the
things off at Isleworth, and Ariadne and I and Kate--Sarah had gone, and
I never got any better reason than that she "had to"--received them at
Cinque Cento House. Mother had stuck to it, that she would not go near
the place till she went in for good, so it was to be all quite new to
her and Aunt Gerty. Ariadne and I, who had been in and out for months,
wondered how they would like it, and expected some sport when their eyes
first fell on it.

We had a long delightful day of anticipation, and putting things where
they had to go, and in the evening Mother and Aunt Gerty came. They had
got out of the train at Swiss Cottage, and asked their way to their own
house. Aunt Gerty had her mouth wide open; Mother had hers tight shut.
She was not intending to carp or pass opinions, but the front-door
knocker was a regular slap in the face, and took her breath away.

She tried to talk of something else, and whispered to Aunt Gerty,
"Rather an inconvenient place for a coal-shoot, isn't it! Right
alongside the front-door!"

I hastened to explain that that was the larder-window she saw, to
prevent unpleasantness.

Mother shivered when she got into the hall, which is vast and flagged
with marble like a church. "It strikes very cold to the feet!" she said
to Aunt Gerty. "Mine are like so much ice."

"Oh, come along, and we'll brew you a glass of hot toddy!" Aunt Gerty
said cheerfully. "It's a bit chilly, I think, myself, but 'ansom, like
the big 'all where 'Amlet 'as the players!"

Aunt Gerty is generally most careful, but she is apt to drop a little h
or so when she is excited. She could hardly contain herself, as Ariadne
and I had hoped, when she saw the gilt stairs leading up into the study.

"What price broken legs? Why, I shall have to get roller-skates or take
off my shoes and stockings to go up them!"

"So you will, Aunt Gerty," said Ariadne. "It is one of George's rules.
He made Lady Scilly even leave off her high heels before she used them."

"Took 'em off for her himself with his lily hands, I suppose?" snorted
my aunt. "Well, I don't expect you will find me treading those golden
stairs very often. I ain't one of George's elect."

"Such wretched things to keep clean," Mother complained. "The servants
are sure to object to the extra work, and give up their places, and I am
sure one can't blame them, and such good ones as we've got, too, in
these awful times, when looking for a cook is like looking for a needle
in a bottle of hay. Heavens, is the girl there all the time listening to
me?"

Kate was, luckily, down-stairs, showing Elizabeth Cawthorne the way
about her kitchen, or else it would have been very imprudent to tell a
servant how valuable she is. Mother was cowed by the danger she had
escaped, but Aunt Gerty went on flouncing about, pricing everything and
tinkling her nails against pots and jugs, till she stopped suddenly and
put her muff before her face--

"Well, of all the improper objects to meet a lady's eye coming into a
gentleman's house! Who's that mouldy old statue of?"

I told her that was Autolycus.

"Cover yourself, Tollie, I would," Aunt Gerty said, going past him
affectedly. "Oh, look, Lucy, at all those dragons and cockroaches doing
splits on the fire-place! Brass, too, trimmed copper. My God!"

"I shall just have to clean that brass fire-place myself," said Mother.
"I shall never have the face to ask Kate to do it."

"And no proper grate, only the bare bricks left showing!" Aunt Gerty
wailed. "How could one get up any proper fireside feeling over a
contraption like that! The Lyceum scenery is nothing to it. It makes me
think of Shakespeare all the time--so _painfully_ meretricious----"

Lady Castlewood in a basket under Mother's arm, suddenly began to mew
very sadly. Aunt Gerty had put Robert the Devil down on the floor, in
his hamper, and I suppose a draught got to him, for he spat loudly.
Ariadne and I let out the poor things and they bounced straight out on
to the parquet floor, and their feet slid from under them. I never saw
two cats look so silly!

"Well, if a cat can't keep his feet on those wooden tiles," said Mother,
"I don't suppose I can," and she jumped, just to try, right into the
middle of a little square of blue carpet, which, true enough, slid along
with her.

"You can give a nice hop here, at any rate," cried Aunt Gerty, catching
her round the waist, and waltzing all over the room, till both their
picture hats fell off, and hung down their backs by the pins. "Ask me
and all the boys, and give a nice sit-down supper, and do us as well as
the old villain will allow you."

She was quite happy. That is just like an actress! Ariadne and I danced
too, and the cats mewed loudly for strangeness. Cats hate newness of any
kind, and they weren't easy till I got some newspaper, crackled it, and
let them sit on it, and then they were all right. Then Mother and Aunt
Gerty rang the queer-shaped bell, as if it would sting them, and got up
some coals which Mother had had the forethought to order in, and lit a
modest little fire in a great cave with brass images in front of it
under the kind of copper hood. It wouldn't draw at first, being used to
logs, and when it smoked we threw water on it, lest we dirtied the
beautiful silk hangings. At last we fetched Elizabeth Cawthorne.

"Hout!" she said. "I'd like to see the fire that's going to get the
better of me!"

She made it burn, sulkily, and Ariadne and I went to a shop we knew of
round the corner, and bought tea and sugar and condensed milk, to make
ourselves tea with the spirit-lamp Aunt Gerty had brought. We had no
butter or bread, only biscuits luckily, so we couldn't stain the Cinque
Cento chairs, whose gold trimmings were simply peeling off them. Sit on
them we dared not, they would have let us down on the floor for a
certainty. Mother and Aunt Gerty had a high old time blaming Lady Scilly
for all her foolish arrangements, and then we all went down to the
so-called kitchen to see how Elizabeth Cawthorne was getting on there.
She was in a rage, but trying to pass it off, like a good soul as she
is.

"Well, I never! Here's a gold handle to my coal-cellar door! I shall
have to wipe my lily hands before I dare use it. And a fine lady of a
dresser that I shall be shy to set a plain dish on. Beetles here, do you
ask, woman?" (To Kate.) "They'd be ashamed to show their faces in such a
smart place as this, I'm thinking. And what's this couple of drucken
little candlesticks for the kitchen? Our Kate'll soon rive the fond bit
handles from off them, or she's not the girl I take her for!"

She banged it hard against the dresser as servants do, to make it break,
but it didn't, and she looked disappointed. Mother then suggested she
should unpack a favourite frying-pan she never goes anywhere without,
and sent Kate out for a pound and a half of loin-chops, and cook was to
fry them for our dinners.

The kitchen fire, after all, was the only one that would burn, so we ate
our chops there, and sat there till bed-time. Ariadne looked like a
picture, sitting at a trestle-table, and a thing like a torch burning at
the back of her head. She was thoroughly disgusted, and got quite cross,
and so did Elizabeth, as the evening went on. She hated trestles, and
flambeaus, and dark Rembrandtish corners, and couldn't lay her hand on
her things nohow, so that when we all went up to bed, Mother said to
her--

"Good-night, Elizabeth. You have been a bit upset, haven't you? I wonder
we have managed to get through the day without a row!"

"So do I, ma'am," said the cook. "Heaps of times I'd have given you
warning for twopence, but you never gave me ought to lay hold on."

A horrid wind sprang up and moaned us off to sleep. I thought once or
twice of George out on the Mediterranean on a tippity yacht, and didn't
quite want him to get drowned, though he had made us live in such an
uncomfortable house. I had tried to colonize a little, and put up a
photograph of Mother done at Ramsgate in a blue frame, to make me feel
more at home. Ariadne had hung up all her necklaces on a row of nails.
She has forty. There is one made of dried marrowfat peas, that she
nibbles when she is nervous, and another of horse's jesses, or whatever
you call them, sewn on red velvet. We have a bed each, costing
fourteen-and-six. They are apt to shut up with you in them. There is no
carpet in our room, and there are not to be any. We are to be hardy.
Nothing rouses one like a touch of cold floor in the mornings, and cools
one on hot nights better than the same. Our water-jug too is an odd
shape. I tilted all the water out of it on to the floor the first time I
tried to use it. It must be French, it is so small. I shall not wash my
hands very often in the days to come, I fancy.

Ariadne began to get reconciled to our room when she had made up her
mind it was like the bower of a mediæval chatelaine, or like Princess
Ursula's bedroom in Carpaccio, but I prefer Early Victorian, and cried
myself to sleep.

Next morning Ben come along; he had stayed all night at the Hitchings',
in Corinth Road. Jessie Hitchings likes Ben best of the family. She may
marry him, when he is grown up, if she likes. He has birth, but no
education, so that will make them even. The only glimmering of hope I
see for Ben is that in this house there seems to be no bedroom for him,
unless it is a room at the top with all the water tanks in it, which
makes me think perhaps George is going to send him to school? For the
present we have arranged him a bed in the butler's pantry. Ben says
perhaps George means him to be butler, as he has laid it down as a rule
that only women servants are to be used in Cinque Cento House. They look
so much nicer than men, George says; he likes a houseful of waving
cap-ribbons. Mother thinks she can work a house best on one servant, and
better still on none. George doesn't mind her having any amount of boys
from the Home near here, but that doesn't suit Mother. She says one boy
isn't much good, that two boys is only one and a half, and that three
boys is no boy at all. I suppose they get playing together? Ariadne and
I would, in their place, I know, and human nature is the same, even in a
Home, though I can't call ours quite that.




CHAPTER VI


George makes a point of refusing to be interviewed. He hates it, unless
it is for one of the best papers. Then he says that it is a sheer
kindness, and that a successful man has no right to refuse some poor
devil or other the chance of making an honest pound or two. So he
suffers him gladly. He even is good enough to work on the thing a little
in the proof: just to give the poor fellow a lift, and prevent him
making a fool of himself and getting his facts all wrong. In the end
George writes the whole thing entirely from beginning to end, and makes
the man a present of a complete magazine article, and a very fine one
too!

"I have been generous," he tells us. "I have offered myself up as a
burnt sacrifice. I have given myself all, without reservation. I have
nothing extenuated, everything set down in malice. I have owned to
strange sins that I never committed, to idiosyncrasies that took me all
my time to invent, and all to bump out an article by some one else. I
have been butchered to make a journalistic holiday!"

This is all very nice and self-sacrificing of George, but this
particular interview read very well when it came out, and made George
seem a very interesting sort of man with some quaint habits, not half so
funny as his real ones, though, and I think the interviewer might just
as well have given those.

So, when I got a chance of telling the truth, I did, meaning to act for
the best, and give Papa a good show and save him the trouble of telling
it all himself, but nobody gave me credit for my good intentions, and
kind heart.

In the first place, how dared I put myself forward and offer to see
George's visitors! But the young man asked for me--at least, when he was
told that George was out, he said might he see one of the young ladies?
Of course I don't suppose that would have occurred to him, only I was
leaning over the new aluminium bannisters, and caught his eye. Then an
idea seemed to come into his head. The look of disappointment that had
come over him when he was told that George was out changed to a little
happy perky look, as if he had just thought of something amusing. He
crooked his little finger at me as I slid down the bannister, and said
would I do? and would he come in? Kate is a cheeky girl, but even the
cook admits that Kate is not a patch upon me. Kate evidently didn't
think it quite right, but she slunk away into the back premises, and
left me to deal with the young man.

He handed me a card. I thought that very polite of him, and "_Mr.
Frederick Cook_," and Representative of _The Bittern_ down in the
corner, explained it all to me. We take in about a hundred rags, and
that's the name of one of them. It's called _The Bittern_ because it
booms people, so George says.

"I suppose you have come to interview my Father," I said. "I'm sorry,
but he is out. Did you have an appointment?"

"No, I didn't," said the young man right out.

I liked his nice bold way of speaking; he was the least shy young man I
ever met.

"I don't believe in appointments. The subject is conscious, primed,
braced up, ready with a series of cards, so to speak, which he wishes to
force on the patient public--a collection of least characteristic facts
which he would like dragged into prominence. It is as if a man should go
to the dentist with his mind made up as to the number of teeth that he
is to have pulled out, a decision which should always rest with any
dentist who respects himself."

He went running on like that, not a bit shy, or anything, and amused me
very much.

"But then the worst of that is, you've got no appointment with George,
and he is not here to have his teeth pulled out."

I really so far wasn't quite sure if he was an interviewer or a dentist,
but I kept calm.

"All the better, my dear young lady, that is if you are willing to aid
and abet me a little. Then we shall have a thundering good interview, I
can promise you. You see, in my theory of interviewing, the actual
collaboration of the patient--shall we call him?--is unnecessary.
Indeed, it is more in the nature of an impediment. My method, which of
course I have very few opportunities of practising, is to seek out his
nearest and dearest, those who have the privilege--or annoyance--of
seeing him at all hours, at all seasons, unawares. If a painter, 'tis
the wife of his brush that I would question; if an author, the partner
of his pen--do you take me?"

Yes, I "took" him, and as George had called me a cockatrice--a very
favourite term of abuse with him--only that morning, and remembering how
she swaggers about being George's Egeria, I said, "You'll have to go to
Lady Scilly for that!"

"Quite so!" he said very naturally. "Your distinguished parent dedicated
his last book to her, did he not? Did you approve, may I ask?"

"No," I said. "People should always dedicate all their works to their
wife, whether they love her or not, that's what I think!"

"Quite so," he said again. "I see we agree famously, and between us we
shall concoct a splendid interview. But now, if you would be so very
good, and happen to have a small portion of leisure at your
disposal----"

"I'll do what I can for you," I said, delighted at his nice polite way
of putting things. "I'll take you round the house, shall I? Have you a
Kodak with you? Would you like to take a snapshot at George's
typewriter?"

"Certainly, if she is pretty," said the silly man, and I explained that
Miss Mander was out, and that it was the machine I meant. He said one
machine was very like another, but that if he might see the study,
where so many beautiful thoughts had taken shape? He said it quite
gravely, but I felt he was laughing in his jacket all the time.

"We'll take it all _seriam_!" I said, not wishing him to have all the
fine words. "And we will begin at the beginning--I mean the atrium."

