CHAPTER III
“If it gets any hotter, I shall be found melted down in one of my own crucibles,” Gillian wailed, to the accidental party of Deb, Nell and Antonia, who had flopped in to see her after a succession of stifling days at the latter end of July.
Antonia was temporarily freed from service by an attack of malaria on the part of her General. And Deb explained that since a couple of weeks Nell was working as her fag at the station canteen whence they had just come.
“Winifred, I wish you’d try for all our sakes to get a little thinner; the mere sight of you in weather like this is trying—especially since you spell your name with such a lot of extra letters.”
“Why, what difference can that make?” from Winnie, quite happy on the divan.
Gillian demanded sympathy from the company: “It’s that Camellia woman puts morbid ideas into her head. She’s told her that Winifred is a degeneration of a beautiful old Saxon name, and we’re gradually Saxonizing it back again to its original condition. We spell it W y n n e f r w d d e now.”
“It’s unrecognizable,” Deb laughed. “I’ll take to the divan on the strength of it.... I’m exhausted—we had an awful hustle up at the canteen.” She carelessly rolled the astonished Winifred on to the floor, and took her place among Theo’s treasured purple and peacock cushions—“Don’t you know, Winnie, that if we were in Germany, you, as an unimportant spinster, would have no right at all to the sofa, which is strictly reserved for the matron?”
“Well, but you’re not married either,” the victim of the evacuation argued slowly. “We none of us are except Gillian, and she isn’t really.”
Gillian twinkled across at Deb: “Well, how would the Germans cope with the problem of somebody who isn’t married really? Would they give me the sofa?”
“They’d give you the boot; and me too. There are no fine semi-shades abroad. A girl is good till she is slightly bad, and then she’s accepted as completely bad and damned everlastingly. Here, a girl can be badder and badder, if she doesn’t break the last rule of all—and then be accepted as completely good again at any time she wants to—like Manon. She’s engaged to Dolph Carew, you know. He’s been left pots of money by his uncle....”
Antonia said contemptuously: “Manon is the epitome of the saying; ‘If you can’t be good, be careful!’ She’s been careful and she’s got her reward....”
“And she’s enjoyed her nineteen years into the bargain. But maidenhood has a market value, and Manon has known that from the cradle. Not from La llorraine; she’s no ready reckoner—much too generous.”
Gillian asked: “Carew has been married before, hasn’t he? What was his first wife like?”
And Antonia and Deb exchanged a long glance. Then the latter spoke softly. “Jenny was good—but not careful.... I’ve been thinking about her rather a lot, lately....”
“She was too good by a thousand miles to be Manon’s predecessor,” murmured Antonia.
Gillian, suddenly standing up, flung away her jersey, revealing only a camisole beneath. Then she unfastened the safety-pin that clipped her skirt together. “That’s better. I believe scraggy people feel the heat more than fat ones—I do really. It seems to get so quickly at our bones and grill them. Which is hotter, sizzled flesh or grilled bones? Winnie, I appeal to you?”
“I was just wondering....” Winnie began, as usual ten minutes behind in the conversation—“What Deb meant by——”
A violent peal at the bell stopped her.
“I can’t be bothered to dress all over again for that. Answer it, Deb!”
“Let me,” pleaded Nell. She had been lumped on the floor, somewhere near Gillian’s feet, gazing steadily upwards at that young woman’s face. Now, in an agony lest someone not herself should have this chance of doing a service to her goddess, she scrambled up, threw a look of fierce dark reproach in Deb’s direction, and rushed to the front door, colliding with Silvester’s dignified progress through the hall.
“Oh——” they heard Nell’s affrighted gasp, “do forgive me—I—I—didn’t know!”
“Lord,” whispered Gillian—“I forgot we have a staff. I’m always forgetting. Poor Nell, this is enough to put her out of gear for a fortnight——”
“It doesn’t matter at all, Miss,” graciously from the valet.
“Not a bit—I mean thanks awfully,” Nell’s assent came in a gasping torrent. Then she darted back into the room, back to her place on the rug, and sat glowering. Nobody dared speak....
It had been several months before Nell would consent at all to meet the illustrious Gillian Sherwood: “She won’t want to meet me—I’m too stupid—I shall hate her—I hate people who ask me questions....”
“But whyshouldshe ask you questions, for goodness sake?” Deb had retorted, exasperated. “She’s not a County Council examiner.”
“She will, I know she will. She knows all sorts of brilliant people and she discovers diseases for the papers, so she can’t want me so dreadfully badly.”
