# Daphne in Fitzroy Street/Chapter 9

“I’VE washed me all beautiful,” said Doris to Daphne returning milk-laden, “and I do like the basin being on the floor, and I’ve got everything on that will go without having to come off again for everything else to be stringed and buttoned. And do me up, Daffy dear. And that tree that’s in the fairy prince’s room comes right up here and looks in at me. There it comes!”
The plumes of the great ash rooted in the blackness of the Bloomsbury back-yard swayed in the wind and the sun. Daphne, leaning through the window, saw the slow, happy shivers run from the topmost leaves down slender branches to the very base of the tree-trunk.
“Good morning,” said Daphne to the tree. “It’s very kind of you to come and see us like this. Button own shoes, my Dormouse, before the tree looks in again. Here’s milk and buns and eggs and bread and butter. What a breakfast we’re going to have.”
“No nasty aunts to say, ‘Sit up, Doris, and don’t slop your milk and crummle your bread in that disgusting way!’” The words were Doris’s but the voice was Aunt Emily’s.
“You mustn’t slop your milk or crummle your bread here, beloved. This is our own house and we must keep it tidy.”
Doris was almost too careful not to crumble her bread, and breakfast was a long meal.
“Isn’t it lovely with no aunts and things?” She breathed a bread-and-buttery sigh. “I think heaven will be just like this, Daffy.”
The large loneliness of the big room, the steady growl of the great city outside, abashed Daphne a little. It made her feel very small, very helpless. But, presently, very brave. All the doors she had tried had opened to her touch: she had led the school, cajoled Madame, outwitted the relations. She was here, free—with Doris. The door that had money on the other side would open if she pushed hard enough. She straightened her shoulders and threw back her head and set her face sternly, a little fiercely.
“What are you going to do?” the child asked anxiously through a mug of milk—“not go and tell aunts what you think they are? Don’t let’s, Daffy.”
Daphne laughed and began to clear away the breakfast things. There was plenty to do—the bed to make, the furniture to arrange, the room to sweep. They went out to buy a broom in Googe Street for the purpose, and bought as well a drooping bunch of peonies. By lunch time—it was just like breakfast, Doris said, and so it was—the room looked less forlorn.
“We’ll have a curtain right across that end,” said Daphne, flushed with rapturous responsibilities, “and that’ll be our bedroom; and a curtain across the corner where the sink is, and that’ll be our kitchen. And the rest of the room will be our dining-room and drawing-room and schoolroom and——”
“Why schoolroom?”
“Because Dormice have got to learn.”
“I thought,” said Doris, injured, “that we were in a fairy-tale. With two princes,” she added contentedly. “I would like to see the train one again. Wouldn’t you, Daff?”
“Yes—no—I don’t know. We shan’t anyway,” said Daphne. “Now what does C A T spell?”
“You,” cried Doris, bubbling with the delightful laughter of a child at its own joke. “You—if you make it lessons. Don’t you think holidays now, to get us to forget Laburnum aunts?”
“Well, for today. We’ll go and buy curtains. Let’s measure the windows.”
The windows measured, they went and bought curtains. The stuff was only eighteenpence a yard, and Daphne told herself that nothing could be cheaper. Yet when she came to pay the bill, it was a five-pound note that was inside the magic ball that was jerked up into a network of overhead lines and rolled away across the shop, delighting Doris; and the ball returned holding only one gold coin, a very little silver, and a thin, grey bill.
But when the curtains came home a week later, everyone agreed that they made all the difference. I say everyone, because Doris had a tea-party that day, and her guests helped her to hang the curtains. That is the best of Bohemia. One is not expected to keep the real pleasures of life to oneself. If one buys a new carpet or new curtains all one’s friends crowd round with sympathetic interest. Even a new kettle is an event to which no spectator can really be indifferent.