He had a little pocket-book in his hand, and he said, as I led the way
through the hall, "You won't mind my writing things down as they occur
to me?"

"Not at all!" I said. "If you will let me look at what you have written.
I see you have put a lot already."

He laughed and handed me his book, and I read--

"_Through dusky suites, lit by stained glass windows, whose dim
cloistral light, falling on lurid hangings and gorgeous masses of
Titianesque drapery, and antique ebon panelling, irresistibly suggest
the languorous mysteries of a mediæval palace...._ Do you think your
father will like this style?"

"You have made it rather stuffy--piled it on a good deal, the drapery
and hangings, I mean!" I said. "Now that I know the sort of thing you
write, I shan't want to read any more."

"I thought you wouldn't," he said, taking it back. "I'll read it to you.
'_Behind this arras might lurk Benvenuto and his dagger----_'"

"Not Ben's dagger, but Papa's bicycle."

"We'll leave it there and keep it out of the interview," he said. "It
would spoil the unity of the effect. '_On, on, through softly-carpeted
ante-rooms where the footstep softer falls, than petals of blown roses
on the grass...._'"

"I hate poetry!" I said. "And we mayn't walk on that part of the carpet
for fear of blurring the Magellanic clouds in the pattern. Do you know
anything about Magellanic clouds in carpets?"

"No, I confess I have never trod them before," he said, becoming all at
once respectful to me. I expect he lives in a garret, and has no carpet
at all, and I thought I would be good to him, and help him to bump out
his article, and not cram him, but tell him where things really came
from. So I drew his attention particularly to the aluminium eagle, and
the pinchbeck serpent George picked up in Wardour Street. I left out
George's famous yarn about the sack of our ancestral Palace in Turin in
the fifteenth century, when the Veros were finally disseminated or
dissipated, whichever it is. I don't believe it myself, but George
always accounts for his swarthy complexion by his Italian grandmother.
Aunt Gerty says it is all his grandmother, or in other words, all liver!

We went down-stairs into the study, which is the largest room in the
house.

"Your father has realized the wish of the Psalmist," said _The Bittern_
man. "_Set my feet in a large room!_"

"He likes to have room to spread himself," I said, "and to swing
cats--books in, I mean."

"So your father uses missiles in the fury of composition?"

"Sometimes; but oftenest he swears, and that saves the books. He mostly
swears. Look here!"

I had just found a piece of paper in Miss Mander's handwriting, and on
it was written, "Selections from the nervous vocabulary of Mr.
Vero-Taylor during the last hour."

_The Bittern_ man looked at them, and, "By Jove! these are corkers!" he
said. Then I thought perhaps I ought not to have let him see them. There
was Drayton, the ironmonger's bill lying about too, and I saw him raise
his eyebrows at the last item, "_To one chased brass handle for
coal-cellar door_."

"That's what I call being thorough!" said _The Bittern_ man. "I'm
thorough myself. See this interview when it is done!"

He was thorough. He looked at everything, and particularly asked to see
the pen George uses. "Or perhaps he uses a stylograph?" he asked.

"Mercy, no!" I screamed out. "He would have an indigestion! This is his
pen--at least, it is this week's pen. George is wasteful of pens; he
eats one a week."

"Very interesting!" said he. "Most authors have a fetish, but I never
heard of their eating their fetish before. This will make a nice fat
paragraph. Come on!"

You see what friends we had become! We went into the dining-room, and I
showed him the dresser, with all the blue china on, and the Turkey
carpet spread on it, instead of a white one--that was how they had it
in the Middle Ages. He sympathized with me about how uncomfortable
Mediæval was, and if it wasn't for the honour and glory of it, how much
we preferred Early Victoria, when the drawers draw, and the mirrors
reflect--there's not one looking-glass in the house that poor Ariadne
can see herself in when she's dressing to go out to a party--or chairs
that will bear sitting on. Why, there are four in one room that we are
forbidden to sit upon on pain of sudden death!

"Very hard lines!" said _The Bittern_ man. "I confess that this point of
view had not occurred to me. I shall give prominence to it in my
article. Art, like the car of some fanatical Juggernaut, crushing its
votaries----"

"Yes," I said. "Mother draped a flower-pot once, and sneaked Ariadne's
photograph into a plush frame. You should have heard George! 'To think
that any wife of his--' 'Cæsar's wife must be above suspicion!' And as
for Ariadne, he had rather see her dead at his feet than folded in blue
plush."

"Capital!" said _The Bittern_ man. "All good grist for the interview!
And now, will you show me the famous metal stairs of which I have heard
so much? There are no penalties attached to that, I trust?"

"Except that we are not allowed to go up them--Ariadne and me--without
taking our boots off first, for fear of scratching the polish. We have
to strip our feet in the housemaid's pantry, and carry them up in our
hands. That's rather a bore, you will admit!"

"And your father? Does he bow to his own decrees?"

"Oh, no!" I said. "Papa is the exception that proves the rule."

"Capital!" again remarked _The Bittern_ man. "I am getting to know all
about the great Mr. Vero-Taylor in the fierce light that beats upon the
domestic hearth! But, by the way," he said, with a little crooked look
at me, "it is usual--shall I say something about Mrs. Vero-Taylor?
People generally like an allusion--just a hint of feminine presence--say
the mistress of the house flitting about, tending her ferns, or what
not?"

"You must put her in the kitchen, then," I said, "tending her servants.
Would you like to see her?"

"I should not like to disturb her," he said politely. "Will you describe
her for me?"

"Oh, mother's nice and thin--a good figure--I should hate to have one of
those feather-beddy mothers, don't you know? But I don't really think
you need describe her. I don't think she cares about being in the
interview, thank you, but you may say that my sister Ariadne is
ravishingly beautiful, if you like?"

"And what about you, Miss----?" he asked, looking at me.

"Tempe Vero-Taylor," I said. "But whatever you do, don't put me in!
George would have a fit! He won't much like your mentioning Ariadne,
but I don't see why she shouldn't have a show, if I can give her one."

"Very well," he said. "Your ladyship shall be obeyed. Now I really think
I have got enough, unless----" I saw his eyes straying up-stairs.

"There's nothing much to see up those stairs, except George's bedroom,
and I daren't take you in there. It is quite commonplace, too; not like
the rest of the house, but very, _very_ comfortable."

"Oho! Your father reminds me of the man who plays Othello, and doesn't
trouble to black more than his face and arms," said _The Bittern_ man.
"And _your_ rooms?"

"Oh, our rooms are cupboards. Bowers, George calls them, and says we
have more room to keep our clothes in than the lady of a mediæval castle
would have. Now that's all, and----"

The truth was, I wanted him to go before George came home, for I thought
it might be awkward for me if I were found entertaining a newspaper man.
George might have preferred to do his own interview, who knows? This
reflection only just occurred to me, as all reflections do, too late.
_The Bittern_ man was very quick, however, and understood me. He thanked
me very much, far more than he need, for on reflection I did not see how
he was going to make an interview out of all the scrappy things I had
told him, and I said so. He assured me I need be under no uneasiness on
that score, that this particular interview would be unique of its kind,
and would gain him great credit with his editor, and increase the
circulation of the paper. If it had nothing else, he said, it would at
least have a _succès de scandale_, at least I think that is what he
said, for I don't understand French very well. While he was making all
those pretty speeches we stood in the hall, and I heard the little
grating noise in the lock that meant that George was fitting his key in,
and oh, how I just longed to run away! But I didn't. George opened the
door, and came in and shook off his big fur coat. Then he saw _The
Bittern_ man and came forward, and _The Bittern_ man came forward too,
with his funny little smile on his face that somehow reminds me of the
Pied Piper we used to read of when we were little.

"I came from _The Bittern_," he said, and George nodded, to show he knew
what for. "To ask you to grant me the favour of an interview----"

"I am sorry I happened to be out!" began George, and then I knew, by the
sound of his voice, that _The Bittern_ was a _good_ paper. "But if it is
not too late, I shall be happy----"

"No need, no need to trouble you now, my dear sir," the interviewer
said, waving his hand a little. "I came, and I go not empty away, but
with the material of a dozen articles of sovereign interest in my
pocket. You left an admirable _locum tenens_ in the person of your
daughter here, who kindly consented to be my cicerone and relieved me of
the necessity of troubling _you_. You will doubtless be relieved also. I
shall have the pleasure of sending you a proof to-morrow. Good-day!"

And before George could say what he wanted to say, Mr. Cook had opened
the door for himself and had gone. I said he had plenty of cheek. George
said so, too, and a great deal worse. I was black and blue for a week,
and _The Bittern_ man never sent a proof after all, so when the article
came out--"_Interviewing, New Style. A Talk with Miss Tempe
Vero-Taylor_,"--I got some more. That is the first and last time I was
ever interviewed. George has peculiar theories about interviewing, I
see, and I shall not interfere with them in future. I should think Mr.
Frederick Cook would get on, making tools of honest children to serve
his ambition like that. George didn't punish him, of course, he is a
power on a paper; while I am but a child in the nursery.




CHAPTER VII


I wonder if other families have got tame countesses, who come bothering
and interfering in their affairs? I don't mind our having a
house-warming party at all, but I do hate that it should be to please
Lady Scilly.

"A party! A party!" she said to George, clasping her hands in her silly
way. "My party on the table!" like the woman in the play of _Ibsen_.
"Ask all the dear, amusing literary people that I adore. And I'll bring
a large contingent of smart people, if I may, to meet them. Please,
_please_!"

I don't know what a contingent is, but I fancy it's something
disagreeable. Lady Scilly is George's friend, not Mother's. She has only
called on Mother once, and that was in the old house, and then Mother
was not receiving as they call it, so she has never even seen the
mistress of the house where she is going to give the party. Christina
Mander, George's secretary, says that is quite the new way of doing
things, and she has been about a great deal, and ought to know.

Miss Mander is a lady. She is very thin, one of those lath-and-plaster
women, you know, that seem to live to support a small waist that is
their greatest beauty, but when we first knew her, she was plump and
jolly-looking. We practically got her for George. Years ago, when we
were quite little and had had measles, we were sent down to a sort of
boarding-house at Ramsgate to an old lady, an ex-dresser in some theatre
Aunt Gerty knew, and who could neither see to mend or to keep us in
order, though she got thirty shillings a week for doing it. They never
got us up till nine; I suppose the slavey thought sufficient for the day
was the evil thereof, and tried to make the evil's day as short as
possible. One morning when it was quite nine, and the sun was shining
in, Ariadne and I were feeling frightfully bored, so we got up in our
night-gowns, moved a wardrobe, and found a door behind it into another
house. It was quite a smart house, with soft plush carpets and
nicely-varnished yellow doors. We went all over it. Only the cat was
awake, licking herself in the window-seat. The bedroom doors were all
shut except one, and we went in and found a nice girl in bed with her
gold hair all spread over the pillow. She didn't seem shocked at us, but
laughed, and when we had explained, she wished us to get into the bed
beside her. It had sheets trimmed with lace, and her initials, C. M., on
the pillow. We did this every morning till we went away. She kept us up,
afterwards sending us Christmas cards and so on, and when George
advertised for a secretary to help him to sub-edit _Wild Oats_, she
answered it, among the thousand others, and we remembered her name and
made George engage her.

She had been to Girton, and to a journalistic school, and Mr. D'Auban's
dancing academy, and to Klondike--where all her hair got cut off, so
that she hasn't enough to spread over the pillow now--and behind the
scenes at a music-hall, and a month on the stage, and edited a paper
once and wrote a novel. All before she was thirty! At every new
arrangement for amusement she made her people opposed her, and prayed
for her in church. But she always got her own way in the end. Her
mother, Mrs. Stephen Cadwallis Mander, came here to sniff about when
George first took Christina on. She is a woman of the world,
tortoise-shell _pince-nez_ and all, but she took to Mother at first
sight, and talked to her quite naturally about this "new move of dear
Christina's."

She spoke in a neat, sighing voice, and told us that Christina had
developed early, and was so different to her other children; she kept on
saying the name of George's new magazine, as if it shocked her very
much.

"_Wild Oats!_ Such a crude name! Though I suppose she must sow them
somewhere, and best, perhaps, in the pages of a magazine. You'll look
after her, won't you? Is there any danger"--she looked towards the
study-door"--of her falling in love with her employer?" She laughed
carelessly.

"Not the slightest!" said Mother, laughing too. "She will have her eyes
opened, that's all, to the seamy side of artistic life."

"My daughter is so absurdly curious about that wretched seamy side.
After all, it's only the side that the workers leave the knots on, they
must be somewhere, just as plates must be washed up in a scullery. But
we don't need to go in and gloat on the horrid sight!"

"I quite agree with you," said Mother. "Only if one happens to be the
scullery-maid----"

Aunt Gerty came in just then and took her part in the conversation. I
was glad to see she was dressed more quietly than usual.

"And," said Mrs. Mander, "she buys everything that comes out, especially
badly-executed magazines that talk about the fore-front of progress and
look just as if they were produced in the dark ages. I know that she
came to your husband entirely because she wanted to help to edit his
magazine--_Wild Oats_. Is not that its name? From what Chris says, it
sounds so _very_ advanced!"

"Oh, very," said Aunt Gerty. "But it won't live!"

"You don't say so?" Mrs. Mander put up her _pince-nez_ and looked at
Aunt Gerty, whom she already didn't like.

"None of my brother-in-law's things do!" Aunt Gerty went on calmly. "He
is a prize wrecker--of women and magazines!"

Mrs. Mander looked startled, and Mother tried to change the
conversation.

"Oh, he's a law unto himself, my brother-in-law is," went on Aunt Gerty.
"But I don't think he'll convert Miss Mander to his views."

"I hope not," said Mrs. Mander, "for I notice that if you make a law
unto yourself, you generally have to make a society unto yourself too!
At least as far as women are concerned."

