Читать книгу: «Unfinished Portrait», страница 4

‘Me, Daddy? Right up to the top?’

‘Yes. You shall ride there on a mule.’

‘What’s a mule, Daddy?’

He told her that a mule was rather like a donkey and rather like a horse. Celia was thrilled at the thought of the adventure. Her mother seemed a little doubtful. ‘Are you sure it’s quite safe, John?’ she said.

Celia’s father pooh-poohed her fears. Of course the child would be all right.

She, her father, and Cyril were to go. Cyril said in a lofty tone, ‘Oh! is the kid coming? She’ll be a rotten nuisance.’ Yet he was quite fond of Celia, but her coming offended his manly pride. This was to have been a man’s expedition—women and children left at home.

Early on the morning of the great expedition Celia was ready and standing on the balcony to see the mules arrive. They came at a trot round the corner—great big animals—more like horses than donkeys. Celia ran downstairs full of joyful expectation. A little man with a brown face in a beret was talking to her father. He was saying that the petite demoiselle would be quite all right. He would charge himself with looking after her. Her father and Cyril mounted; then the guide picked her up and swung her up to the saddle. How very high up it felt! But very, very exciting.

They moved off. From the balcony above, Celia’s mother waved to them. Celia was thrilling with pride. She felt practically grown up. The guide ran beside her. He chatted to her, but she understood very little of what he said, owing to his strong Spanish accent.

It was a marvellous ride. They went up zigzag paths that grew gradually steeper and steeper. Now they were well out on the mountain side, a wall of rock on one side of them and a sheer drop on the other. At the most dangerous-looking places Celia’s mule would stop reflectively on the precipice edge and kick out idly with one foot. It also liked walking on the extreme edge. It was, Celia thought, a very nice horse. Its name seemed to be Aniseed, which Celia thought a very queer name for a horse to have.

It was midday when they reached the summit. There was a tiny little hut there with a table in front of it, and they sat down, and presently the woman there brought them out lunch—a very good lunch too. Omelette, some fried trout, and cream cheese and bread. There was a big woolly dog with whom Celia played.

‘C’est presque un Anglais,’ said the woman. ‘Il s’appelle Milor.’

Milor was very amiable and allowed Celia to do anything she pleased with him.

Presently Celia’s father looked at his watch and said it was time to start down again. He called to the guide.

The latter came smiling. He had something in his hands.

‘See what I have just caught,’ he said.

It was a beautiful big butterfly.

‘C’est pour Mademoiselle,’ he said.

And quickly, deftly, before she knew what he was going to do, he had produced a pin and skewered the butterfly to the crown of Celia’s straw hat.

‘Voilà que Mademoiselle est chic,’ he said, falling back to admire his handiwork.

Then the mules were brought round, the party was mounted, and the descent was begun.

Celia was miserable. She could feel the wings of the butterfly fluttering against her hat. It was alive—alive. Skewered on a pin! She felt sick and miserable. Large tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.

At last her father noticed.

‘What’s the matter, poppet?’

Celia shook her head. Her sobs increased.

‘Have you got a pain? Are you very tired? Does your head ache?’

Celia merely shook her head more and more violently at each suggestion.

‘She’s frightened of the horse,’ said Cyril.

‘I’m not,’ said Celia.

‘Then what are you blubbing for?’

‘La petite demoiselle est fatiguée,’ suggested the guide.

Celia’s tears flowed faster and faster. They were all looking at her, questioning her—and how could she say what was the matter? It would hurt the guide’s feelings terribly. He had meant to be kind. He had caught the butterfly specially for her. He had been so proud of his idea in pinning it to her hat. How could she say out loud that she didn’t like it? And now nobody would ever, ever understand! The wind made the butterfly’s wings flap more than ever. Celia wept unrestrainedly. Never, she felt, had there been misery such as hers.

‘We’d better push on as fast as we can,’ said her father. He looked vexed. ‘Get her back to her mother. She was right. It’s been too much for the child.’

Celia longed to cry out: ‘It hasn’t, hasn’t. It’s not that at all.’ But she didn’t because she realized that then they would ask her again, ‘But then what is it?’ She only shook her head dumbly.

She wept all the way down. Her misery grew blacker and blacker. Still weeping she was lifted from her mule, and her father carried her up to the sitting-room where her mother was sitting waiting for them. ‘You were right, Miriam,’ said her father. ‘It’s been too much for the child. I don’t know whether she’s got a pain or whether she’s overtired.’