But the next day, after the housework had been done, a little of the Regent’s Park explored, and dinner eaten and cleared away, the afternoon stretched long and empty ahead. There was no tea-party to look forward to. Daphne had no reason to suppose that there ever would be a tea-party. The excitement of flight, the agitation of the terror of pursuit, had died out. This – the quiet, spacious room with the scattered, insufficient furniture, the ceaseless moan of London underlying its silences – this was the fabric of life to which events, of any kind, would be only decorative embroideries. Daphne perceived that it might be a beautiful fabric—but she wanted to set bright stitches in it. And materials were lacking. There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a great town. This has been said before, but it is true for all that. She had heard no more of Claud Winston than his boots on the stairs below. She had seen nothing of him at all. He was keeping his promise. He would not come and bother. Well, that was nice of him. The next step in the acquaintance would have to be hers. And she did not choose to take it. Yet she felt a strange sympathy with the child who wanted so very much to go and scratch at the door of the fairy prince’s room.
“And when he opened it I’d play I was panthers. He’d like that.”
But Daphne said, No. The fairy prince was very busy, no doubt, and did not want Dormice, however dear. Life looked a little blank. Daphne was fully confident of her power to conquer the world—but to do that she must come to close quarters with it, and it looked now a prickly, hedgehoggy thing, hard to get hold of. Where ought one to begin? She felt empty—flat—blank, and found herself wishing that Doris had the habit of the afternoon sleep. She wanted to lose herself, to forget herself, to read, to write. And here was the child, talking, exacting. Till now most of Doris’s time had been spent with other people—in classes at school, with the servants, or in the presence of the aunts at Laburnum Villa; and the sisters’ moments together had had the value of the stolen meetings of unaccredited lovers. Now they would be always together.
“Let’s do something, Daffy,” the child urged, and a little pang shot through the girl. Were they going to be bored—they two? It was like the pang that sometimes pierces the golden hangings in Love’s palace at about, say, the third week of the honeymoon.
She had wished to be always with Doris. Well, now she was going to be always with her.
“What can us do?” Doris said. She had slipped out of her sister’s arm and was wandering aimlessly round the room, looking dully at the furniture that had seemed so interesting when it was in dusty disorder, clamouring for arrangement. Now it was arranged. Everything was neat now, neat with the dreadful neatness that follows a “good tidy-up.”
“Shall I tell you a story?” Daphne asked, but without heart. Doris accepted the offer with crushing alacrity. And the story was very dull. For the first time the tale came with effort; ideas were shy and words hard to find.
“I don’t think,” said the child, when the lame ending was reached, “I don’t think that’s a very nice story. Tell another.”
“I can’t,” said Daphne. “Look here, we’ll play noughts and crosses; and tomorrow we’ll go out and buy a real game in a box.”
Doris wanted to know what game, and Daphne did not know what game. The game at present was to be noughts and crosses.
“But I’m tired of noughts and crosses,” said the child, wrinkling up its face, “ever so dreadfully tired, you can’t think. I wish Cook was here, don’t you? She is so funny.”
At these dreadful words a sudden wave of misery swept over Daphne. This, then, was the end of everything. She had run away with Doris—for the child’s sake—she was prepared to devote her life to the child, she had loved her and taken care of her all her little years, and now, when for the first time the two were alone together for a couple of days, she had lost her power, her charm, and the child wanted—“the cook!”
The cisterns gurgled mockingly.
Her eyes, suddenly pricking, saw the pink, fluffy balls of the peonies that had stiffened their stalks in the water, showing green through the glass jam-jar found by Doris on the landing below; saw them clearly, then distorted and discoloured through the prism of tears that she did not choose to shed. She kept her eyes wide open, and jumped up, shaking her head so that the tears fell on the bare floor. She went to the window and looked out. The ash-tree swayed softly, and its green fingers stroked the window. Beyond, all the windows of those blackfaced houses that went down so deep and up so high, and in every room, no doubt, someone was being unhappy, or had been, or would be. It was an ugly world, very large, very lonely. On the terrace at school at this hour the girls would be walking up and down eating their thick slices of bread, thinly smeared with dark-red jam. Not thinking of her, of course—why should they? Even Doris——
“Don’t you wish Cook was here?” Doris insisted.