"People will always let you go your own way," said Mother; "but the
point is, will they come with you--join with you in a pleasant walk?"

"Well," said Mrs. Mander, "my daughter is the most headstrong of young
women. I can't control her, or you may be sure I should not have allowed
her to undertake this post of secretary to Mr. Vero-Taylor."

"I gathered as much," said Mother, not offended a bit. "But I will look
after her well!" She does; she gives her cod-liver oil every day to make
her fat, and breakfast in bed once a week.

Christina says Lady Scilly is a female Mecænas! Ben says she a minx. Ben
hates her, because she makes a fool of George, and he says Ariadne is a
cad to accept her old dresses and wear them, and go out with her, but
then, what is Ariadne to do? She likes to go to parties, and Mother
won't go anywhere, she is quite obstinate about that. I must say that
George doesn't try to persuade her much. You see, he isn't used to
having a wife, socially speaking, after going about as a bachelor all
those years!

George agreed to have a party here, to please Lady Scilly, but Christina
is quite sure that the idea had occurred to him already, for why should
he build a house for purposes of advertisement, and then hide it under
a bushel? A successful party is more good than fifty interviews, so she
says, and sells an edition. She knows a great deal about geniuses. She
says the hermit-plan would not suit George. I asked her what the
hermit-plan was. She said she had known an artist, who took a lovely old
house in the suburbs of London, and lived there, and never went out;
anybody who cared must come out to see him, and then it was not so easy,
for his Sundays were only for a select few--very selected. He only gave
tea and bread-and-butter--very little butter--and no table-cloth--plain
living, and high prices, for his pictures cost a lot, though he
pretended he did not care if he sold them or not; in fact, it cut him to
the heart to see any of them go out into the great cold brutal world,
and he never exhibited in exhibitions, but in an empty room in his own
house. He said, in fun, I suppose, that if the Academy were to elect him
to be an R.A., he should put the matter into the hands of his
solicitors. The end of that man was, she said, that he did become a
Royal Academician, quite against his will, and princes and princesses of
the blood used to come and have tea with him, without a table-cloth. But
that would not do for George, for he isn't at all hermit-like, and he
can make epigrams! They say that is his _forte_. I hate them myself, I
think they are rude, and only a clever way of hurting people's feelings
so that they can't complain, but then, of course, the family gets them
in the rough; epigrams, like charity, begin at home.

George began to talk a great deal about the duty of entertaining. He
said a man owed it to his century. And his party must be something out
of the common run; it must be individual and exceptional. He thought he
would give a party like the ones they gave in the Middle Ages. Judging
from what he said, I think that it must have been very uncomfortable,
and very expensive, for to be really grand you had to have cygnets and
peacocks to eat. People stood about round the sides of the room, or sat
on the floor or on coffers, and before the evening was half over the
smoke from the flambeaux made it impossible for them to see each other's
faces! That didn't suit Ariadne at all, and she snubbed the idea as much
as she could.

Luckily, George changed his mind, and then it was to be a supper, still
Mediæval, at six o'clock. We should have had to eat with our fingers,
because only the carver has a fork, and he sometimes lends it, but it
can't go all round. That's the reason we have finger-bowls now, and
little bits of bread beside our plates instead of big bits of brown to
eat off. And when you were done, did you eat the plate? As far as I can
see, everybody handed everybody they loved nice pieces off their own
trenchers and drank out of the same glasses, so the fewer persons that
loved one the better I should have liked it. You should have seen
Mother's face when the middle-aged menu was explained to her! She said
she would do what she could, but how was she going to put the grocers'
and the butchers' shops back a century?

The first course, George explained, was quite easy--it was little bits
of toast with honey and hypocras.

"Perhaps they will know what that is at the Stores?" Mother said,
meaning to be funny. "There's a very civil young man there might help
me?"

"Next course, smoked eels," went on George. "Any soup you like, only it
must be flavoured with verjuice. That is the third course. Then you have
venison, rabbits, pigeons, fricasseed beans, river crabs, sorrel,
oranges, capers in vinegar----"

"It will relieve us for ever of the burden of entertaining for ever and
ever, that's one good thing!" Mother said, "for nobody will care to try
that _menu_ twice!"

"It would look well in the papers, though," George said. "What do you
say to barbecued pig?"

But Mother would have nothing to say to barbecued pig, and George and
Lady Scilly finally settled that it was to be a masked ball, costume not
obligatory, but masks and dominos imperative, with a cold collation at
twelve o'clock, and all the guests to unmask then.

The date was chosen to please her, and it was changed three times, but
at last it was fixed, and George got some cards printed that he had
designed himself. They were quite white and plain, but with a knowing
red splotch in one corner, which signified George's passionate Italian
nature. I was in the study when the first dozens of packets came, with
Miss Mander, and she undid them. Secretaries always take the right to
open everything!

"My Goodness!" she said.

"Isn't it right?" I asked, getting hold of it, but when I had looked at
it I was no wiser, for I couldn't see what was wrong. There it was,
written out very nicely, "_Mr. Vero-Taylor At Home. Wednesday the
twenty-first_," and the address in the corner, and all those rules about
the dominos, and that was all.

"Oh, dear darling Christina," I begged, deadly curious, "do tell me what
is wrong with that? I cannot guess."

"It's just as well, perhaps," she said. "Preserve your sublime
ignorance, my dear child, as long as you can."

And not another word could I get out of her! I suppose she calls that
being loyal to her employer.

I told Ben, and he said he knew, and what was more, he would go one
better. He got hold of one of the cards, and altered it. And then it was
_Mr. Vero-Taylor and Lady Scilly At Home_! I think that was absurd, for
though Lady Scilly meddles in all our affairs, she doesn't quite live
here yet! and Mother does, and what's more, Mother never goes out at all
except to take a servant's character, or scold the butcher, or something
of the sort, so she is really the one at home! Christina took it from
him, and looked at it, and I'll swear I saw her smile before she tore it
up. So Ben had me there, for he still wouldn't tell me what was wrong
with the first card.

We began to write in the names of the people. It took us a whole
morning, Ben, Ariadne, Miss Mander and I. I offered to help, and really,
though I write rather badly, I can spell better than any of them, but I
don't believe they valued my help very much, and only gave me a card now
and then to keep me quiet. There were six young men that Ariadne wanted
asked--six, no less, if you please--and she's only been out six months!
And she kept trying to force them on George, same as you do cards in a
card trick! But he didn't take any notice, and kept walking up and down
the room mentioning the names of all sorts of absurd people that nobody
wanted, except himself. It was really going to be a very smart party;
there were to be detectives and reporters, and what more can you have
than that? All the countesses and dukes and so on were to come, of
course, but I must say I had thought that George knew a great many more
of them; he managed to scratch up so few, considering all the talk there
had been about it. I kept saying, "Oh, do give me a Countess to ask. You
give me all the plain people to do."

Somehow or other, George did not seem to be pleased, and he sent us all
away after fifty had been written.

Next day, he told us that he had thought it all out, and he was going to
do an original thing, and instead of sending out cards for his party, he
was going to announce it in the pages of _The Bittern_, and that all his
friends, reading it, must consider themselves bidden. Mother said how
should she know how many to prepare for? I suppose the answer to that
depends on the number of friends George has got, and whether they know
that he considers them his friends. For think how awkward to assume that
you were a friend and had a place laid for you, and then to come and
find that you were only an acquaintance. I suggested that the real
friends should have a hot sit-down supper, with wine, while the
acquaintances should only go to a buffet and have cold pressed beef and
lemonade. There should be a password, _Hot with_, and _cold without_,
and they roared when I told them this, but I didn't see why. Then the
party would really be of some use, for after it people would know where
they were! But how about the newspaper people? They couldn't call
themselves friends, or even acquaintances, so they wouldn't be able to
come at all, and what would George do then? I said all this, which seems
to me very sensible, but no one noticed it. And the detectives! They
have to be paid for coming, surely, and I'd rather see them than any of
the others. "If they don't come the party will be spoilt for me," I said
to Christina.

"It will be all right," she said, and Ariadne was quite pleased, for of
course, this way, her six young men can come, a dozen if they like.

Ariadne and I had costumes. I was the little Duke of Gandia, that
brother of Cæsar Borgia that he killed, and Ariadne had the dress of
Beatrice Cenci with a sort of bath-towel wound round her head. The funny
thing is that she looks far younger than me in it, quite a little girl,
while I look like a big boy. My legs are very long. George has a monk's
costume, one of the Fratelli dei Morti, and it is much the same sort of
looking thing as a domino. Nobody would ever know him, and he looks very
nice.

I am told that at masques you have to speak a squeaky voice or alter it
somehow. George will have to, because he has a very peculiar voice, that
anybody would know a mile off; people call it resonant, nervous,
bell-like--I call it cracked. It is one of his chief fascinations, but
he will have to do without it for once, and rely on the others.

The study was to be the ball-room, only George preferred to leave signs
of literary occupation in the shape of his desk, which he just shoved
away on one side, with the proofs of his new novel left negligently
lying on it. We sprinkled copies of his last but one about the house, in
moderation; it was rather fun--I felt as if I were planting bulbs.
George likes these sort of little attentions, and I knew I was not to be
put off by his finding one, as he did, and scolding me and telling me to
put it on the fire.




CHAPTER VIII


About nine they all began to arrive, and by ten o'clock the house was
overflowing. Ben was a capital commissionaire in a District Messenger's
costume he had borrowed, with George's consent, and I do believe he
enjoyed himself most of anybody. Of course at first all he had to do was
to stand at the door and show people in, but he hoped that later in the
evening he should have to chuck somebody out. It was likely, he thought,
for all the literary world of London would be sure to be at our party.
I'm sorry to say that Ben was wrong there, or else the literary people
didn't come, for those that did come were as quiet as lambs. There were
detectives, several of them, and although I looked very particularly at
their boots, which I have always been told is the way to spot a
detective, I saw nothing at all out of the common. There was a man with
a cloven hoof, but then he was meant for the devil. He was masked of
course, but the devil needs no domino. And _I_ knew all the time that it
was the little man who interviewed me once instead of George for _The
Bittern_, and got me into such a row, and very devilish of him it was,
and I had no butter to my bread for a week because of him. How I was
supposed to know that George hated the truth instead of loving it, I
can't see, only _The Bittern_ man knew well enough, I expect! Never,
_never_ again will I interfere between a man and his interviewer!

There were hosts of newspaper people there; I heard two of them
discussing us, sitting in the high-backed Medici seat. I managed to get
jammed in behind, "powerless to move," as they say in the novels, even
if I had wanted to. People _are_ careless. I heard heaps of
conversations, anyhow, people even said things to each other across me,
without stopping to think whether or no I wasn't one of the family. I
suppose because they were masked, they felt anonymous, as if it didn't
matter what they said, and it needn't count afterwards.

The man I listened to was _The Bittern_ man, dressed as the devil. The
woman's domino was all shot with queer faint colours, and, if any
colour, sulphur colour. She was scented too, a nice odd scent. _The
Bittern_ man seemed to know her.

"I cannot be mistaken; am I not talking to the most dangerous woman in
London?"

The woman seemed quite complimented, and smiled under her mask.

"Not quite, but very nearly," she said. "I am a gas. Give me a name!"

"I will call you Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen. How does that suit you?"

"Is it a noxious gas?" she said, "for, honestly, I never am spiteful! I
only speak of things as I find them, and one must send up bright copy,
or one wouldn't be taken on. I tell the truth----"

"Nothing extenuate, everything set down in malice!" said he. "The devil
and _The Bittern_ are much obliged to you. It is the honest truth that
makes his work so easy for him. We are of a trade in more senses than
one. Now tell me, can't we exchange celebrities? I'll give you my names,
and you shall give me yours. I suppose all the world is here to-night?"

"All the world--and somebody else's wife!" she said quickly, and the
devil rubbed his hands. "But that is the rub--we can't know who they all
are till twelve o'clock, and my idea is that a good many of them will
decamp before they are forced to reveal themselves. Least seen, soonest
mended."

"Then we shall have to invent them!" he said. "The very form of
invitation must lead to a good deal of promiscuity. Can you tell me
which is Lady Scilly? She at least is sure to be here."

"Naturally! Wasn't it she who discovered George Vero-Taylor and made him
the fashion, you know?"

"Do you suppose he was particularly obliged to her for digging his
family out as well?"

"You naughty man! But it was a most extraordinary thing, wasn't it?
Delightful, and not too scandalous to use. For the man is really quite
harmless, only a frantic _poseur_ and----"

"Ah, yes, and posed in London Society for ten years as an unmarried man!
Suppose some nice girl had gone and fallen in love with him?"

"Ah, but he was careful, as careful as a good _parti_ has to be in the
London season. He lent them his books, and guanoed their minds
thoroughly, but he always sheered off when they showed signs of taking
him seriously."

"Chose married women to flirt with, for preference? What does the wife
say?"

"The wife? So there is a wife! But no one has ever seen her. Perpetual
hay-fever, or something of the sort."

"That is what Vero-Taylor gives out."

"Oh, I don't really think there is anything in--with Lady Scilly, I
mean. He is too selfish--they are both too selfish. Those sort of women
are like the Leaning Tower, they lean but never fall. It is an alliance
of interest, so to speak. He introduces the literary element into her
parties, and writes her novel for her, and in return she flatters him
and takes his daughter out. Poor girl, she would be quite pretty, if she
were properly dressed, but the mediæval superstition, you know--she has
to dress like a Monna Somebody or other, so as to advertise his books. I
believe she did refuse to have her hair shaved off her forehead _à la
Rimini_, but she mostly has to comply----"

"Well, I never heard of a man using his daughter as a sandwich-man
before. Which is she?"

Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen pointed out Ariadne, whose bath-towel was
tumbling all over her eyes.