‘I’m not,’ said Celia.

‘She was frightened of coming down those steep places,’ said Cyril.

‘I wasn’t,’ said Celia.

‘Then what is it?’ demanded her father.

Celia stared dumbly at her mother. She knew now that she could never tell. The cause of her misery would remain locked in her own breast forever and ever. She wanted to tell—oh, how badly she wanted to tell—but somehow she couldn’t. Some mysterious inhibition had been laid on her, sealing her lips. If only Mummy knew. Mummy would understand. But she couldn’t tell Mummy. They were all looking at her—waiting for her to speak. A terrible agony welled up in her breast. She gazed dumbly, agonizingly, at her mother. ‘Help me,’ that gaze said. ‘Oh, do help me.’

Miriam gazed back at her.

‘I believe she doesn’t like that butterfly in her hat,’ she said, ‘Who pinned it there?’

Oh, the relief—the wonderful, aching, agonizing relief.

‘Nonsense,’ her father was beginning, but Celia interrupted him. Words burst from her released like water at the bursting of a dam.

‘I ’ate it. I ’ate it,’ she cried. ‘It flaps. It’s alive. It’s being hurt.’

‘Why on earth didn’t you say so, you silly kid?’ said Cyril.

Celia’s mother answered: ‘I expect she didn’t want to hurt the guide’s feelings.’

‘Oh, Mummy!’ said Celia.

It was all there—in those two words. Her relief, her gratitude—and a great welling up of love.

Her mother had understood.

CHAPTER 3
Grannie

The following winter Celia’s father and mother went to Egypt. They did not think it practicable to take Celia with them, so she and Jeanne went to stay with Grannie.

Grannie lived at Wimbledon, and Celia liked staying with her very much. The features of Grannie’s house were, first, the garden—a square pocket handkerchief of green, bordered with rose trees, every tree of which Celia knew intimately, remembering even in winter: ‘That’s the pink la France—Jeanne, you’d like that one,’ but the crown and glory of the garden was a big ash tree trained over wire supports to make an arbour. There was nothing like the ash tree at home, and Celia regarded it as one of the most exciting wonders of the world. Then there was the WC seat of old-fashioned mahogany set very high. Retiring to this spot after breakfast, Celia would fancy herself a queen enthroned, and securely secluded behind a locked door she would bow regally, extend a hand to be kissed by imaginary courtiers and prolong the court scene as long as she dared. There was also Grannie’s store cupboard situated by the door into the garden. Every morning, her large bunch of keys clanking, Grannie would visit her store cupboard, and with the punctuality of a child, a dog, or a lion at feeding time, Celia would be there too. Grannie would hand out packets of sugar, butter, eggs, or a pot of jam. She would hold long acrimonious discussions with old Sarah, the cook. Very different from Rouncy, old Sarah. As thin as Rouncy was fat. A little old woman with a nut-cracker wrinkled face. For fifty years of her life she had been in service with Grannie, and during all those fifty years the discussions had been the same. Too much sugar was being used: what happened to the last half pound of tea? It was, by now, a kind of ritual—it was Grannie going through her daily performance of the careful housewife. Servants were so wasteful! You had to look after them sharply. The ritual finished, Grannie would pretend to notice Celia for the first time.

‘Dear, dear, what’s a little girl doing here?’

And Grannie would pretend great surprise.

‘Well, well,’ she would say, ‘you can’t want anything?’

‘I do, Grannie, I do.’

‘Well, let me see now.’ Grannie would burrow leisurely in the depths of the cupboard. Something would be extracted—a jar of French plums, a stick of angelica, a pot of quince preserve. There was always something for a little girl.

Grannie was a very handsome old lady. She had pink and white skin, two waves of white crimped hair each side of her forehead, and a big good-humoured mouth. In figure she was majestically stout with a pronounced bosom and stately hips. She wore dresses of velvet or brocade, ample as to skirts, and well pulled in round the waist.

‘I always had a beautiful figure, my dear,’ she used to tell Celia. ‘Fanny—that was my sister—had the prettiest face of the family, but she’d no figure—no figure at all! As thin as two boards nailed together. No man looked at her for long when I was about. It’s figure the men care for, not face.’

‘The men’ bulked largely in Grannie’s conversation. She had been brought up in the days when men were considered to be the hub of the universe. Women merely existed to minister to those magnificent beings.