“But people needn’t want each other dreadfully badly to just meet in the ordinary way.”
“I hate meeting anyone in the ordinary way,” perversely. And Antonia, who was present, had laughed, and told Deb to leave the shy baby alone. So that it was a shock of astonishment to Antonia when Gillian, after a recent accidental encounter, was straightway enthroned as Nell’s deity....
“She’s a sweet kid, but she wrings one dry,” was the deity’s confidential version to Deb. “She writes to me every day, long unpunctuated letters all about whether certain people make you feel certain feelings, and other feelings make you see certain colours, and certain people make you see red.... And then she comes to see me, and says ‘I didn’t want to come really—You didn’t want me, did you?’ And I have to be hectic——”
“And she says: ‘Yes, but you don’t say that as if it was real,’” Deb guessed.
“Oh, Deb, what shall I do with her? One can almost love the child and one wouldn’t hurt her for worlds, but we sit inlong heavy muffled impenetrable silences like slow sinking into a feather bed ... and then she shoots out at me ‘You’re different to-day somehow, aren’t you?’ And I guiltily try to be the same, but I don’t know what to be the same as. And I get a swift brown look and: ‘What are you thinking of?’—When ten to one I’m not thinking of anything worth while—well, I mean nothing she’d like me to be thinking of. So I say, ‘One can’t always tell one’s thoughts and feelings, can one?’ ‘No—but one would like to, wouldn’t one? At least I suppose mine aren’t up to much.... But I wonder——’”
“And you say ‘What?’ and she says ‘Nothing’—and then it begins all over again. I’m sorry, Jill; I let you in for this.”
“Don’t blame yourself. She saps my strength rather, but I’m fond of young Nell, and she’s lovely to look at—as Timothy Fawcett seems to have found out.”
“They never get any forrarder though, do they?”
“Bless him—and bless them both. They can afford to waste three or four years in being shy. Theo and I did.”
Deb laughed outright at the comparison of the two wooings.... “I wonder——”
“What?”
“Nothing!”
“You’re as bad as Nell!”
But Deb was wondering what effect Gillian’s pioneer boldness might have on the psychology of her disciple.
Nell sat glowering ... and the other three girls were sympathetically silent, listening the while to Zoe’s voice hailing Silvester as “Bob” and eagerly enlightening him as to the adventures and whereabouts of a certain “Guiseppi” who was evidently an intimate acquaintance of a mutual past....
“She’s the Socialist in sex par excellence,” murmured Gillian, “a reproof to all us snobs....” And then Zoe bubbled into the room.
“Gillian, isn’t it too funny for words, I used to know your man quite well—at least I suppose he’s your husband’s man—at least I suppose he isn’t your husband—but that isn’t what I came to tell you....”
“Anyway, I was aware of it already,” Gillian laughed.
“What—about Pinto? My dear, howcouldyou be—unless, of course, Cliffe told Antonia, and she told you? You know, Antonia, I never like to say anything and I’m very fond of Cliffe, but I do think he talks too much.... You remember that evening when Pinto went mad in my flat last year?”
“Will I ever forget it? and will your brother ever forget it, Deb? and will Captain Braithwaite and Mr Sam Wright and the little Belgian corporal ever forget it? Oh, and the macaroni merchant from round the corner—he had most cause to remember it, hadn’t he? Did he ever get damages, by the way?
“Well, you can say what you like, Antonia, but though I was very angry with Pinto for the moment, I do honestly think he was perfectly right—in his own way. And I must say, I do like a man to assert himself. I mean, it’s a sort of test, isn’t it, Gillian, how much he really respects you, if it annoys him to find your room full of other men? especially—but that was what I was going to tell you.” She unpinned the veil from her slanting sailor hat and adjusted the belt of her trim jacket ... pulled forward a kiss-curl or two, dumped Quelle Vie into Nell’s lap, whipped out some lurid red lip-salve and delicately outlined the curves of her mouth, and spun a provocative glance downwards at her flaunted silk ankles, as though they were another’s, and she coveted them.
“Never mind all that, Zoe—Theo won’t be in for ages. Tell us your news first.”
Zoe opened her eyes. “Well, I must say, Jill, it’snotlike you to be spiteful. No, it isn’t, and I’m disappointed. If Deb had made that remark, I wouldn’t have been....”
“Thanks,” from a drowsy but grateful Deb on the divan. While Gillian, in whose wide frankness had lurked not a germ of spite, gazed helplessly at the ruffled little soubrette; and then, suddenly understanding, apologized.