"She looks half-starved!" said _The Bittern_ man.

"My dear man," said Sulphuretta Hydrogen, "don't you know that they
have a crank about meals, and refuse to have them regularly? I am told
that they have a kind of buttery-hatch--a cold pie always cut in the
cupboard, and they go and put their heads in and eat a bit when so
disposed."

"Well, they are free, at any rate--free from the trammels of custom----"

"Oh yes, they are free, but so very sallow!"

I was getting pretty much out of patience at having so many lies told
about my family, and I was just going to contradict that about the
buttery and the poking our heads into a cupboard, when the fat woman
that they had said was Mother, but whom I was sure was not, strode up to
Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen, and said--

"Begging your pardon for contradicting you, Madam, but I am in a
position to state that that is not so. Miss Ariadne is thin because she
chooses to be, and thinks it becoming, but I can assure you that she
eats her three meals a day hearty, and Mr. Taylor isn't far behind-hand,
though he is yellow!"

And then she swooped away, and I knew that it was Elizabeth Cawthorne!
But where on earth had she got a domino and leave to come to the ball?

I thought I would go and look after Ariadne, who I saw could manage to
make eyes out of the holes of a mask. But I suppose where there's a will
there's a way. She was doing it all right, and the young men seemed to
like it. Though I don't believe young men marry the girls who make eyes
at them best, and as Ariadne's one object is to marry and get out of
this house and have me to stay with her, I think she is going the wrong
way to work. I went to her, and I asked her where Mother was.

"I am sure I don't know," she said crossly.

"I'll tell you where Elizabeth Cawthorne is," I said. "She is in the
party--in the room!"

"Well, I can't help that!" said Ariadne, tossing her head. "Mother ought
to look after her better."

I was sorry for poor Mother, because nobody seemed to mind about her in
her own house, and even her own daughter didn't seem to care whether she
was in the room or not. As for George, he was looking all over for Lady
Scilly, and at last he thought he had got her, but it wasn't, for I
thought I knew a little join in the hem of the domino--I seemed to
remember having helped to hem it. They needn't say that eyes can't look
bright in a mask, for this woman's did. She went up to George, and she
didn't speak in a squeaky voice at all, but in French, not the kind of
French she teaches me, but a thick, deep sort, right down her throat.

"_Eh, bien, beau masque!_" was what she said. "I know you, but you do
not know me!"

"I know you by your eyes," he said. "Eyes like the sea----"

Now, Lady Scilly's eyes are quite common, it is only the work round them
that makes them tell, and that would be hidden by the mask. One saw that
George was talking without thinking.

"Eyes without their context mean nothing!" she said, and then I knew the
woman was Christina, for that was the very thing she had once said to
Ariadne to tease her. She evidently thinks it good enough to say twice.

"Come!" she said to George. "Speak to me, say anything to me that the
hour and the mood permit. I want to hear how a poet makes love!"

"Madame!" said George, bowing. I think he was a little shocked, but
after all, if he will give a masked ball, what can he expect? Only I had
no idea that Christina could have done it so well!

"Come," she said again, tapping her foot to show that she had grown
impatient. "Come, a madrigal--a _ballade_, in any kind of china!"

I fancy it was then that George began to suspect that it wasn't Lady
Scilly. She couldn't have managed that about ballads and lyrics.

He asked her if she would lift up the lace of her mask a little--just a
little.

"No, no, I dare not!" she cried out. "There is a hobgoblin called Ben in
the room--a sort of lubber fiend who loves to play pranks on people. Why
on earth don't you send that boy to school?"

I could not help giggling. George looked cross, for this was personal,
and he took the first chance of leaving the mask's side. There wasn't a
buzz of talk in the room, no, not at all, for everybody was trying so
hard to say something clever and appropriate, that they mostly didn't
say anything, but mooned about, trying to look as if they were enjoying
themselves hugely, and secretly bored to death all the time. The only
time people are really gay, I observe, is at a funeral, or at _Every
man_, or somewhere where they particularly shouldn't be jolly.

I was thinking sadly about my dear Mother, and wondering where she was,
when I ran against a Frenchman, a real Frenchman, and he asked me where
was the mistress of the house, and that showed me that other people
thought about her too; I didn't answer for a moment, and he went on in a
kind of dreamy voice--

"I was brought here to see an English interior----"

"Well," I said. "It's inside four walls, isn't it?"

"_Mon Dieu, mademoiselle_," said he, "I had made to myself another idea
of _le home Anglais_--the fireside--the _maîtresse de la maison_ with
her keys depending from her girdle--the children--the sacred children,
standing round her--_bébé_ crowing----"

"There isn't any baby!" I said, "and a good thing too! But this is a
party, don't you see, and we are all playing the fool, and we shall be
sensible to-morrow, and if you will excuse me, I am one of the sacred
children, and I am just looking for my mother's knee to go and stand
against."

He made way for me with a "_Permettez, mademoiselle!_" and I went,
thinking I would go and ask Ben at the door if he knew where she was.
Ben didn't know, but he said that a woman who was standing near the
door, letting the cool night-wind blow in under her mask and telling
people how she enjoyed it, was Lady Scilly. She was standing almost in
the street, with a man, who was George. There are tall bushes near our
door, rather pretty at night, though they belong to the next-door
gardens. Ben didn't know till I told him; he is the stupid child that
doesn't know its own father. He told me what they had been saying. She
had begun by asking him if he approved of women wearing ospreys? There's
a silly thing to ask, for what could he say but that he didn't, being a
poet? Then she made a face, prettyish, out of habit, forgetting that it
couldn't be seen under her mask, and whined,

"Oh, I'm so sorry, it is the least wicked thing I do!"

"For beautiful women--I assume you are a beautiful woman, for purposes
of dialogue," George said; "there is no law of humanity. Go on. Pluck
your red pleasure from the teeth of pain." ...

"Yes, I am very wicked," she said. "My impulses are cruel. Sometimes, do
you know, I am almost afraid of myself."

"As I am--as we all are," said George.

"Why, am I so very terrible? What do I do to you? Speak to me. Why are
you so guarded, so unenterprising?"

She cast a stage glance round. It was very funny, but George knew that
Ben was the commissionaire and Lady Scilly didn't, so she couldn't think
why George was so stiff. In fact, if George had only known it, he was
bi-chaperoned--if that is the way to put it--for there was me too. Ben
and I enjoyed it hugely, but I don't think George did, because he could
not quite make a fool of himself before Ben. Besides, it was draughty
out there, and George takes cold easily. He kept trying to get her to
come in, and she pretended to be babyish and wouldn't. She said she had
never been out in the open street at midnight in her life before, and
she thoroughly enjoyed it; that it was a Romeo and Juliet night, or some
rot of that sort, and that she might never have such an opportunity
again. But poor George felt he could not play Romeo, because of Ben, and
there was nothing to climb, except a lamp-post that led to nothing,
since Juliet was standing in the gutter below it.

George looked at his watch, and said, "In ten minutes they will give the
signal for the removal of masks. Had you not better----?"

"I shall leave the party," she said. "I shall walk straight home! It
will spoil all the effect of this enchanted night, if we have to meet
again in the glare of----"

"The lights are shaded," George put in.

"I alluded to the glare of publicity!" she said. "I shall ask this
commissionaire," she said, "to call my carriage----"

"Better not," said George hastily, "for you would have to give him your
name,--your name which I know. For my sake--won't you slip back into the
ball-room and submit to the ordeal, as I know it is, of unmasking like
the rest? Believe me it is best."

"It is my host commands, is it not?" she said slyly, to show him that
she had known it was he all the time, and ran past him, in a skittish
way. As if he hadn't known all the time that she knew that he knew that
she knew who he was! Grown-up people do waste so much time in
pretending.

Well, I thought if masks were going to be removed, I had better take up
a respectable-looking position at once, say, beside Miss Mander, which
seemed suitable, and I went in. Then I saw Lady Scilly again, and wanted
so to know what she was up to. She was stealing out of the room, and the
devil was going with her. He was _The Bittern_ man, of course, only I
didn't know she knew him. They were talking very earnestly.

"You know the way?" she was asking him.

"I know the house, like the inside of a glove," he said, and indeed he
did, for hadn't I taken him all over it, the day he interviewed me
instead of George, and there was a row? I think he is mischievous,
rather like Puck was, in _Midsummer Night's Dream_, so I thought I would
stick to them. Lady Scilly wanted to go into an empty room to take off
her mask and domino. That I could quite understand, as she had behaved
so badly in both. _The Bittern_ man offered to show her the way to
George's sanctum.

"You see, you can go where you like in a show-house--or ought to be able
to. It is public property, the property of the press, at any rate."

"The press is too much with us, soon and late," said she, laughing.

"Ah, but confess, my lady, you can't do without us!" said this awful
young man--though I suppose he has to be cheeky, so as to get his nose
in everywhere in the interest of his paper. "You suffer us gladly."

"I don't suffer at all--I shouldn't allow you to make me suffer," said
she, not understanding him. Smart women never do understand things out
of the Bible.

I followed them; my excuse was, that I wanted to see they didn't steal
the spoons. They made the coolest remarks as they went up-stairs.

"I have never been beyond the First Floor in this House of Awe," said
_The Bittern_ man.

"Haven't you? It seems to get more and more comfortable and less
eccentric as one goes up," said Lady Scilly.

"Art is only skin-deep," said _The Bittern_ man. "Just look at that bed,
which seems to me to have come from nothing more dangerously subversive
or artistic than Staple's.... Come, lay down your mask and domino, and
let us go down again, and wait about in the back precincts till we hear
our host give the word for unmasking."

So they marched out of George's bedroom, for that was where they had got
to--and as no one ever need see that, he has it quite comfortable, and
modern--and sneaked down-stairs by a different way. I followed them.
Soon they got quite lost and were heading straight for the kitchen. I
wondered if Elizabeth had taken off her domino, and gone back to her
work, for though the supper was all sent in from a shop, there would be
sure to be something for her to do.

These two marched straight in, and I after them, and found themselves in
a blaze of light and an empty kitchen--for the moment only, for one
heard all the men stumping along from the dining-room on the other side,
and the scullery-maid rinsing something in the scullery. Just as Lady
Scilly and _The Bittern_ man burst in, Mother was standing alone, in a
checked apron, before the kitchen-dresser, and turned right round and
looked at them. She looked dignified and cold, in spite of the kitchen
fire, which had caught her face on one side.

Lady Scilly and _The Bittern_ man took no notice of her, but walked
about looking at things.

"And so this is the Poet's kitchen!" Lady Scilly said, rather
scornfully. "How his pots shine!"

"Very comfortable indeed!" said Mr. Frederick Cook. He seemed to despise
George. Then he continued, laughing under his mask--"It's no end of a
privilege to see the humble objects that minister to the Poet's use.
This is his soup-ladle, and----"

Mother made a little step forward and finished Mr. Cook's sentence for
him.

"And this is his dresser, and this is his boiler, that is his cat--and
I'm his wife!"

Lady Scilly skooted, Mr. Cook stayed behind and did a little bit of
polite. He isn't a bad sort, and Mother rather liked him after that, and
he began to come here.




CHAPTER IX


Smart women like having a fluffy dog or a child to drive with them in
the afternoons. Lady Scilly hasn't got either of her own, so she is
always borrowing me, and sending for me to lunch and drive. She seldom
asks Ariadne, because Ariadne is out and nearer her own age--too near.
That's what I tell Ariadne, when she is jealous, and makes me a scene
about it, and it is true. If it were not for the honour and glory of the
thing, I don't care so very much about it myself, Lady Scilly's motor is
always getting into trouble, because it is so highly bred, I suppose. We
run into something live--or else the kerb--most times we are out, and
it's extremely agitating, though I must say she never screams, though
once she fainted after it was all over. It is a mark of breeding to get
into scrapes, but not make a fuss. We have all heard about it, she is
just as much before the public as my father, though in a different way.
I read an interview with her in _The Bittern_ the other day (she had to
start some Cottage Homes at Ealing to get herself into that!), and it
said that hers was one of the oldest names in England, and that she was
the daughter of a hundred Earls. Now I call that nonsense, for how
could she be? There isn't room for a hundred Earls since the Heptarchy,
unless they were all at the same time, and that is not likely.

Lord Scilly is very well born too, he's the eldest son of the Earl of
Fowey. The Earl keeps him very tight. So they have to get along with
expectations and a title, till the old man dies, and Lady Scilly wishes
he would, but Lord Scilly doesn't, because he's not quite a beast. He is
very nice, and rather fond of Lady Scilly, though he is always scolding
her. That is the expectations, they spoil the temper, I fancy. I have
heard that he doesn't think it dignified, the way she goes on, lowering
herself and turning his house into a menagerie. He doesn't understand
why she pets authors and publishers. The authors help her to write
novels, and the publishers publish them for love and ninety pounds.
George is writing one for her now, and he goes to her place nearly every
morning to see about it. Lord Scilly doesn't mind in the least her
collaborating with George and the others, it keeps her out of mischief;
but I expect he would be down upon her at once if she were to
collaborate with one of her own class, that would be different.

I shall be glad when the book is finished, for Elizabeth Cawthorne, who
tells me everything, doesn't think so much collaborating is quite what
is due to Mother, and that if she were the mistress, "blessed if she'd
let herself be put upon by a countess."

Elizabeth says Lady Scilly is a daisy--that's what her name means,
Paquerette. That's what she tells me to call her. I am proud to call a
grown-up person by her Christian name, and a titled lady too, and it
makes Ariadne jealous, which does her good, and keeps her down.
Paquerette treats Ariadne on quite another footing, any one can see she
is not nearly so intimate with her as she is with me. I go there at all
times and seasons, and I accept no benefits from her. I won't. If she
gives me things, I take them and give them to Ariadne. So I feel I may
say and think what I like of her, while amusing myself with her, and
listening to all the silly things she says. The funny thing is, I am
always trying to be grown-up, and she is always trying to be childish.