“Yes,” said Daphne, fiercely. “I do.”
There was a blank silence. Then—“You’re not cross, Daffy, are you?”
“No,” said Daphne, still fiercely.
“You sound as if you was—cross like aunts,” said Doris.
There was another silence.
“Sure?” said the child, catching its breath.
The girl turned quickly from the window and held out her arms.
“Yes, I was,” she said, “very cross—not with you, my Dormouse dear. Only I’m tired and my head aches and—don’t choke me, beloved.”
The little soft arms were close and very comforting.
“Don’t be tired,” said the little soft voice, “don’t be headacherish. Own Dormouse loves it!” The voice was the voice with which Daphne had so often soothed the child’s own troubles—soft little kisses were falling, light as butterflies, on cheeks, ears, neck.
“I’m better now,” said Daphne, and it seemed to Doris that she was laughing. “Silly Daphne.”
The arms tightened for a last hug. “I kissed you better, didn’t I?”
“Yes, darling.”
“Sure you’re all right?” The lank, dark hair was rubbed against the sister’s face.
“Yes, darling.”
The child leaned its weight back, and hung by its stretched arms to the neck of the kneeling Daphne.
“Dear Daphne,” she said, “what can we do? I do wish Cook was here!”
It was a knock on the trap door that interrupted the third quite successful fairy story. Every knock on the door brought Daphne’s heart into her mouth. It always might herald a discovering relative. So far it had only announced the charwoman who “did for Mr. Claud on the next floor, and please miss he thought you might be wanting someone to do for you”; or the man who came to connect the gas, and to ask whether the lady didn’t want a gas stove; or the vividly dressed young woman who had come to the wrong house, and was really, as she explained, sitting to Mr. Somebody-or-other next door—“and all these stairs, too,” she added over a puce plush shoulder. But each time it seemed that it might be one of the visitors whom Daphne least desired. And if it never was, then it was more likely that next time it would be. So now she said: “Come in,” not very cordially. The trap door opened, someone said, “It’s me,” and Doris bounded to its edge.
Winston’s head and shoulders, appearing in the black square where the trap door had been, reminded Daphne of the Flemish picture of the Resurrection that hung in the school chapel. The tilted trap-door, at the very angle of the gravestone of the principal figure.
“It’s the fairy prince,” cried Doris. “Have you come to ask me to tea, like you said you would?”
“That,” said the fairy prince—“may I come up, Miss Carmichael—how do you do?—is exactly what I have come for.” It was half of what he had come for. The other half he went without, because he saw Daphne’s face.
“May I have her?” he asked; “you’re awfully tired, and I’ll take all sorts of care of her.”
“Yes, yes,” said Doris, “do let me, Daffy.”
“It’s very kind of you,” said Daphne—“a little washing first, perhaps. London does come off on you so. I’ll send her down in a minute.”
“Only paws, Daffy,” he heard the stipulation as he got his length down through the trap door, “not faces. Faces isn’t fair more than three times in one day.”
The face, however, was pink and fresh as the hands when Doris presented herself at his door with a tap and “Daffy said to knock—but it couldn’t not be me when it’s me that’s having tea with you—your room isn’t so big as ours—and who is it washes your hands, because I think it’s high time——”
“It’s charcoal—what I draw with, you know. I’ll wash it off now, this minute.”
“Someone ought to wash you when you get as black as that. You have to have a master-mind—Daffy says so—when it’s really black. I’ll call Daffy—she’ll show you what a real good washing is.”
“No, no”—he caught her pinky hand.
“You’ll come off on me,” she urged, reproachfully. “You wash me,” he suggested.
“You’re very large—it’ll take a long time soaping you thoroughly,” she mused, as he took off his coat and turned up his shirt sleeves. “More water because of your being so very. Oh, you’ve got a real washstand. We haven’t yet. We have to go down on our hands and knees like forest beasts drinking at pools. I tried pretending it was a bath this morning, but when I went to walk in it, it went sideways over and everything got wet except me. It was fun. It went all under the chest of drawers and the bed and the hearthrug, and the hearthrug came off on the floor—it’s like a pattern, red and blue and splotchy. I do wish you’d keep still, and can’t you make your hand go any smaller?”