‘You wouldn’t have found a handsomer man anywhere than my father. Six foot tall, he was. All we children were afraid of him. He was very severe.’

‘What was your mother like, Grannie?’

‘Ah, poor soul. Only thirty-nine when she died. Ten of us children, there were. A lot of hungry mouths. After a baby was born, when she was staying in bed—’

‘Why did she stay in bed, Grannie?’

‘It’s the custom, dearie.’

Celia accepted the mandate incuriously.

‘She always took her month,’ went on Grannie. ‘It was the only rest she got, poor soul. She enjoyed her month. She used to have breakfast in bed and a boiled egg. Not that she got much of that. We children used to come and bother her. “Can I have a taste of your egg, Mother? Can I have the top of it?” There wouldn’t be much left for her after each child had had a taste. She was too kind—too gentle. She died when I was fourteen. I was the eldest of the family. Poor father was heart-broken. They were a devoted couple. He followed her to the grave six months later.’

Celia nodded. That seemed right and fitting in her eyes. In most of the child’s books in the nursery there was a deathbed scene—usually that of a child—a peculiarly holy and angelic child.

‘What did he die of?’

‘Galloping consumption,’ replied Grannie.

‘And your mother?’

‘She went into a decline, my dear. Just went into decline. Always wrap your throat up well when you go out in an east wind. Remember that, Celia. It’s the east wind that kills. Poor Miss Sankey—why, she had tea with me only a month ago. Went to those nasty swimming baths—came out afterwards with an east wind blowing and no boa round her neck—and she was dead in a week.’

Nearly all Grannie’s stories and reminiscences ended like this. A most cheerful person herself, she delighted in tales of incurable illness, of sudden death, or of mysterious disease. Celia was so well accustomed to this that she would demand with eager and rapturous interest in the middle of one of Grannie’s stories, ‘And then did he die, Grannie?’ And Grannie would reply, ‘Ah, yes, he died, poor fellow.’ Or girl or boy, or woman—as the case might be. None of Grannie’s stories ever ended happily. It was perhaps her natural reaction from her own healthy and vigorous personality.

Grannie was also full of mysterious warnings.

‘If anybody you don’t know offers you sweets, dearie, never take them. And when you’re an older girl, remember never to get into a train with a single man.’

This last injunction rather distressed Celia. She was a shy child. If one was not to get into a train with a single man, one would have to ask him whether or not he was married. You couldn’t tell if a man was married or not to look at him. The mere thought of having to do such a thing made her squirm uneasily.

She did not connect with herself a murmur from a lady visitor.

‘Surely unwise—put things into her head.’

Grannie’s answer rose robustly.

‘Those that are warned in time won’t come to grief. Young people ought to know these things. And there’s a thing that perhaps you never heard of, my dear. My husband told me about it—my first husband.’ (Grannie had had three husbands—so attractive had been her figure—and so well had she ministered to the male sex. She had buried them in turn—one with tears—one with resignation—and one with decorum.) ‘He said women ought to know about such things.’

Her voice dropped. It hissed in sibilant whispers.

What she could hear seemed to Celia dull. She strayed away into the garden …

Jeanne was unhappy. She became increasingly homesick for France and her own people. The English servants, she told Celia, were not kind.

‘The cuisinière, Sarah, she is gentille, though she calls me a papist. But the others, Mary and Kate—they laugh because I do not spend my wages on my clothes, and send it all home to Maman.’

Grannie attempted to cheer Jeanne.

‘You go on behaving like a sensible girl,’ she told Jeanne. ‘Putting a lot of useless finery on your back never caught a decent man yet. You go on sending your wages home to your mother, and you’ll have a nice little nest egg laid by for when you get married. That neat plain style of dressing is far more suitable to a domestic servant than a lot of fal-lals. You go on being a sensible girl.’

But Jeanne would occasionally give way to tears when Mary or Kate had been unusually spiteful or unkind. The English girls did not like foreigners, and Jeanne was a papist too, and everyone knew that Roman Catholics worshipped the Scarlet Woman.

Grannie’s rough encouragements did not always heal the wound.

‘Quite right to stick to your religion, my girl. Not that I hold with the Roman Catholic religion myself, because I don’t. Most Romans I’ve known have been liars. I’d think more of them if their priests married. And these convents! All those beautiful young girls shut up in convents and never being heard of again. What happens to them, I should like to know? The priests could answer that question, I dare say.’

Fortunately Jeanne’s English was not quite equal to this flow of remarks.