The other day when I got to Curzon Street about twelve--Lady Scilly had
sent a messenger for me--she was still in bed in the loveliest pale-blue
tea-jacket, down to where the bed-clothes came up to, and she was
writing her letters in pencil on a writing-board, trying to squeeze a
few words in round a great sprawling gilt monogram that took up nearly
all the paper. There were three French books on the bed, they had covers
with ladies with red mouths and all their hair down, and _La Femme
Polype_ was the name of one, and _Madame Belle-et-m'aime_ another. Lady
Scilly says she always gets up all her history and philosophy in French
if possible, so as to improve her grasp of the language. There was also
on the pillow a box of cigarettes, and a great bunch of lilies, that
made me feel sleepy. There are daisies worked all over the curtains and
the counterpane, and great bunches of them painted on the mirrors
hanging head downwards, and about three sets of silver-topped brush
things spread out on the dressing-table. As for photographs, I never saw
so many in my life! There are about a dozen cabinets with "To darling,
from Kitty London," and as many more with "Best love, yours cordially,
Gladys Margate," and I have given up trying to count the ones of
actresses! Then the men! There is one of the poet with the bumpy
forehead, and wrinkly trousers, who wrote _The Sorrows of the Amethyst_,
and one of the K.C. who wrote _Duchesses in the Divorce Court_--the
Ollendorff man I call him; and one of the men who did the Gaiety play
called _The Up-and-Down Girl_, which Lady Scilly acted in the provinces
once, for a charity, till Lord Scilly stopped her. There he is in his
volunteer uniform looking like a lamb. I do like Lord Scilly, and I
think he's put upon. So I am as nice to him as I can be when I see him,
which isn't often. He never comes into her room where I principally am.
There's a desk in one corner, where she writes her little notes--I don't
suppose she ever wrote a real letter in her life, her handwriting is so
big it would burst the post-bag--and there are two sorts of racks on it,
one to hold her bills that she hasn't paid, and that's got printed on it
in gold "_Oh Horrors!_" and another with those she has paid with "_Thank
Heaven!_" on it, though that one is mostly empty. She never hardly pays
bills, she says it is waste of tissue, and bad form, but sends
something on account, and that I think is a very good way, for however
broke you are, you must go on ordering dresses, else the dressmaker
would close your account, and if you only go on long enough, the chances
are you'll die first and leave a nice little bill behind you, that,
being dead, you can't be expected to pay!

I hate kissing people in bed, I nearly always tumble over them; and
also, if they are writing, I can't help seeing what it is, and then if
it is "_Dearests_" and "_Darlings_" I do feel awkward. But to-day when
she had said "How do you do?" she handed me the writing-board.

"Write for me, dear," she said, "to the most odious woman in London. And
the most insolent, and the most unwashed! Insolent! Yes, positively she
dared to play Lady Ildegonde in _The Devey Devastator_ at a _matinée_ at
Camberwell yesterday, in perfect dreams of dresses--stood by the
management of course--and nails like a coal-heaver's. Now don't you
think, that as the part of Lady Ildegonde was admittedly written round
my personality, with my entire consent, that it is an outrage for Irene
Lauderdale to dress the part better than I can afford to do! I shall not
forgive her. Now you write. '_Dear thing!_' Don't be surprised, I can't
afford to quarrel with her, unfortunately! '_You were wonderful
yesterday! I know what's what, and believe me that's it!_' I mean the
dresses, but she will think I mean her playing! That is what we call
diplomacy. Don't say any more. Short, and spiteful. Now seal it. I will
see that Mrs. Ptomaine guys Lauderdale in Romeo. Tommy will do anything
for me, and _The Bittern_ will do anything for her. We will go and see
her this very afternoon. I must get up, I suppose. Ring for Miller,
dear. Oh, good heavens! how bored I am!"

She threw one of the French novels (they were library books, so it
didn't matter) across the room, and it fell into the wash-basin, and
then she seemed to feel better.

"I wish I could do without Miller!" she said. "Old Miller hates me, and
I loathe her. But she will never leave me. Too good 'perks' for that.
She always folds up my frocks as if she knew they would belong to her
one day. So they will! I can't afford to quarrel with a woman who can do
my hair carelessly, with a single hair-pin. What am I going to wear
to-day, Miller?"

"Well," said Mrs. Miller (she's Scotch, and she is rather stingy of
"ladyships"), "there's your blue that come home last week. It seems a
pity to leave it aside just yet."

"You mean you can do without it a little longer, eh, Miller? No, I can't
put that on, it's too big for me since massage. I simply swim in it."

"Then there is the grey _panne_."

"Oh, that dam-panne, as I call it. No, it makes me look like my own
maid. No offence to you, Miller."

"I don't intend to take any, my lady," said Miller, pursing up her
lips. "What about your black with sequins?"

"Yes, let's have the vicious sequins. It will go with the child's hair.
You see, I dress to you, my dear."

But I knew it was only that she likes things to go nicely together, just
as she chooses her horses to be a pair.

Then she sat down and did her face, very neatly; it is about the only
thing she does really well. She put red on her lips, and white on her
nose, and black on her eyes, till she looked like a Siamese doll I once
had before I licked the paint off. I paid particular attention, for I
shall do it when I am grown-up, that is if I am able to afford it--the
best paints--and I am told that stands you in about four hundred a year.

Her hair is the very newest gold shade, the one they have in
Paris--rather purplish--it will be blue next season, I dare say! It is
just a little bit dark down by the roots, which is pretty, I think, and
looks so very natural. All the time Miller was dressing it, she worked
away at the front with the stick of her comb, pulling little bits out,
and putting them back, and staring into a hand-glass as anxiously as if
her life depended on it, while Miller patiently gummed some little
tendrils of hair down on her forehead.

"Child, child," she said to me. "Do you know what makes me sigh?"

"Indigestion?" I asked, quite on the chance, but she said it wasn't,
that she never had had it, it was only because she felt so terribly, so
diabolically, so preternaturally ugly.

"Oh no, you look sweet!" I said. I really thought so, but Miller
grinned.

"You are delightful!" Lady Scilly said. "And you can have that boa you
are fiddling with, if you like. Tulle is death to me! Makes me
meretricious; and, child, when your times comes, don't ever--ever--have
anything to do with massage! It grows on one so! One can't leave it off,
and it has to be always with one, like the poor. I have actually to
subsidize a masseuse to live round the corner, and she cheeks me all the
time. Oh, _la, la_!"

I know about massage. I massed Ariadne once, according to a system we
read of in a book. I've seldom had such a chance at her. I pinched her
black and blue, and she kept saying, "Go on! Harder! Harder!" but as it
didn't seem to agree with her afterwards, I didn't do it again. But I
took the boa to give Ariadne, I have no use for such things myself.

When Lady Scilly was ready she said--"We won't lunch in, we will go to
Prince's and have a _filet_. Scilly's in a bad temper because of bills.
Well, bills must come,--and I may go, I suppose. There's no reason one
shouldn't keep out of their way."

She stuck a hat on with twenty feathers in it, and we went down, and she
told the butler to call a hansom now, and tell the carriage to fetch us
at three o'clock.

The butler said, "Very well, my lady. Your ladyship has a lunch-party
of ten!" all in the same voice.

"So I have! Oh, Parker, what a fool I am!" and she flopped into a hall
seat.

"Yes, my lady," Parker said, quite politely, closing the hall-door
again. He has known her from a child, so he may be rude.

So we took off our hats, at least I did--she wears a hat every time she
can, except in bed--and went into the library where Lord Scilly was, and
her cousin, a young man from the Foreign Office, Simon Hermyre, that I
know.

Lord Scilly came up to her and said out loud, "You have got too much
on!"

She softly dabbed her face with her handkerchief to please him, but so
as not to disturb anything, and the young man from the Foreign Office
laughed. He is a fifth cousin. Lady Scilly says her cousins grow like
blackberries on every bush--one of the penalties of greatness.

"I've never really seen your face, Paquerette," he said, "and I do
believe it would justify my wildest expectations. Still, I think you are
right not to make it too cheap. Who's coming? Smart people, or one of
your Bohemian crowds?"

"You'll see," she said. "Mrs. Ptomaine, for one."

"Dear Tommy!" said he. "I love her.... Desist, O wasp!" he said to one
that had come in by the window and was bothering him. "This is a
precursor of Tommy."

"Tommy's all right, so long as she hasn't got her knife into you. She
favours you, Simon. You are to take her in, and distract her, and see
that she doesn't make eyes at my tame millionaire."

"Oh, Mr. Pawky!" said Simon. "Is he coming? You should put me opposite,
so that I could intercept the glances. And why mayn't Tommy have a bit
of him? She's terribly thin!"

"Because he isn't a very big millionaire--only half a one--and there's
only just enough for me. So you know what you have got to do. You may
flirt wildly with Tommy, if nothing else will do. Let me see, who else
is coming? Oh, Marston, the actor, a nice boy, gives me boxes, and
mortally afraid of Lauderdale--and some odd fill-ups. Just think, I
nearly went out to lunch with this child, and forgot you all. I should
like to have seen all your faces!"

Then all these people came, and Lady Scilly put me on one side of the
millionaire and herself on the other. He looked very mild and
indigestible, and as if millionairing didn't agree with him. He could
only drink hot water and eat dry toast. He made a little
"How-Are-You-My-Pretty-Dear" conversation with me, but he attended most
to Lady Scilly, of course. She was telling him all about Miss
Lauderdale, and _Lady Ildegonde_ and the dresses, and discussing
Society, as it is now.

"Titles! Why, my dear man, no one cares a fig for birth now-a-days. No,
the only thing we care for is culture, and the only thing we can't
forgive is for people to bore us!"

I wondered where the poor millionaire came in, for he can't culture,
while he certainly does bore, but I suppose Lady Scilly wouldn't waste
her time for nothing, and perhaps there is some other attraction Society
takes count of that she didn't mention?

"I'll go anywhere and everywhere to be amused," she went on. "I'd go to
Gatti's Music Hall under the Arches--only music halls are a bit stale
now! I'd go to a prize-fight in a sewer--anything to get some colour
into my life!"

"Paint the town red, wouldn't you!" muttered Lord Scilly.

"That is the way we all are," Lady Scilly went on. "Look at Kitty
London! She is going to marry a perfect darling of an acrobat, who can
play billiards on his own back!"

"Cheap culture that!" said Lord Scilly, and I don't know what he meant,
but I knew he meant to be nasty; but the millionaire went on sipping his
hot water, and enjoyed having a countess talk like that to him, and
stood her any amount of dinners at the Paxton for it, I dare say. They
say he runs it?

He was well protected, but still I could not help thinking that Mrs.
Ptomaine on the other side of the table, not even opposite, seemed to
have her eye on him, one of them at any rate, Simon couldn't manage to
distract both. I didn't like her. She came to our ball in a mask, and
flirted with Mr. Frederick Cook. I quite saw why Simon Hermyre compared
her to a wasp. She looked as if she sat up too late and drank too much
tea, and I was sure that though they were very smart, her petticoats
were all muddy at the bottom. She called Lady Scilly "Darling!" across
the table every now and then to show how intimate she was. Lady Scilly
never cares or notices. It is one of her charms. The actor was on her
other side. I saw Lord Scilly stare at his eighteen rings and his nice
painted face, as if he were a new arrival. But there is some excuse for
him, he was just up--he said so--and I dare say he was too tired to wash
the paint off when he got home this morning. Besides that, he is acting
Juliet to Miss Lauderdale's Romeo--that is the way they do it now. I
wish I had seen Shakespeare when men acted men's parts and women did
women, but I was born too late for that.

When we got up from lunch, Mrs. Ptomaine cleverly caught her dress in a
leg of her chair, and she wouldn't let the actor disengage it, but
waited till the millionaire came past her seat and had a feeble try at
it. She smiled at him very gratefully for tearing a large bit of the
flounce off in getting it out, but after all, it made an introduction,
and she can have a new piece of common lace put in. Afterwards in the
drawing-room she had quite a nice chat with him, before Lady Scilly sent
somebody to break it up, as she did, after five minutes.

At four o'clock they all went and we took our drive after all. Lady
Scilly never pays calls--only the bourgeois do--but we went to see Mrs.
Ptomaine.

"I hadn't a word with Tommy to-day," Lady Scilly said, "and I had
several little things to arrange with her. I can't sleep till I have put
a spoke in Lauderdale's wheel. Poor Tommy! What a fright she looked
to-day! But she is not a bad sort, is Tommy, and devoted to me!"

"What does she do?" I asked.

"Oh, she works the press for me. She has command of half-a-dozen papers.
Goodness knows how, for I am sure no editor would ever care for her to
make love to him! She is useful, you see, she describes my dresses free.
I don't care for that myself, naturally, but the dressmakers do, if
their names are given, and then they don't worry so with their bills.
And she interviewed me once, and I gave Kitty London such a
lesson--things I wanted conveyed to her, you know, and could not quite
say myself! It is rather a good idea to conduct one's quarrels through
the press, isn't it? Here we are at Tommy's flat! Up at the very, very
top! The vulture in its eyrie--is it the vulture that has an eyrie? I
know it has a ragged neck with cheap fur round it! Up we go! No lift!
One oughtn't to visit with flats without a lift! You ring!"

I rang, and Mrs. Ptomaine herself opened the door.

"So soon, darling! Delightful!" she said. She didn't look very pleased
to see us, I thought, but she was "in to tea," I could see, for there
were three kinds of little tea-cakes and a yellow cake made with
egg-powder.

"I wanted to prime you about your critique of _Lady Ildegonde_, you
know. Now, Tommy, it is understood, Lauderdale is to be snubbed and
punished for her impertinence in daring to act _me_, in Camille's
dresses."