Zoe kissed her. “All right, dear. ‘The mind knoweth not its own cattiness.’ Well, about Pinto——”
She described at length how a very contrite Pinto had yesterday turned up at the flat, tendering his usual olive-branch—a jar of olives—with the explanation of the occasion when he had overheard, in a café in Paris, two subalterns discussing his fiancée by name, over a letter presumably fromCliffe, containing the advice to think about her no more, for she was being kept by a man with the face of an orang-outang and the temper of a Patagonian savage....
“And I do think it’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard, don’t you, Antonia?—that the poor darling never recognized himself, but thought I was being untrue to him with another man while he was away. Yes, I really do think it justifies his annoyance that time.... Ilikea man to have a spirit of his own, whatever you may say. And now he’s at last had it out with Cliffe, and we’re engaged again, and I’ve promised him all sorts of things, I forget what——”
“I’d try and remember, if I were you. One of them might be important.”
“Deb, you’ve got a perfectly horrid mind.... I’ve promised him, of course, not to answer advertisements in the “Vie Parisienne,” nor to accept wine—little things like that. And I think he’s right, in a way, don’t you?—because one never knows what may happen—though I do think Cliffe ought to think twice before he gossips about being ‘kept,’ because it’s not a nice thing to say about one’s friends, is it? I wonder if I shall ever meet those two subalterns—wouldn’t you say they must have seen me somehow, and been rather smitten, for Cliffe to write like that and warn them off? But it was a funny coincidence, wasn’t it, that Pinto should just have been sitting at the same time in the same café, so near their table? And I believe, though he didn’t say so, that one of them was that perfectly dear lamb, Timothy Fawcett.”
Antonia, to spare Nell’s obvious confusion, asked: “Are you going to marry Pinto at last?”
“Good heavens, no! Marry a man with a temper like that? Quelle vie!—no, I wasn’t talking to you, love!” as the spaniel sat up and barked. “But I’m used to being engaged to Pinto, and one misses it—besides, it’s a sort of protection now I’m at the War Office. My dears, just listen....”
They listened for about twenty minutes. And then Gillian said she might as well be suitably employed during the entertainment; and darted into the adjoining bedroom, whence she returned with an enormous pile of snowy but ragged underclothing and a cigar-box full of cottons.
And then even Zoe was silent and attentive before the spectacle of Gillian sewing. She had no scissors and no thimble, so she jabbed the needle on her knee to prick it through themore resisting portions of material or lace, and left a length of thread hanging or else pulled at it—and pulled out the previous ten minutes’ toil. She held her needle poised over an exquisite bit of embroidery, like a spade over a potato allotment—and then dug at it with grim energy. And she sighed and she swore and she struggled, and assaulted the tatters of fine lawn and crêpe-de-chine, till Antonia was moved to exclaim: “And these are the fingers that are noted for the most delicate experimental work in the entire Institute——”
Gillian spread out and ruefully surveyed the ten pricked and discoloured victims of her combined career as a woman and a professor of scientific research.
“One can’t always be getting fresh underwear. It’s such a fag. These were very expensive when I bought them; it’s not so long ago—but I can never feel I’m in harmony with this sort of work. It’s got to be done, though,” and she thrust the eye of the needle anew towards the thread poised in her other hand.
Nell had been taught by her mother to sew beautifully, and sat wishing bashfully she had the courage to tender her gift at Gillian’s shrine. She was, however, unable to articulate her ardent desire; and Winnie, whose plain purport in the house was solely to spare Gillian the present endurances, sat likewise passively watching the warfare in which the animate seemed likely to be defeated by the inanimate; advising at last: “Try holding them a different way, Jill. No, not the needle—them”
“Like this?” Gillian made an awkward bunch of the material in her fist. “But it feels all wrong now.”
“Better give it up, Jill—throw it over to Winnie, she’ll do it for you.”
Winifred disregarded the hint. And Nell opened impulsive lips, made a sound in her throat, and thickened again to silence.
“I won’t give up”—putting in stitches that were like a giant straddling from one edge of the rent to the other. “It’s a nuisance, but I’ve got to learn,” ferociously obstinate.
“Cleanliness is next to ungodliness,” Antonia discovered with her aloof air of mingled amusement and disdain.