Daphne, left alone, had put the new kettle on the new spirit-lamp. One may as well have tea, even if one’s little sister does want the cook. Then she sat down to face the first situation that had ever baffled her. It seemed to her that Doris would always want the cook. And—would that charwoman be a sufficient substitute? And who was Daphne Carmichael that she should have taken into her hands the sole care of a little child who wanted cooks, and who would want other things, many other things—fresh air, exercise, space to play in, other children, education, training?
Doris’s laugh rang out up the uncarpeted stairs, through the still open trap.
“She’s happy now, anyhow,” said Daphne, and suddenly found that there was no reason why she should not cry. There was no one to see her or to ask what was the matter—that was one comfort. It was such a comfort that at its instance she cried more than ever. Then she shook herself. “You’re a nice person to conquer the world, aren’t you?” she presently asked a swollen-faced lady who looked out at her from, a shilling mirror over the chest of drawers, “and why should he have asked you to tea, anyhow?”
“Your kettle’s boiling over—I can hear it,” said a voice below the trap-door. “I’ve brought you some tea.”
Daphne put herself between the trap-door and window so that the light should not be on her face.
“I meant to ask you to come down with Doris,” said Claud, putting the tea on the table without looking at her. “It isn’t breaking our compact; I’ve waited two days. But I saw you were tired. You have a good rest—I’ll look after Doris. What a dear she is! I’m sorry I haven’t got a proper tea-tray.”
And he was gone. The “tea-tray” was a worn paper-portfolio. The tea was perfect, and there was cake. The evening light was hanging the bare walls with cloth of splendour. The shadows of the ash-tree made Japanesy patterns on floor and whitewash. Suddenly the loneliness was only solitude—the space not desolate but restful. She got out her blotting book—the one with her name embroidered on it in rosy silks by Madeleine, and began a letter to Columbine.
13 Fitzroy Street, Fitzroy Square, London.
"Dear Angel:
I have got a house of my own, at least Doris and I have. Will you come to tea with us? We have shaken off the aunts—forever, I trust, and here we are on our wild lone. We are frightfully happy. It is splendid to think that Doris is now dependent on me for everything. I shall simply live for her. We have a beautiful big attic, and we do our own housework. I shall give Doris lessons, of course. I intend to earn my own living, but I don’t know what at, yet. There is an artist, a sort of cousin of mine, who lives in this house. Perhaps I shall try to be an artist. And I sometimes think I shall become an author. Doris is having tea with the cousin, and I am alone in the big room. There is a tall ash-tree outside the window that bows and waves wanly in the breeze. The solitude and space are beautiful. Life will probably be very difficult for a while, but you know I am not afraid of life. I mean to conquer the world. I know now why people always look back to their school days as the happiest time. All the dear garden, and all of you, are surrounded by the halos of memory. It is a sad-sweet feeling. I feel that I am developing very rapidly. One does, through suffering, and I have suffered.
Here she came to the end of the sheet—read it—re-read it—frowned and moved as to tear it; then she took another sheet, and went on.
The above is rot, but I shan’t write it again. Take it cum ever so many grano salises. But we really have fled the auntal roof, and we really do wish you could drop in to tea. And there really is a thing that calls itself a cousin. And I didn’t make up the ash-tree either. Give my love to Madame and everyone. And write to me. And tell me everything. Have you seen anybody—anybody new? You can write just what you like now, because there’s no one here who’d open my letters. I know they used to try and read through your envelopes at Laburnum Lodge. I shall send this through Maria Spenlove, so that Madame won’t see it. And now I’ve thought of something else—only don’t tell anyone. Is it very awful to talk to people you’re not introduced to? Because I seem to be always doing it. Y. Ms. I mean. Of course with a lady it wouldn’t matter. Doris and the cousin seem to be playing wild-beasts. You hear everything very plainly because there are no carpets, and the cousin’s boots. As I am sending this through Maria I may as well say that the cousin is not really one, but a Y. M. and a perfect stranger. He is the second unintroduced person I was telling you about. Is it very awful of me? It’s not anything of that sort, and could not be, ever, because he is in love with another girl. So there can’t be any harm in it, can there? I should not like anyone to love me unless I cared for them. It must be awful to be the cause of misery and despair to others, I think a flirt is a very despicable character, don’t you? Good night. I wish you could see this room. It’s just the place for something very romantic. One might see a pale thoughtful face at a window, and then afterward he might come across the roofs after a cat that he had lost, or something, and you’d find he was your soul’s affinity. But that would be three unintroduced persons, and one too many. Write soon to your devoted
Daphne.