Madame was very kind, she said, she would try not to mind what the other girls said.

Grannie then had up Mary and Kate and denounced them in no measured terms for their unkindness to a poor girl in a strange country. Mary and Kate were very soft spoken, very polite, very surprised. Indeed, they had said nothing—nothing at all. Jeanne was such a one as never was for imagining things.

Grannie got a little satisfaction by refusing with horror Mary’s plea to be allowed to keep a bicycle.

‘I am surprised at you, Mary, for making such a suggestion. No servant of mine shall ever do such an unsuitable thing.’

Mary, looking sulky, muttered that her cousin at Richmond was allowed to have one.

‘Let me hear nothing more about it,’ said Grannie. ‘Anyway, they’re dangerous things for women. Many a woman has been prevented from having children for life by riding those nasty things. They’re not good for a woman’s inside.’

Mary and Kate retired sulkily. They would have given notice, but they knew that the place was a good one. The food was first class—no inferior tainted stuff bought for the kitchen as in some places—and the work was not heavy. The old lady was rather a tartar, but she was kind in her way. If there was any trouble at home, she’d often come to the rescue, and nobody could be more generous at Christmas. There was old Sarah’s tongue, of course, but you had to put up with that. Her cooking was prime.

Like all children, Celia haunted the kitchen a good deal. Old Sarah was much fiercer than Rouncy, but then, of course, she was terribly old. If anyone had told Celia that Sarah was a hundred and fifty she would not have been in the least surprised. Nobody, Celia felt, had ever been quite so old as Sarah.

Sarah was most unaccountably touchy about the most extraordinary things. One day, for instance, Celia had gone into the kitchen and had asked Sarah what she was cooking.

‘Giblet soup, Miss Celia.’

‘What are giblets, Sarah?’

Sarah pursed her mouth.

‘Things that it’s not nice for a little lady to make inquiries about.’

‘But what are they?’ Celia’s curiosity was pleasantly aroused.

‘Now, that’s enough, Miss Celia. It’s not for a little lady like you to ask questions about such things.’

‘Sarah.’ Celia danced about the kitchen. Her flaxen hair bobbed. ‘What are giblets? Sarah, what are giblets? Giblets—giblets—giblets?’

The infuriated Sarah made a rush at her with a frying pan, and Celia retreated, to poke her head in a few minutes later with the query, ‘Sarah, what are giblets?’

She next repeated the question from the kitchen window.

Sarah, her face dark with annoyance, made no answer, merely mumbled to herself.

Finally, tiring suddenly of this sport, Celia sought out her grandmother.

Grannie always sat in the dining-room, which was situated looking out over the short drive in front of the house. It was a room that Celia could have described minutely twenty years later. The heavy Nottingham lace curtains, the dark red and gold wallpaper, the general air of gloom, and the faint smell of apples and a trace still of the midday joint. The broad Victorian dining table with its chenille cloth, the massive mahogany sideboard, the little table by the fire with the stacked-up newspapers, the heavy bronzes on the mantelpiece (‘Your grandfather gave £70 for them at the Paris Exhibition’), the sofa upholstered in shiny red leather on which Celia sometimes had her ‘rest’, and which was so slippery that it was hard to remain in the centre of it, the crocheted woolwork that was hung over the back of it, the dumbwaiters in the windows crammed with small objects, the revolving bookcase on the round table, the red velvet rocking chair in which Celia had once rocked so violently that she had shot over backwards and developed an egg-like bump on her head, the row of leather upholstered chairs against the wall, and lastly the great high-backed leather chair in which Grannie sat pursuing this, that, and the other activity.

Grannie was never idle. She wrote letters—long letters in a spiky spidery handwriting, mostly on half sheets of paper because it used them up, and she couldn’t bear waste. (‘Waste not, want not, Celia.’) Then she crocheted shawls—pretty shawls in purples and blues and mauves. They were usually for the servants’ relations. Then she knitted with great balls of soft fleecy wool. That was usually for somebody’s baby. And there was netting—a delicate foam of netting round a little circle of damask. At tea time all the cakes and biscuits reposed on these foamy doilies. Then there were waistcoats—for the old gentlemen of Grannie’s acquaintance. You did them on strips of huckaback towelling, running through the stitches with lines of coloured embroidery cotton. This was, perhaps, Grannie’s favourite work. Though eighty-one years of age, she still had an eye for ‘the men’. She knitted them bed socks, too.