“Oh, cleanliness matters even in one’s godly days. And softness. But when it comes to wheat-coloured or pale lilac ribbons drawn through, and the cling of faint scent and embroidered butterflies put on over the heart,—well, I do considerTheo’s extras take up rather a lot of time.” And Gillian added with mournful honesty: “I never used to mind a hole or two!”
Winnie put in: “It doesn’t matter in places that don’t show....”
“You never can be sure, though, can you, Winnie?” Deb teased her.
“Of course you can.”
“Winnie, are all your flirtations strictly spiritual?”
“Don’t be silly. One doesn’t flirt with men who can’t behave.”
“Even the best behaved of men are liable to be carried away by their feelings.”
Deb was naughtily poking up that layer of suburban respectability which was spread just underneath Winnie’s ordinary girlish tendency for what she termed “larking about.”
“A nice girl can always keep them in order,” complacently. “I’m sure I’m fond enough of a bit of fun, nobody can call me a prude, but I always make a rule ‘so far and no further.’”
Deb and Zoe joyously hurled themselves on the phrase: “Howfar is so far?—that’s just it! define the limits of virtue, Winnie.Howfar before they mayn’t go any further?”
And in spite of Winifred’s indignant dodges and subterfuges, they succeeded in pinning her down at last to a hesitant declaration of principle. She affirmed that the parts which civilized raiment left exposed were for caresses—no harm in that: the face, the V of the neck, the arms below the elbow, hands and wrists....
“And anything beyond is violation of neutral territory?”
Winnie wriggled ambiguously. “Of course, as soon as a fellow starts pulling you about, you know.”
“Know what?”
“What he’s after.”
“What is he after?” Deb’s voice was the perfection of innocent inquiry.
“Oh, I don’t know.... You do worry, Deb. I’ve got along all right till now.” Winnie’s eyes were very round and puzzled. For the code of her class was not for analysis; a jumble of puritanism and prejudice and incurious sensuality. “But of course one has got to put a stop to it somewhere; mother wanted me to have a good time, and never bothered me much, but she did say that a chap, when he marries a girl,likes to feel that he’s the first.... Mother’d be shocked at you, Deb, I really do believe you’ve let a fellow”—her voice died away. And Deb said quickly, with averted head: “You believe I’d let a fellow go so far—and further, is that it?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘further’” Winifred retorted, pestered into a desire to get some of her own back. “You’re so close about your love-affairs.”
“Winnie, there was a time when I was a pure young girl, like you are now ... and then something happened ... in my life ... and I’ve never been the same since, Winifred. I wonder if you’d understand if I told you.”
“Oh, do!” gasped Winnie, her prudery delightedly offering itself to be shocked.
Zoe’s voice was heard in the distance shrilling a duet of deathless memories with Silvester in the pantry.
“You couldn’t do it if she were in the room—she wouldn’t give you the chance,” Gillian said, letting her lingerie fall from her lap in despair. “But as it is, Deb, I officially invite you to tell Winnie the Unofficial Story of your Life—it may widen her outlook.... We’ll keep quite still, Antonia, Nell and I.”
Deb began, hands clasped behind her head, eyes contracted as in dreamy contemplation of small figures specking a curly, dusty road:
“For the moment I can only remember John Thorpe and his mother’s ear-trumpet. I was wildly infatuated with John Thorpe, so I used to ingratiate myself with his mother through her ear-trumpet. Not many people in the hotel would bother with that ear-trumpet, but I thought it was a short cut to Paradise.... Once I heard him bellowing to her in the strictest confidence that Ellaline had accepted him the night before. And I had to go on ingratiating myself down the ear-trumpet, because he and everybody would have noticed it if I’d suddenly left off. One has one’s pride.... At the end of eleven days my throat was as sore as my soul ... so I went to Germany on a visit and the war broke out....
“And that was for me the dawn of love....
“I can’t keep to any chronological order, of course.
“The next thing that stands out is three minutes—well, it can hardly have been that. I’d gone to bed with a headache—not a very bad one; and when I heard Phil’s voice in the hall—he’d motored over with a party—I wished I hadn’tpretended it was too bad to stay up. I heard him say: ‘Where’s my wife?’—he always called me his wife.... They answered laughing, ‘first floor, second door on the right’—the thud of his feet on the stairs. Then he was on the bed and had me and the quilt and the pillow all swept up and smothered up together in his arms.... I was simply dazed with his kisses—and with the hot tingling feel of his hands. He rushed downstairs again and I heard him explaining lightly to the others that he’d popped in his head at the door. He went abroad a little while after....
“And I sometimes think that was for me the dawn of love.”