P. S. Don’t forget to write fully—especially about any new person you’ve met.—D. C.
P. P. S. The cousin seems to be doing the wild beasts in different voices. It is deafening and worse than the menagerie we went to that Whit Monday.
P. P. P. S. I shan’t say anything about that darling diamond heart at present. You wait till I get you home—that’s all!
It was nearly dark when Doris arrived on the back of the tall fairy prince who was, she affirmed, her little pet elephant. “And there’s a bear down there, and a gazelle and a beautiful giraffe-lady and I did Cook for them, and all the aunts and Madame and the girls, and they did laugh.”
“When she’s asleep,” said the little pet elephant diffidently, as he got down into the Flemish grave again, “won’t you come down and have supper with us? They’re all art students—and all jolly, You will you, won’t you?”
Daphne would, and gladly.
“Don’t go to sleep till I get you into bed, or I can’t undo you. Yes—and you must say your prayers. Very well, you may say them in bed. Now—you’re nearly asleep. Now, ‘Please God——’”
“Please God—sake, Amen,” said Doris, and was asleep.
It seemed worth while to put on another dress—a white one—and to do one’s hair. A bear, a gazelle, and a beautiful giraffe-lady, to say nothing of the elephant-host. If the one man in the world is far away and will not take any notice of one, that is not a reason for looking a frump.
As she bent over the curled up Dormouse for one last look she wondered how she could ever have felt impatient.
It is not easy to do one’s hair by the help of two flickering candles and a shilling mirror, but Daphne’s hair almost did itself, as Columbine had often remarked. Its pure red was a halo round her shell-tinted face. She looked extremely pretty, and knew it. The white woollen dress, plain as a nun’s habit, had been meant for a dressing-gown, but by sheer merit it had won its way to a higher station. As Daphne meant to do. Softly falling lace and an embroidery of gold had lent their aid to the making of a gown which no parlour in Laburnum Lodge had ever seen. She put it on now; it seemed the most “arty” dress she had—and was she not going among art students?
Her silk petticoat swished on the stairs. Doris was left alone save for one burning candle—the door open. From below came a confused murmur of laughing voices.
“It’s no use beginning till the fire gets clear,” she heard.
“Clear your mind of cant,” said someone else, as though it were something funny. More laughter.
She hesitated a moment with her hand on the door. Then entered. Sparse furniture—candle-light—young men and girls – introductions—greetings. Then she was in an armchair and looking about her with eyes almost for the first time shy. Here were young people, half a dozen of them, all new, all separated from her by the gulf of mere acquaintanceship. People whom she could not influence, people who would not try to influence her. Strangers, to whom she was a stranger. Daphne felt the world widen. A graceful girl with untidy dark hair and a long neck was leaning forward supported by a stiff arm on the divan and saying:
“What a darling your little sister is,” in a tone which convinced Daphne that, to the speaker, Doris’s sister, at least, was no darling.
“She is rather nice,” Daphne admitted, and wondered whether this was the giraffe or the gazelle. She knew when the girl on the hearth-rug shook back her long-short hair from eyes large, brown, and liquid as the eyes of a toy terrier and said, “Do you like scrambled eggs? I think it’s going to be that because I meant it to be an omelette?”
“Very much,” said Daphne, politely.
Then a stout young man with fair hair asked whether he had not met her in Paris—at Julien’s.