Under Grannie’s guidance Celia was doing a set of washstand mats as a surprise for Mummy on her return. You took different-sized rounds of bath towelling, buttonholed them round first in wool, and then crocheted into the buttonholing. Celia was doing her set in pale blue wool, and both she and Grannie admired the result enormously. After tea was cleared away, Grannie and Celia would play spillikins, and after that cribbage, their faces serious and preoccupied, the classic phrases falling from their lips, ‘One for his knob, two for his heel, fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, and six are twelve.’ ‘Do you know why cribbage is such a good game, my dear?’ ‘No, Grannie.’ ‘Because it teaches you to count.’

Grannie never failed to make this little speech. She had been brought up never to admit enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake. You ate your food because it was good for your health. Stewed cherries, of which Grannie was passionately fond, she had nearly every day because they were ‘so good for the kidneys’. Cheese, which Grannie also loved, ‘digested your food’, the glass of port served with dessert ‘I have been ordered by the doctor.’ Especially was it necessary to emphasize the enjoyment of alcohol (for a member of the weaker sex). ‘Don’t you like it, Grannie?’ Celia would demand. ‘No, dear,’ Grannie would reply, and would make a wry face as she took the first sip. ‘I drink it for my health.’ She could then finish her glass with every sign of enjoyment, having uttered the required formula. Coffee was the only thing for which Grannie admitted a partiality. ‘Very Moorish, this coffee,’ she would say, wrinkling up her eyelids in enjoyment. ‘Very moreish,’ and would laugh at her little joke as she helped herself to another cup.

On the other side of the hall was the morning-room, where sat Poor Miss Bennett, the sewing woman. Miss Bennett was never referred to without the poor in front of her name.

‘Poor Miss Bennett,’ Grannie would say. ‘It’s a charity to give her employment. I really don’t believe the poor thing has enough to eat sometimes.’

If any special delicacies were served at table, a share was always sent in to Poor Miss Bennett.

Poor Miss Bennett was a little woman with a wealth of untidy grey hair wreathed round her head till it looked like a bird’s nest. She was not actually deformed, but she had a look of deformity. She spoke in a mincing and ultra-refined voice, addressing Grannie as Madam. She was quite incapable of making any article correctly. The dresses she made for Celia were always so much too large that the sleeves fell over her hands, and the armholes were halfway down her arms.

You had to be very, very careful not to hurt Poor Miss Bennett’s feelings. The least thing did it, and then Miss Bennett would sit sewing violently with a red spot in each cheek and tossing her head.

Poor Miss Bennett had had an Unfortunate History. Her father, as she constantly told you, had been very well connected—‘In fact, though perhaps I ought not to say so, but this is entirely in confidence, he was a very Great Gentleman. My mother always said so. I take after him. You may have noticed my hands and my ears—always a sign of breeding, they say. It would be a great shock to him, I’m sure, if he knew I was earning my living this way. Not but that with you, madam, it is different from what I have had to bear from Some People. Treated almost like a Servant. You, madam, understand.’

So Grannie was careful always to see that Poor Miss Bennett was treated properly. Her meals went in on a tray. Miss Bennett treated the servants very haughtily, ordering them about, with the result that they disliked her intensely.

‘Giving herself such airs,’ Celia heard old Sarah mutter. ‘And her nothing but a come-by-chance with a father she doesn’t even know the name of.’

‘What’s a come-by-chance, Sarah?’

Sarah grew very red.

‘Nothing to hear about on the lips of a young lady, Miss Celia.’

‘Is it a giblet?’ asked Celia hopefully.

Kate, who was standing by, went off into peals of laughter and was wrathfully told by Sarah to hold her tongue.

Behind the morning-room was the drawing-room. It was cool and dim and remote in there. It was only used when Grannie gave a party. It was very full of velvety chairs and tables and brocaded sofas, it had big cabinets crammed to bursting point with china figures. In one corner was a piano with a loud bass and a weak sweet treble. The windows led into a conservatory, and from there into the garden. The steel grate and fire irons were the delight of old Sarah, who kept them bright and shining so that you could almost see your face in them.

Upstairs was the nursery, a low long room overlooking the garden, above it an attic which housed Mary and Kate, and up a few steps, the three best bedrooms and an airless slit of a room belonging to Sarah.