"Darling, quite so! Of course. I had it nearly written. Dearest, you
don't trust your Tommy."

"Not so much darling dear, now, if you don't mind," said Lady Scilly.
"We are alone, and this child doesn't need impressing. It fidgets me."

"All right, sweetheart--I beg your pardon," said Mrs. Ptomaine, quite
obligingly; but talk of fidgeting, she herself was in a terrible state.
"Is it too early for tea?"

"Too late you mean, Tommy. What is the matter with you? Have you got a
headache?"

"Three distinct headaches," said poor Tommy. "Did three first nights
last night, and got a separate headache for each."

"How interesting!" said Lady Scilly. "I mean I am very sorry. Is there
nothing I can do?"

"No, no, nothing. I have experience of these. Nothing but complete rest
will do any good. If I could just lie down and darken the room and think
of nothing for an hour."

Lady Scilly got up to go after such a plain hint as that, and we were
just opening the door when it opened itself and let in the millionaire!

Mrs. Ptomaine made the best of it. She got up to receive him with a very
pained smile on the side of her face next Lady Scilly, and said to her
in an undertone, "No chance for me, you see! This man will want his tea.
_Must_ you go?"

Lady Scilly hadn't even said she must go, but she did go, and p.d.q. as
my brother Ben says. What was more, she said "Good-bye, Mrs. Ptomaine,"
in a tone that must have peeled the skin off poor Tommy's nose. No more
"dears" and "darlings"! To the millionaire she said, "So we meet again?"
and from the way she said that polite thing, I should say he would have
serious doubts as to whether he would ever be invited to drink
toast-and-water in her house any more.

"There are as good millionaires in South Africa as ever came out of it,"
she said to me, going down-stairs. "Poor old Pawky! One woman after
another exploits the dear old thing. They are kind to him, _pour le bon
motif!_ He did say to me in a first introduction, 'Hev' you any bills?'
But I put it down to his South African manners and his idea of breaking
the ice and making conversation. Tommy will fleece him. I hope she'll
get him to give her a new carpet!"

I know that Mr. Pawky gave Lady Scilly her box at the Opera, but then it
was on consideration of her allowing him to sit in it with her now and
then. Thus she gives a _quid pro quo_, which poor Tommy can't do, having
nothing marketable about her, not even a title.

If he values Lady Scilly's kindness he is a fool to run after Tommy so
obviously. But that is what I have noticed about these rich people; they
seem to lose their heads, let themselves go cheap every now and then.
Tommy is so ugly--she never looked nice in her life except when she was
Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen, at our party, and wore a mask and flirted
with Mr. Frederick Cook--that he must be demented, or jealous of
Frederick Cook, perhaps?

She has an organ, I mean a paper she's on, and I suppose she can write
Mr. Pawky up. Still I think he has made a bad exchange, for Mrs.
Ptomaine won't last. They change the staffs of those papers in the
night, and any morning Mr. Frederick Cook may walk down to the office
and find a new man sitting at his desk, and the same with Mrs.
Ptomaine,--where there's a way (of making a little) there's a minx to
take it! so she often says. Lady Scilly can't lose her title except to
change it for another and a nicer.




CHAPTER X


It is a very odd thing that with a father a novelist, who can sell ten
thousand copies of a book, you can't get any sort of useful advice on
the subject he has made peculiarly his own. Ariadne would much sooner
consult the cook about such things. And it is not nice to ask advice
from a person who can oblige you to follow it! George can't in fairness
advise as an author and command as a father, so the result is that
Ariadne makes blunders at all these parties she goes to now. Poor girl,
she only has me to consult. I say it is a mistake the moment you enter a
room to fix your eyes on the man you want to dance with you, or even to
ask him for a dance as Ariadne did once. She said she thought he was too
shy to ask her, though he did know her a little, and she wanted to see
if he danced as beautifully as he looked. A man shy! It takes a shy girl
like Ariadne to imagine that! For Ariadne is both shy and superstitious.
She gets that from Lady Scilly and Lady Scilly's aunt, the Countess of
Plyndyn. A very fat old lady with a corresponding hand, that when she
holds it out to a fortune-teller, it is like counting the creases in a
feather-bed. She makes them take count of every crease though, and begs
them to invent a fate for her.

"Haven't I got a future like other people?" she whines, and then the
poor paid fortune-teller, in a great hurry, sows a crop of initials in
her hand, and she is not more than pleased, and takes it as a right to
have three husbands, although she is already seventy.

Lady Scilly never thinks of having an afternoon-party now without at
least two fortune-tellers in different parts of the house. You see
people waiting in little lumps at the doors; in a little more, and they
would be tying their handkerchiefs to the handles, just as you do to
bathing-machines, to say who has the right to go in first. They go in
shyly, just like people who have made a stumble in the street, looking
silly, and they come out looking humble, like people who have been
having their hair washed. The fortune-teller doesn't tell women the very
serious things, for instance, that they are going to die themselves,
though she tells them when their husbands are. They always tell Ariadne
what sort of coloured man she is going to marry, but as there are only
two sorts of coloured men, fair and dark, it is sure to come right
sometimes. The last time the woman said, "Fair--verging on red!" and as
Ariadne doesn't know any man who has anything like red hair except Mr.
Aix, whom she doesn't care for, she frowned and said, "Are you quite
sure?" The woman changed it to dark, almost black, in a great hurry,
and Ariadne was pleased, for it is a safer colour. Ariadne wears a piece
of wood let into a bracelet that Lady Scilly gave her, just the same as
she wears herself, and touches it whenever she thinks misfortune is in
the air, or when she is afraid of making a fool of herself more than
usual. She took me out to gather May dew in Kensington Gardens, and very
smutty it was. She always counts cherry-stones, and once at the
Islingtons' lunch when it came badly, she actually swallowed Never!

Now, in Lady Scilly's set, they call her "The girl that swallowed
Never," and it seems to amuse them. Anything amuses them, especially a
nickname. I myself wonder Ariadne did not have appendicitis, or at least
that apple-tree growing out of her ear they used to tell us of when we
were children. At luncheon parties now, they make a joke of refusing to
help her to greengage, cherry, or plum-tart, in fact to anything
countable, and Ariadne doesn't seem to see that it is plain to them all
that she is anxious to be married, which, though it is true, sounds
unpleasant, at any rate for the men. She is wild to be married, and to
go away and leave this house and have a house of her own that she can
ask me to come and stay at, and Miss Mander. I think it is a very good
wish, only why make it public? Nor she needn't let every one know that
George only gives her fifteen pounds a year to dress like a lady on. It
is cheaper to dress like an artist or a Bohemian, or in character, and
so she does. We don't have any dressmaker, we hardly know the feel of
one even. Mother and Ariadne make their own clothes, and Mother never
going out, is able to give Ariadne a little extra off her own allowance.
I don't know how much that is. She will never tell.

Mother has all the taste that Aunt Gerty hasn't got. It is odd, how
taste skips one in a family! Aunt Gerty is like a very smart rag-doll,
dressed in odds and ends to show the fashion on a small scale. And
fashion after all is only a matter of "bulge." You bulge in a different
place every year, and if you can only bulge a little earlier, or leave
off bulging in any particular place sooner than other people, well, you
may consider you are a well-dressed woman!

Ariadne makes money doing his reviews for George. He gives her sixpence
a head, when he remembers to. Dozens of books come in to our house every
week, from _The Bittern_, and for _Wild Oats_. George is "Pease Blossom"
on _The Bittern_. We don't need to subscribe to a library, we live in a
book-shop practically, for they are all sold in Booksellers' Row
afterwards. George takes the important ones, of course, and gives the
smaller fry to Ariadne to do. She is his understudy. When they are ready
George writes hers up, and Christina types them, and it all goes in
together. He once reviewed a batch of bad ones under the heading of
_Darnel_, and people thought him clever but malicious.

Papa doesn't know it, but Ariadne has an understudy too. She lets the
novels out to me, and gives me twopence a head. I must say that she has
no idea of beating one down. I read them as carefully as I have time
for--it depends on how many Ariadne gives me--and then when she is doing
her hair, I sit beside her, and tell her the plots. The more improper
ones she keeps to herself, but I read those for pleasure, not work, so
it's all right.

Ariadne knows about a dozen useful phrases that she didn't invent, but
found ready made. "Up to the level of this author's reputation" is one;
"marks a distinct advance," "breezy," "strong, or convincing," and the
opposites, "unconvincing," "weak," "morbid," "effete," are useful ones.
She uses all these turn and turn about, and always mentions "a fine
sense of atmosphere" if she honestly can.

She has great fun sometimes, when she meets the authors in society. She
flirts with them till they get confidential, and tell her about their
books, and how totally they have been misunderstood by the press, and
what a crassly ignorant set reviewers are! They explain to her that not
one of the whole d--d crew has the slightest sense of responsibility,
especially The _Bittern_, which has got the most God-forsaken staff that
ever paper went to the devil with! Ariadne is amused at all this and
gives them another chance of conversation, and then they go on to quote
her own words to her!

Once, though, she got caught, and George very nearly took all the
reviewing away from her, for he had to stand the racket himself, of
course. She had actually said at the end of the review that it was a
pity Mr. ---- I forget the author's name--did not relieve our anxiety as
to the perpetrator of the hellish crime, which to the very end he
allowed to remain shrouded in obscurity. Well, as a matter of fact,
there was a hanging scene and dying confession in the last chapter but
one, but Ariadne unfortunately burnt that before she had got to it. She
was using the novel as a screen to keep the draught off the flame for
heating her tongs, and so she never read that part, and had to make up
her own end. The editor of _The Bittern_ had to acknowledge the error
and apologize in a footnote, because the author threatened a libel
action. Ariadne doesn't care about meeting that man in society!

It is fairer at any rate for Ariadne to review books than George,
because she doesn't write them. People who write books shouldn't have
the right to say what they think of other people's; it is like a mother
listening to tales in the nursery, and putting one child in the corner
to please another. I once went into the study and saw George walking up
and down, and throwing light bits of furniture about.

"D--m the fellow! He's stolen the babe unborn of an excellent plot of
mine, and mauled it and ruined it, beyond recognition!"

It was no use my putting in my word, and saying, "Well, then, George,
you can use it again." He went on fuming and fussing, loudly dictating a
regular corker of a review.

"I'll let him have it! Go on, please, Miss Mander. '_The signal
ineptitude of this author's_----'"

I am sure that was going to be a very unpleasant review to read, though
I never saw it in print.

Ariadne is sentimental, and doesn't care for realistic novels at all,
which is a pity, as George's greatest friend, and the person who comes
oftenest to this house, is a realist, and wrote a novel called _The
Laundress_. He lived in Shoreditch in a tenement dwelling for a whole
year to learn how to write it from the laundresses themselves,--he went
to tea with a different laundress every afternoon? The one he wrote
about had three diamond rings and three husbands to match. He himself
wore flannel shirts then, not nice frock-coats such as he has now, but
the flannel shirts weren't because he was poor, but so as not to
frighten the laundresses by looking too smart. Then the book came out,
and there was a great fuss about it, and it was published at sixpence,
and our cook bought it, and it lies on the kitchen-table beside the
cookery-book.

That is the reason Mr. Aix, being a realist, makes more money than Papa,
who is an idealist. You see, Duchesses and Countesses want to hear all
about laundresses, just as much as cooks do, but though Duchesses and
Countesses are interested in mediæval knights and maidens, cooks--nor
yet laundresses--aren't.

"The suburbs do not appreciate me as they do you, old man!" he says
sometimes. "If I was proper, they wouldn't even look at me!"

"Ay! the suburbs?" George says dreamily; "the kind, the mild, the
tenderly trustful suburbs. I manipulate them freely. I have taught
Peckham Rye and Clapham that there are stranger things in Pall Mall and
Piccadilly than are dreamt of in their simple philosophy----"

"You have tickled the Philistines, not smitten them!" says Mr. Aix.

"I have shocked them--they love being shocked! I have startled
them--that does them good. I have puzzled them--not altogether
unpleasantly. I have inured them to Dukes and familiarized them with
Duchesses, as the butcher hardens his pony to a motor-car. I reduce to a
common, romantic denominator----"

"You are like those useful earthworms of _le père_ Darwin, bringing up
soil and interweaving strata," said Mr. Aix wearily.

George accepted the worm reluctantly, and went on. "Yes, I dominate the
lower strata, they dote on any topsy-turvy upper-class gospel I chose at
the moment to formulate for their crass benefit. Miss Mander, did you
ever envisage Peckham?"

"I lived there and sold matches once," said she, "and, moreover, I've
kept a Home for distressed female-authors in the Isle of Dogs."

"Is there anything you haven't done?" said Mr. Aix, quite jealous of a
woman interfering in his own line. He always makes a point of living
among his raw material. When he was writing _The Serio-Comic_, in order
to get the serious atmosphere--which I should have thought gin would
have done for well enough--he went every night of his life to some music
hall or other, and went behind and talked to them, and fastened their
frocks at the back for them, and put in hair-pins when they stuck out
just as they were going on. Then he stood them drinks, and didn't preach
for his life, for if he had, the serio-comics wouldn't have told him
anything or shown him the secret of their inner life. He had to pretend
that he thought them and their life all that was perfect. Christina
calls this novel "The Sweetmeat in the Gutter," and loves it, though
George says it is as broad as it's long, and that ladies shouldn't read
it. But Christina has been to Klondike and seen the seamy side, so it
doesn't matter. _I_ have read _The Serio-Comic_, and I can't see
anything wrong. There's more seriousness than fun in it. Miss Deucie
Dulcimer's real name is Frances Raggles, and she's the mother of five in
the course of three hundred and fifty pages, and there's a
brandy-and-soda in every chapter.