“No,” said Daphne, definitely. “I’ve never been in Paris except for three days once, and then we only did museums and picture galleries.”
There was a pause. They were all trying to be nice to her, and she, for the first time in her life, distrusted her own power of being nice to anyone.
A tall, dark man leaning back in a chair apart was watching her with half-closed eyes.
“Miss Carmichael is undecided whether to study art, music, or medicine,” said Claud. He meant to be amusing, but no one saw this, and the silence thickened.
The fat art student suddenly said, “Indeed,” but that hardly broke the silence at all. Daphne felt an intruder, an interloper. It was she—she, once the life and soul of all school parties, who had cast this blight. They had all been laughing before she came in. The girl on the hearth-rug smoothed a paint-stained pinafore, and moved the eggs on the hearthrug as though she were going to do conjuring tricks with them. A long-nosed young man, leaning against the wall, patiently sought to conceal the fact that his hands had not been washed for a long time. The man in the chair still looked at her. And the look was not friendly. She wished he wouldn’t.
“You’ll have some cocoa?” said Claud, with the effect of an ultimatum.
“Thank you,” said Daphne, in what sounded like tones of contempt.
“Oh, why did I come?” she was saying to herself. “They were so jolly without me. They hate my being here. Shall I have a headache and go?”
Conversation had resumed itself. The others were talking to each other, about things and people that she did not know. But there was none of the gay laughter that had hurried her hands at their hairdressing that she might the sooner be one of that merry party.
“I am a blight,” Daphne told herself. “A blight—me!”
They had tried to talk to her—to be civil. She had not known how to reply. She sat in silence listening, watching. Her eyes went from one shabby figure to another and fell on her own white lap. What a dress to have put on to come to a students’ tea-party! No wonder they felt her a blight. Such a fool would be. Why hadn’t she come as she was? Or put on the old green dress? No doubt they thought she was superior and stuck-up—and she had no way of showing them that she wasn’t. That Winston boy might have told them she wasn’t a blight. Or shown them. But the situation was evidently beyond him. He still babbled fitfully of cocoa. She looked round her, in something like despair, and all her longing was to “get out of it.”
Then her blue eyes met the beautiful eyes of the giraffe-lady, looked long, drew from their green depths a desperate courage. She leaned forward.
“I am most awfully frightened of you all,” she said to the green eyes. “I never met anyone really interesting before. Anyone who did things, I mean.”
“We don’t do much,” said Green Eyes doubtfully. “We’re only art students.”
“I’m a schoolgirl,” said Daphne; “at least I was till the other day. And now”—the proper method of making cocoa was being hotly debated and under cover of it she found courage—“and now I feel so silly. Mr. Winston said you were all art students, and this is the only ‘arty’ frock I’ve got—and now I feel like a person in a play. But I really did put it on because I thought you’d like it—I thought it was the right thing.”
“So it is,” said Green Eyes, obviously struggling with some unexplained emotion; “it’s perfectly lovely. And so are you.”
Daphne instantly felt at home. So, and not otherwise, might Columbine have spoken. A breath of the old familiar atmosphere of admiration came to her, like the air of June dawn.
“Do help me,” she murmured across a pile of cushions; “it’s all so strange. And I feel that! We just come in and spoiled everything. And I’m not a pig, really. Really I’m not.”
“I’ve got eyes,” said she whose eyes were green. “You’re not a pig. But I thought you were—superior.”
“How very horrible!” Daphne’s tone was convincing. Her figure drooped from its prim pose, took on the alluring innocent curves that her schoolmates had worshipped at the drawing-class.
The cocoa controversy raged—the storm of it covered talk. Claud, noting with satisfaction that his white-robed guest had found a tongue and an ear, intensified the bitterness of his defence.
“I’ve got to earn my living,” Daphne said, with soft, confiding glance—she was playing for a place in this society which regarded her as an outsider, and she was playing her best—“and I don’t in the least know what to do.”
“Do you draw?” asked the other.