Celia privately considered the three best bedrooms much grander than anything at home. They had vast suites in them, one of a dappled grey wood, the other two of mahogany. Grannie’s bedroom was over the dining-room. It had a vast four-poster bed, a huge mahogany wardrobe which occupied the whole of one wall, a handsome washstand and dressing table, and another huge chest of drawers. Every drawer in the room was crammed to repletion with parcels of articles neatly folded. Sometimes when opened the drawers would not shut, and Grannie would have a terrible time with them. Everything was securely locked. On the inside of the door, besides the lock were a substantial bolt and two brass cabin hooks and eyes. Once securely fastened into her apartment, Grannie would retire for the night with a watchman’s rattle and a police whistle within reach of her hand so as to be able to give an immediate alarm should burglars attempt to storm her fortress.

On the top of the wardrobe, protected by a glass case, was a large crown of white wax flowers, a floral tribute at the decease of Grannie’s first husband. On the right-hand wall was the framed memorial service of Grannie’s second husband. On the left-hand wall was a large photograph of the handsome marble tombstone erected to Grannie’s third husband.

The bed was a feather one, and the windows were never opened.

The night air, Grannie said, was highly injurious. Air of all kinds, indeed, she regarded as something of a risk. Except on the hottest days of summer she rarely went into the garden, such outings as she made were usually to the Army and Navy Stores—a four-wheeler to the station, train to Victoria, and another four-wheeler to the stores. On such occasions she was well wrapped up in her ‘mantle’ and further protected by a feather boa wound tightly many times round her neck.

Grannie never went out to see people. They came to see her. When visitors arrived cake was brought in and sweet biscuits, and different kinds of Grannie’s own home-made liqueur. The gentlemen were first asked what they would take. ‘You must taste my cherry brandy—that’s what all the gentlemen like.’ Then the ladies were urged in their turn, ‘A little drop—just to keep the cold out.’ Thus Grannie, believing that no member of the female sex could admit publicly to liking alcoholic liquor. Or if it was in the afternoon: ‘You’ll find it digests your dinner, my dear.’

If an old gentleman who came should not already be in possession of a waistcoat, Grannie would display the waistcoat at present in hand and she would then say with a kind of sprightly archness: ‘I’d offer to make you one if I were sure your wife wouldn’t object.’ The wife would then cry: ‘Oh, do make him one. I shall be delighted.’ Grannie would say waggishly: ‘I mustn’t cause trouble,’ and the old gentleman would say something gallant about wearing a waistcoat worked ‘with her own fair fingers’.

After a visit, Grannie’s cheeks would be twice as pink, and her figure twice as upright. She adored the giving of hospitality in any form.

‘Grannie, may I come and be with you for a little?’

‘Why? Can’t you find anything to do upstairs with Jeanne?’

Celia hesitated for a minute or two to find a phrase that satisfied her. She said at last:

‘Things aren’t very pleasant in the nursery this afternoon.’

Grannie laughed and said:

‘Well, to be sure, that’s one way of putting it.’

Celia was always uncomfortable and miserable on the rare occasions on which she fell out with Jeanne. This afternoon trouble had come out of the blue in the most unexpected manner.

They had been arguing about the correct disposition of the furniture in Celia’s dolls’ house, and Celia, arguing a point, had exclaimed: ‘Mais, ma pauvre fille—’ And that had done it. Jeanne had burst into tears and a voluble flood of French.

Yes, no doubt she was a pauvre fille, as Celia said, but her family, though poor, was honest and respectable. Her father was respected all over Pau. M. le Maire even was on terms of friendship with him.

‘But I never said—’ began Celia.

Jeanne swept on.

‘Doubtless la petite mees, so rich, so beautifully dressed, with her parents who voyaged, and her frocks of silk, considered her, Jeanne, as an equal with a mendicant in the street—’

‘But I never said—’ began Celia again, more and more bewildered.

But even les pauvres filles had their feelings. She, Jeanne, had her feelings. She was wounded. She was wounded to the core.

‘But, Jeanne, I love you,’ cried Celia desperately.

But Jeanne was not to be appeased. She got out some of her most severe sewing, a buckram collar for a gown she was making for Grannie, and stitched at it in silence, shaking her head and refusing to answer Celia’s appeals. Naturally Celia knew nothing of certain remarks made by Mary and Kate at the midday meal as to Jeanne’s people being indeed poor if they took all their daughter’s earnings.

Faced by an incomprehensible situation, Celia retreated from it and trotted downstairs to the dining-room.

‘And what do you want to do?’ asked Grannie, peering over her spectacles and dropping a large ball of wool. Celia picked it up.