Mr. Aix is forty, but he looks like a boy. He has a snub soft nose like
Lady Scilly's pug, with wrinkles on the bridge of it. He wears
spectacles because of his weak eyes, and he always says "Quite so," as
if he were good-natured enough to agree with Providence in everything.
He is the opposite of George, who is proud to be considered cat-like.
Perhaps that is why they are friends. If Mr. Aix were a dog, he would
knock over everything with his tail. He has no tact. He never drinks
anything but water, and does calisthenics before breakfast with an
exerciser on a door. He is the kind of man who would put stops in a
telegram--so very punctilious. His eyes are wall, and look different
ways, and Aunt Gerty says that once at a dance he asked two girls for
the same polka, and they both accepted, because he looked at them both
at the same time.

He is about the only person who doesn't think Ariadne pretty, so Ariadne
naturally dislikes him. She can't help it. If we didn't let her think
she was pretty, she would have jaundice, or something lingering of that
sort. She snubs Mr. Aix, but somehow he won't consider himself snubbed.
It comes of having no sense of decency, as the reviews say of him.
Christina chaffs him, and teases him about his next novel, and asks him
if it is to be called _The Dustman_ or _The General_, and what the
_locale_ is to be, the scullery or the collecting-places just outside
London?

I have an idea that it will be called _The Seamstress_, for he has
lately taken to coming up into the little entresol on the stairs where
we sit and stitch, and make our frocks, and asking us to teach him to
sew. He puts out a hand like a sheaf of bananas, Ariadne fits a needle
into one of them, and he cobbles away quite painstakingly for an hour.

Once he came up when Ariadne was awfully tired, and could hardly keep
her eyes open, as she always is after a dance.

"I have often wondered," he began, "what must be the sensations of a
young girl on entering on her kingdom of the ball-room. Is she dazzled,
is she obfuscated by the twinkling repetition of the lights? are her
senses stunned or stimulated by the ponderous beat of the time,
relentless under its top-dressing of melody, like despair underlying
frivolity? Is she----?"

He would have gone on for ever if I had not interrupted--

"I can tell you. She's thinking all the time, 'Is there a hair-pin
sticking out? Is the tip of my nose shiny? Is my dress too short in
front, and is it properly fastened at the back, and what does Mr. ---- it
depends which Mister is there that evening--think of it all?"

"Don't, Tempe!" said Ariadne.

"No, no, Miss Tempe, go on, I beg of you. Go on being indiscreet. Tell
me some more things about women."

"Do you know why women always sit on one side when they are alone in a
hansom?"

"No, I have no idea. Some charmingly morbid reason, I suppose?"

"Oh, you can call it morbid, if you like," I said. "It is only because
there happens to be a looking-glass there."

George and Mr. Aix have different publishers, but the same literary
agent. A publisher once took them both to the top of a high hill in
Surrey and tempted them--to sell him the rights of every novel they did
for ten years, and be kept in luxury by him. But they both shook their
heads and said, "You must go to Middleman!" Then he took them to a
London restaurant and made them drunk, and still they shook their heads
and sent him to Middleman, who makes all their bargains for them, but
he can't control all the reviews.

One morning Mr. Aix came in to see George, with a blue press-cutting in
his hand; I was in the study then, as it happened, and I did not go.
George never minds our hearing everything, he says it is too much of an
effort to be a hero to one's typewriter, or one's daughter.

"I am in a rage!" Mr. Aix said, and so I suppose he was, though he
looked more like a white gooseberry than ever. "Just let me get hold of
this fellow they have got on _The Bittern_, and see if I don't wring his
neck for him!"

George didn't say anything, and so I asked--somebody had to--"What has
_The Bittern_ man done, please?"

"Done! He has dammed me with faint praise, that's all! I'd have the
fellow know that I'm read in every pothouse, every kitchen in England!
Here, George, take it, and read it, the infamous thing!"

George read it--at least he ran his eyes over it. He didn't seem to want
to see it particularly, and gave it back as if it bit him, saying--

"Well, my dear fellow, you must take the rough with the smooth--one can
always learn something from criticism, or so I find!"

"What the devil do you suppose I am to learn from an incompetent
paste-and-scissors understrapper like that? He wants a good hiding,
that's what he wants, and I for one would have no objection to giving it
him!"

"Well, it wasn't me wrote it, Mr. Aix," I said, "nor Ariadne!" He isn't
supposed to know that George farms out his reviews.

Mr. Aix laughed, and left off being cross. The odd thing was, that it
had only just missed being Ariadne or me, for the book certainly came in
for review. Most likely George wrote it, or else why didn't he trouble
to read it, when it was given him to read? It looks as if he were
growing a little tiny bit of a conscience, for he knows he ought to have
said to _The Bittern_ editor, "Avaunt! Don't tempt an author to review
his friend's book, when he knows he cannot speak well of it for so many
reasons!" That is my idea of literary morality.




CHAPTER XI


George came back from his yachting tour with the Scillys very brown and
cheerful, having collected enough sunshine for a new book, and Christina
is typing it at his dictation.

George is a cranky dictator, and it takes her all her time to keep in
touch with him. I have watched her at it. Sometimes he stops and can't
for the life of him find the right word, and I can tell by her eyes that
she knows it, and is too polite to give it him; just the way one longs
to help out a stutterer. But I have seen her put the word down out of
her own head long before George has shouted it at her, as he does in the
end. She picks and chooses, too, a little, for George is a tidy swearer,
as the cabman said. I suppose he learned it in the high society he goes
among! He does it all the time he is composing; it relieves the tension,
he says, and she doesn't mind. She manages him. George pretends he knows
he is being managed, which shows that he doesn't really think he is. I
asked her once why she didn't marry, but she said the profession of
typewriting was not so binding as the other, for you could get down off
your high stool if you wanted.

Christina always says rude things about epigrams and marriage. She is
not very old, only thirty; but she says she has outgrown them both. Of
course in this house epigrams are the same as bread-and-butter, hers and
ours, for George pays her a good salary for typing those that he makes
ready for print. As for epigrams, she says she can make them herself,
and here are some I found written out in her handwriting on a china
memorandum tablet. I expect she keeps a separate tablet for her remarks
on Marriage.

1. Man cannot live by epigram alone.

2. Epigrams are like the paper-streamers they fling out of the boxes at
a _bal masqué_ at the Opera. They flat fall immediately afterwards.

3. An epigram is like the deadly Upas Tree, and blights everything in
the shape of conversation that grows near it.

4. Reverse an epigram and you get a platitude.

5. The savage, sour, and friendless epigram. The last sounds to me all
wrong, for it has no verb. But I give it as I find it.

George's new novel is to be called _The Senior Epigrammatist_, and the
scene is laid in the Smart Sea Islands.

"Our well-known blend," said Mr. Aix, "of opaline sea and crystal
epigram knocks the public every time! But mark me, Christina dear, this
sunlight soap won't wash clothes. It isn't for home consumption. It
gladdens publishers' offices, but leaves the domestic hearth cold. The
fires of passion----"

"Don't talk to me of passion," said Christina. "I just detest the word.
Passion is piggish! It's a perfect disgrace to have primitive instincts,
and I wouldn't be seen dead with a temperament, in these days."

She was putting a new ribbon into her typewriter and trying it. She
typed something like this--

Christina x x x Ball x x C.B. x x (----) C. Ball B B----

"Who is Ball?" said Mr. Aix anxiously.

Christina answered as if she meant to bite his head off.

"A man who never made an epigram in his life, and stands six foot six in
his shoes."

"The noble savage, eh? Well, well, I wish him luck!"

I knew who Ball was; it is Peter Ball, and Christina likes him. She
hasn't said or typed anything against marriage since she knew him.

It was at a concert that some friends of hers gave in Queen's Gate, that
she first met him. I was with her, and we all sat in rows on rout seats,
that skidded and flew off like shirt-buttons across the room whenever
you got up suddenly. Peter Ball sat next us, and his legs were long,
though his feet were small. He had a golden beard, which I hate, and so,
I thought, did Christina. She had always said there was one thing she
would not marry, and that was a beard.

He wished out loud that he hadn't got let in for the sitting-down seats,
so that he could not make a clean bolt of it when he had had enough of
Miss Squallini. There was not any Miss of that name on the programme, so
though he said loud, no one could be offended. A Maddle. Xeres told us
quite slyly, lifting her eyebrows up and down, that "she knew a bank!"
as if she had got up early like the worm, and found it all by herself.
After that, one of the spare hostesses came wandering by and introduced
him to us. He began to talk to Christina without looking at her, and
gradually he forgot his legs and put one under the rout seat in front of
him and lifted it up without thinking. The lady on it looked round
indignantly and Christina smiled. After that he talked to us all through
the programme though people shoo'd him, and then he stopped for a little
and apologized, and went on again.

"I don't often turn up at this sort of function, do you?" he asked
Christina.

"No, I do not," she replied, "I have too much to do as a general thing."

"And stay at home and do it," said he; "you're wise."

"I have to!" said Christina. "Oh," she sighed, "I am so dreadfully hot."

It was June.

"Why do you wear that bag?" he said, meaning her motor tulle veil, which
was absurdly thick and made her look as if she had small-pox. But every
one else apparently had a different form of the same disease, shown by a
different size in spots. She said so, and that she wore a veil like
every one else.

"Get out of it, can't you, and let me take care of it for you, and that
boa thing you have got round your neck."

She took it off, and the boa, and gave them to him.

"I am afraid you will drop the boa, and let the veil work under the
seat," she said in a fright, as he nipped them both in one great hand.
So he pinned them, boa, veil, and all, to his grey speckled trousers
with her hat-pin, and sat all through the rest of the concert, looking
at the bunch at his knee. I never saw a man like that before, he didn't
seem at all like the people who come to Cinque Cento House. I didn't
seem to see him there, and I rather thought I should like to. Why, he
would make George straighten his back!

"I say," he said presently, "do you like gramophones?"

"I love them," said Christina, and I knew it was a lie.

"My people have a perfectly splendid one!" said he, and his whole face
lighted up. "I wish you could hear it."

Christina wished she could, and he said--

"Oh, then, we will manage it somehow."

When the concert was over he didn't bolt as he had said he wanted to,
but gave us ices, Christina one, me two, and then Christina put the bag
on again.

"If you were in my motor in that thing in a shower you'd get drowned,"
said he. "Why, it would _hold_ the water. I should like to drive you in
my motor all the same. I say, can't I call on you?"

Christina told him very nicely that she was private secretary to the
author, Mr. George Vero-Taylor, and hadn't much time for herself. She
seemed to say that this made a call impossible.

"Ah, I see! Live in, do you? Well, I'll call there, drop my pasteboard,
all straight and formal, you know, and then there can be no objection to
my giving you a spin in the motor. Right you are! Sinky Cento House.
What a rum name! Suggests drains! Never mind, I'll be there, and then
when I've made the acquaintance of your chaperon, she'll allow you to
come to tea with my mater, and make the acquaintance of the gramophone.
My mater's too old to go out. It's a ripper, the gramophone, I mean,
like some other people I am thinking of!"

"What a breezy man!" said Christina, on the way home. "He reminds me of
The Northman I used to draw at South Kensington. I broke him, and had to
pay seven-and-six for him." Then she began to think--I believe it was
about Peter Ball. He _was_ handsome, for he had blue eyes and a little
short, straight nose like the Sovereigns in Madame Tussaud's.

"Isn't he exactly like Harold of England?" I said to Christina. "I hope
George won't snub him when he comes to see you?"

"He won't come," said she; "but if he did he wouldn't know he was being
snubbed."

"No, he would say to George, 'Keep your snubs for a man of your own
size.' But, Christina dear, I always _thought_ you hated both marriage
and gramophones."

"I am not so sure about gramophones," said she. "Perhaps a very big
one----?"

"A six-footer, like Mr. Peter Ball, eh?"

She was quite moody and absent in the 'bus going home, and wouldn't go
on top to please me. Then I accidentally stuck my umbrella in over the
top of her shoe as I walked beside her, and then she was too cross to
speak at all. I respected her mood. That is why I am beloved in the home
circle. But I have my own ideas, and they keep me amused.

I was unfortunately out of the way when Mr. Peter Ball did call, three
days later. Mother and Christina were in, and Ariadne, who gave me a
true account of it all. She says the first thing he said to Christina
was, "I hope you don't think I have been too precipitate?" I suppose he
meant in calling? He stared about him a good deal at first, and she
thought that George's queer furniture made him feel shy, and that he
thought the ivory figure of Buddha quite indecent. She was sure he
didn't admire her (Ariadne), but only Christina, because Christina is a
"tailor-made" girl, that men like. Mother made the tea very strong that
afternoon, so as to make him feel at home, and then after all he didn't
touch tea. She kindly offered him a brandy-and-soda and he declined
that, but I expect it was only because it would have seemed
disrespectful to Christina. All men are alike, and prone to a b. and s.
if they can get it without disgrace. Mother was sure that he had fallen
head-over-ears in love with Christina, and she with him at the very
first sight. She told me so, and said she meant to help it on.

"It is because Christina is so used to seeing George every day," said I.
"Peter Ball is very different, isn't he?"

Mother said that there was no accounting for tastes, and that for her
part she considered George's type was the nicest. But whatever we did,
she said, we were not to chaff Christina about it, and put her off a
very good match. A girl of Christina's sort never took kindly to chaff,
and though she should be sorry to lose Christina as a secretary to
George, it being impossible to tell what sort of minx he might engage in
her place, she for one wouldn't like any personal consideration whatever
to interfere with Christina's establishment in life. Peter Ball is a
landed gentry. He is M.F.H. in the county of Northumberland to the
Rattenraw Hunt, and a capital shot and first-rate angler. When his old
mother dies he will be richer, but he is a good son, and often stays
with her in Leinster Gardens where he has asked me and Christina to go
to tea next week.