“Not well enough,” said Daphne—“at least I’m afraid not. But I’ve got to do something, because we haven’t any money at all, hardly.”
“The omelette is ready,” said the girl on the hearthrug; and everyone got up, and there was a rattle of plates.
“I would love to draw you,” said Green Eyes, intensely. “Did you ever sit?”
“Often—no one else ever could—to the drawing class at school.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t care—— It’s awfully little, of course. But there’s a sketch club. Would you sit for us? It’s a shilling an hour.”
“I should love to,” said Daphne, flushing with pleasure.
“The scrambled eggs are served,” said Claud. “There are only three forks. The higher numbers will eat with teaspoons.”
The confusion consequent on the disparity between the number of chairs and the number of guests was short, but it was long enough for Green Eyes to convey to the two other girls the true inwardness of Daphne’s white-and-goldness—not side, as anyone would have been justified in inferring, but a sheer desire to fit herself for reverent worship at the shrine of art—and art students.
The leaning youth roused himself to place the best chair for Daphne. Green Eyes took her hand to lead her to it. Claud gave her cocoa, and an eggy mess on a chipped plate.
“You are entitled to a fork,” said he, “as guest of the evening.”
The dark man from the chair was opposite her now. He was thickly powdered with charcoal. He would be able to look at her more than ever. But he had eyes now only for his plate.
The supper had got to petits suisses from Garnier’s and to éclairs and mille-feuilles, from the only really French pastry cook’s in London—I mean the one in Charlotte Street—and Daphne had had time to wonder whether shyness always thus fools its victims, before Green Eyes spoke up.
“Miss Carmichael,” she said, “is one of Us. She has got to earn her living. And she has kindly consented to sit for the sketch club—in that dress—to begin with.”
A murmur ran round the table. Daphne suddenly perceived the meeting to be friendly.
“I—I’m not a professional model,” she said.
“That sees itself,” said the fair youth who leaned against walls.
“But if you’ll let me pose for you—I can—I can keep still.”
Seven cups, mugs, and glasses of cocoa were raised and drained to the new model.
Daphne moved once again in the atmosphere of assured success. Everyone was as “nice” to Daphne as even Daphne could wish. Obviously she had not only ceased to be a blight, but had become a personage. She was, once again, as she had always felt she should be, and indeed in her school life had been, the centre of things. They acted charades—Daphne had her choice of parts. They sang—Daphne’s voice was praised—solos demanded. Her French songs enraptured—her tuning of the dusty guitar reached from its nail on the wall excited respect—her playing of it roused enthusiasm. An orchestra of combs and paper gave an outlet to unsuspected musical talent.
“Oh!” said Daphne at last, stooping her head to release her neck from the guitar—two handkerchiefs hastily knotted together had replaced the guitar’s grimy ribbon, “Oh, I have had such a lovely time. I do feel as if I’d known you, all of you, all my life. It has been so jolly.”
“The pleasure,” said the youth against the wall, “has been ours.”
The charcoal-powdered man, who had not performed on the comb, or joined in the songs, but had preserved throughout the attitude of a spectator at a play, nodded a sudden “Good night,” and went out abruptly.
“Will you come and see me?” she asked Green Eyes, at parting.
“Won’t I just?” Green Eyes answered. “Tomorrow? At five? Right.”
“Miss Carmichael ought to have a house-warming,” said the dirtiest student, “and I haven’t a free day till Tuesday.”
“That fixes the date, of course.” Daphne was now once again quite definitely her pretty commanding self, “won’t you all come to supper on Tuesday, and—and bring your own mugs?”
That settled it.
At one o’clock a chorus of combs and tissue paper accompanied Daphne’s retirement to her attic. And the tune that they played was, “Who is Sylvia?”
“What a find!” the gazelle-eyed lady murmured as the trap door closed on her white draperies, and her new friends blundered and rustled according to sex and natural aptitude, down bare, steep, unlighted stairs. “Claud, you ought to be an Arctic explorer.”
“I am,” said Claud, modestly.
Thus in a little orgy of innocent vanity gratified, Daphne put out the first roots in the new soil.