I promised not to chaff, but if she had only known, it would have taken
a steam-crane to put Christina off that particular thing. She talked
lots about Peter. He was the "finest specimen of humanity she had ever
come across!" "Such a contrast to the little anæmic, effete,
ambisextrous (I hope I have got it right?) creatures that haunt Cinque
Cento House, who are all trying to get more out of their heads than is
in them!" "Greek in his simplicity, a sort of mixture of John Bull and
Antinöus!" I say, just wait till you see his mother; nice men's mothers
are sometimes sad eye-openers, and Peter Ball is always talking about
his. Also it is quite on the cards that she may not like Christina, and
then I am sure he will never propose to her. He is an admirable son. I
believe he keeps a gramophone just to attract the girls he admires into
his mother's cave, and give her the opportunity of looking over them,
and making up her mind if they are fit to be her Peter's wife or no.

When the eventful day came, Christina was on thorns. She didn't know how
to dress. She finally left off the chiffon bag and wore a fringe-net,
and her best-cut "tailor-made," and took out her ear-rings lest they
should damn her in his mother's eyes. Then at exactly five minutes to
four we rang the bell in 1000 Leinster Square.

A proud butler opened the door. George will only let us have maids,
although he could afford ten butlers.

The house was beautiful, and not a bit like ours. "Early Victorian,"
Christina whispered me. She was dreadfully nervous, and made me too. I
dropped my umbrella in the rack with such a clatter that she blushed and
scolded me. Then a palm-leaf tickled my head as I went by, and I begged
its pardon, thinking some one behind was trying to attract my
attention. We were taken into a big room with pedestal things in gold
and stucco set down at intervals, and a clock with a bare pendulum which
looks simply undressed to me, and a bronze Father Time with his sickle
lying lazily across the top. On another clock there was a gilt man in a
gilt cart whipping up two gilt horses. The carpet had large bouquets of
roses on it, and I thought what a good game it would be to pretend they
were islands and hop across from one to the other. I began, but she
stopped me. In a corner was the gramophone, like a great brass ear put
out to hear what you were saying. It was playing when we went in, like
an old man with a wheeze, and in came Peter Ball looking as if he had
just got out of a bath, and said, "How-do-you-do! it is playing
'Coppelia.'" Then it played "Valse Bleue" and "Casey at the Wake," and
"Casey as Doctor," and "When other Lips," and then Peter Ball said his
mother was ready.

Into another room we went, full of Berlin wool-work chairs, and screens
of Potiphar and his wife, and the curtains were of green rep with ropes
of silk to tie them back and gilt festoons to hide their beginnings, and
an old old lady in a big arm-chair and a lace cap with nodding bugles
was in a corner, just like another and older bit of furniture.

We were introduced; she was very deaf and very blind, and I am not sure
she didn't think I was the girl Peter wanted to marry. However that
might be, she seemed pleased with us, and we talked of her son and the
house. Christina, who used to say she preferred a Chéret poster to a
Titian, and plain deal to mahogany, admired everything freely. The
rosewood wheelbarrow with silver fittings given to Peter Ball's father
when he laid a first stone somewhere, she said was superb and so
graceful; the picture of old Mrs. Ball by Ingres in a poke bonnet and
short waist she said was far superior to anything by Burne Jones.

"Who is Burne Jones?" said the old lady, and Christina denied Burne
Jones cheerfully. I thought of my favourite piece of poetry--

    "See, ye Ladies that are coy,
     What the mighty Love can do!"

Then we had tea (the cake in a silver basket on a fringed mat, if you
please!), and after we had talked a little more, we said good-bye, and
Peter took us out. He had rushed out of the room just five minutes
before, when the first symptoms of leave-taking manifested themselves,
and we saw why, when we passed out through the first room where the
gramophone was. It played us out with "The Wedding March," surely a
graceful thought of Peter Ball's!

"He's very nice, but what a pity he hasn't got taste!" I said as we came
away. You see, I am used to Cinque Cento House, and I have always been
told that there is only one taste, and that ours is it.

"Taste!" Christina mooned, as we got into a 'bus. "There's so much of it
about, isn't there? On my word, it will soon be quite _chic_ to be
vulgar."

It was not difficult to tell which way the wind was blowing after that.
It was about this time that Mr. Aix found Christina typing her own name
and Peter's on a sheet of III Imperial. He hadn't even set eyes on Peter
Ball then, but he did a few days later, when Peter Ball came to tea,
holding his grey kid gloves in his hand. George, luckily, was out again,
really out, not pretending to be in his study, and Mr. Aix it was who
opened the front-door for Peter when he went away at seven.

"A man!" he said, when he came back to us all in the winter garden, and
Christina was just going out--escaping to her own room to think over
Peter Ball, I dare say--and she said as she passed him--

"I could hug you for saying that, Mr. Aix."

"No, you couldn't," said he. "I am popularly supposed to be repellent. A
lady said I was like a white stick of celery grown in a dark cellar.
Another, of music-hall celebrity, compared me to a blasted pipe-stem. I
do not look for success with your sex. It was kind of you to think of
it, though."

Peter Ball meant business, or else we could not have all spoken of it so
openly. George was awfully cross at the idea of having to find a new
secretary. Lady Scilly said she thought he could do better than
Christina, who was too forward (and too pretty). She tried very hard to
flirt with Peter herself, but perhaps Peter thought _he_ could do
better, and wouldn't. She looked into his face and said, "You great big
beauty!" She told him "high" stories, as Christina and I call them, and
he wouldn't laugh. She asked him right out why he wouldn't, and he
answered equally right out, "Because I disapprove of all jesting with
regard to the relations of the sexes!"

Lady Scilly looked disgusted, and left him severely alone, as he meant
her to.

For weeks after this he was like a full pail of water one is afraid to
carry without spilling. At last he slopped over, and asked Christina to
be his wife. I wasn't in the room, of course, but Christina was nice and
told us afterwards. He went on his knees, she says, and I believe her,
because I found a cushion on the floor immediately after, before the
housemaid had tidied the room, and I think he had managed to put it
under his knees without her seeing. Our floor is bony.

"The very moment," she said, "he had got me to say yes, he jumped up and
rushed out without his hat, to send a telegram to his mother with the
good news!"

She thought this so nice of him and so flattering, as showing that he
hadn't made quite sure of her. For though we all knew she meant to take
him, he was not supposed to be aware of it. Considering that Christina
is grown up, she ought to be able to make a man think exactly what she
wishes him to think about her. Such power comes, or should come, with
advancing years, and is one of its compensations. Ariadne, of course,
isn't old enough to have left off being quite transparent, and regrets
it deeply in some of her poetry.

Christina was married to Peter Ball almost directly, and Ariadne and I
were her bridesmaids. Mrs. Mander gave us our dresses and hats. They
were quite fashionable; she would have no nonsense or necklaces. Ariadne
looked smart and like other people, for once. She didn't look so pretty,
but it is a mistake to want to go about the streets looking like a
picture. Prettiness isn't everything, and the really smartest people
would disdain to look simply ready for an artist to paint them.

Simon Hermyre, Lady Scilly's best friend, was Peter Ball's best man. He
had met Ariadne at the Scillys', but at Christina's wedding he said that
he should not have known her again. He began to take some notice of her.
She at once asked him to call, and it was a great mistake, for he never
did. It is awkward for Ariadne, I admit, for Mother not going out, and
George being perfectly useless as a father, she has to do all her own
asking.

That can't be helped, but Ariadne is always hasty and strikes while the
iron is too hot. Simon Hermyre did _rather_ like her, but he wasn't
quite sure that he actually wanted to take her on, and all that that
means--and whether he liked her enough to risk making Lady Scilly angry
about it, as of course she would be. At all events he didn't come--his
chief kept him in till six o'clock every day, or some excuse of that
sort. As if a man couldn't always manage a call if he wanted to, even if
he were third secretary to some one in the planet Mars!




CHAPTER XII


We never used to go away for more than a week every summer to Brighton
or Herne Bay, but now that we live in the heart of the town, as of
course St. John's Wood is, it has been decided that we want a whole
month at the sea. This year Mother and Aunt Gerty chose Whitby in
Yorkshire. It is convenient for Aunt Gerty--something about a company
that she is thinking of joining in the autumn. George didn't care where
we went, as he isn't to be with us. He just forks out the money as
Mother asks for it; he trusts her implicitly not to waste it, and to do
things as cheap as they can be done and yet decently, because after all
we _are_ his family, and everybody knows that now.

I sometimes think he would come with us himself, if Aunt Gerty wasn't so
much about.

Ariadne and Aunt Gerty haven't got an ounce of country fibre in them.
They get at loggerheads with the country at once. The mildest cows chase
them, they manage to nearly drown themselves in the tiniest ditches, the
quietest old pony rears if they drive him. If they pick a mushroom it is
sure to be a toadstool; if they bite into a pear there's a wasp inside
it; if they take hold of a village baby they are sure to drop it. They
haven't country good manners, they leave gates open, they trample down
grass, they entice dogs away, they startle geese and set hens running,
and offend everybody all round.

So they weren't particularly happy in the first rooms we took, at a farm
just out of Whitby. There was one stuffy little best parlour, sealed up
like a bottle of medecine, and one mouldy geranium looking as if it
couldn't help it on the window-sill, and the "Seven Deadly Sins" in
chromo on the walls, and Rebecca at a well of Berlin wools over the
mantelpiece. They covered the family Bible with an antimacassar, and
Aunt Gerty's theatrical photos without which she never travels, and
suppressed the frosty ornament in a glass case of one of Mrs. Wilson's
wedding-cakes. Mrs. Wilson married early, she says, and I say she
married often, for there are three of them! It _was_ uncomfortable.
Mother didn't complain, Aunt Gerty did. She had nowhere to hang up her
dresses; they were all getting spoilt; she couldn't see to do her hair
in the wretched little scrap of looking-glass, and the room was so small
that she twice set fire to her bed-curtains, curling her hair, which she
did twenty times a day, for there was always wind or rain or something.
The walls were so thin that she could hear every word Mr. and Mrs.
Wilson said to each other in the next room, quarrelling and arranging
the bill and so on. She couldn't sleep with the window shut, and all
sorts of horrid buggy things came in if you left it open. It was so
dreadfully lonely here, and she had never "seen so much land" in her
life.

Aunt Gerty has been on tour often enough to get used to uncomfortable
lodgings, lodgings not chosen by herself, very likely, and her luggage
all fetched away the day before she leaves by the baggage man! But it is
in a town, and that makes all the difference. Give her a strip of mirror
in the door of her wardrobe, and a gas-jet ready to set fire to her
window-curtains, and a row of shops outside to cheer her up, and she
won't think of grumbling.

The landlady didn't consider us a particularly good "let." I used to
hear her in bed in the mornings explaining to Mr. Wilson, who is a
railway porter, how glad she would be to be "shot" of us if it wasn't
for the money. "Ay, lass!" he would answer, and then I used to hear him
turning over in bed and going to sleep again.

"They're better to keep a week than a fortnight!" she used to say. "What
with their late dinners and breakfasts in bed, and their black coffee,
and all sitting down for an hour o' mornings polishing up them ondacent
brown boots--they darsen't trust the help, no, not since she went and
rubbed them with lard--poor girl, she meant well,--and she fit to rive
her legs off answering the parlour bell every minute! Well, the sooner I
see their backs, the better pleased I shall be!"

We took the hint and gave up the rooms, and got some nicer ones in town
on the quay. Aunt Gerty left off bothering Mother to have late dinner
and strong coffee, and we lived on herrings and cream cheeses, the
cheapest things in Whitby. I mean the herrings. When they have a good
catch, they sell them at a halfpenny each on the quay-side, or slap
their children with them, or shy them at strangers. Anything to keep the
market up!

Mrs. Bennison, our new landlady, isn't a Whitby woman, but her husband
is, and owns a boat, and takes Ben out sailing, and tries to make a man
of him. We hardly ever see him, so we know he is happy. Mother and Aunt
Gerty sit one on each side of the bow window the greater part of the
day, and make blouses, and read at the same time. George would throw
their books into the harbour if he caught them in their hands; they are
the sort he disapproves of. I won't say who the authors of these are, as
being a literary man's daughter it might give offence, but they are by
women mostly. George vetoes women's books too, for they are generally
bad, and if they are good, they have no business to be.

Just now, George isn't here to object, he is at Homburg, doing a cure.
He always gets brain fag towards the end of the season like his other
friends. It seems to me the smartest illness to have, except
appendicitis. The moment Goodwood is over, they all troop off to Germany
or Switzerland and pay pounds to some doctor who only makes them leave
off eating and drinking too much, and go to bed a little before
daylight. It is kill and then cure with the smart set, every year.
George does what is right and usual--bathes in champagne at Wiesbaden,
and drinks the water rotten eggs have been boiled in at Homburg. He does
it in good company, to take the taste away. Mr. Aix drew us a picture of
George and a Duchess walking up and down a parade, with a glass tube
connected with a tumbler, in their mouths, talking about emulating "The
Life of the Busy Bee" as they went along.

About the middle of August we heard he had come back to England and was
paying his usual round of visits to Barefront, and Baddeley and
Fylingdales Tower. Nearly all these places have real battlements and
ghosts. Fylingdales Tower is near here. Mother and I and Aunt Gerty
joined a cheap trip to it, the other day, and were taken all over the
house for a shilling. I don't even believe The Family was away, but
stowed away _pro tem._ and staring at us through some chink and loathing
us. I did manage to persuade Aunt Gerty not to throw away her sandwich
paper in the grate of the fire-place of the room where Edward the Third
had slept on his way to Alnwick, but kindly keep it till we were got
into the Park. But she was very irreverent all the same, and insisted on
setting her hat straight in the glass of Queen Elizabeth's portrait, and
that was the only picture she looked at at all. I don't care for
pictures much. I like th

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