“You let him come into your bedroom?” panted Winnie. “You let a strange fellow sit—on—your—bed?”
Deb went on as though she had not heard.
“When Louis Halliwell—yes, the music-hall song-and-patter star—motored me to the Kingston Empire that night of nights——”
“Thesamenight?” from Winnie, incredulously.
“Six years before—he promised me I should see life from behind the scenes. He kept his promise. I spent the evening in his dressing-room, watched him make up, heard him chaff with the other ‘turns’ who drifted in and out. He drove me round to the digs of the Twin Acrobats, after the show, and they filled up a tumbler with port, and he told me in a whisper it was expected of bohemian palliness I should toss it off.... So I was half asleep coming home in the car, but I just remember he put my arm at the back of his waist and said it helped him drive if I kept it there. So I kept it there. On the doorstep he put his hands on my shoulders and said ringingly: “You’re one of usnow, Deb!”—and kissed me, once, on the middle of my mouth....
“That kiss was, for me, the dawn of love.”
Winifred was so congealed to a solid state of astonishment, that when she said “Not again?” it sounded quite calm.
“For cherry jam I’d do anything. That must be my excuse. For when Colville came back to me, married, and said I’d been his ideal on and off for seven years, and perhaps his wife would die, although he had a tendency to appendicitis, I thought I’d better discourage him. If he had died in my arms, Gillian, and there’d been an inquest, she couldn’t have divorced him any more, could she? But she might have got a Decree of the High Courts to haul in the cherry jam supposing he’dmade a will in my favour. Colville said: ‘I paid 4s. 3d. a pound for it, Deb. I don’t mind paying for what I want most....’ He looked meaning, and I looked far-away and said: ‘There’s—somebody—else—now. There wouldn’t have been if you’d come last Tuesday.” He groaned and asked me for a glove—as if one spoils a pair these days! So I laid my cheek for a brief-fleeting-space-of-time against the back of his hand, instead. It did just as well—but I do think he might have sent me a pot of the jam. But he said he couldn’t get any out of the cellar without her seeing, even in a shrimping-net. He said he had thirty-seven pounds of it in the cellar.
“And that was, for me, the dawn of love....”
Deb sighed.
“Pass over Padraic, the Sorrowful Celt, who used to keen and croon and lilt and lament rhythmically over the misery which would surely be my lot, till I felt like my own corpse privileged to attend my own wake. He would tell me long melancholy Irish stories about his long melancholy Irish friends, and they all sounded to me the same friend,” Deb’s voice rose and fell with the cadences of waves on the shore—“till at the very last, did I not hear myself fading to unreality as a legend of Eire, long and melancholy, re-told by him in the future to other friends, who would also become legends, who would all become the same harrowing, hopeless legend....
“‘But,’ he said—‘if I could only look up and look across the room, Rosaleen——’”
“Who was Rosaleen?”
“Me,” briefly. “‘As I sit mourning o’ nights solitary at my window—if I could only look up and see yourself in the doorway, grave as Mary among the lilies—in your simple white shift, Rosaleen....’”
“What’s a shift?” Winnie was galvanized anew by curiosity.
“An animal only to be found in Ireland. The skin of the shift is used for coats....”
“But why did he want you to come to his room in a white fur coat?” completely mystified.
“Men do,” Deb explained lightly. “There was Monna Vanna, you know....”
“And youwent? Well, youare! What didhedo?” her appetite was growing by what Deb gave it to feed upon.
Scornful of her expectation, and without removing her eyes from that visionary road specked by the little black figures of men, Deb answered her: “He smiled mournfully, without moving from where he sat solitary at his window, and murmured: ‘This does not make a man feel good, Rosaleen——’
“Perhaps those words were, for me, the dawn of love. Perhaps—who knows....”
“But what happened?” goggled Winnie.
“The landlord came in with the watering-pot,” Deb snubbed her, brutally. “And we all played French rounders together.”
“Memoirs of a Courtesan, by Lewis Carroll. Deb, I don’t think Winnie can stand many more dawns.”
“Olaf was romantic. Olaf was fair and blue-eyed and white of skin, and just twenty; and he came from the northern forests of Sweden. Nothing was too stock sentimental for him.... When I set out to gather roses in a basket from my garden before breakfast, he followed me about saying how beautiful it was to see me gather roses in a basket from my garden before breakfast.... He dreamt of a day when he should be standing in the doorway of his hut among the snow, carelessly rubbing up his ski and shielding his eyes from the Aurora Borealis, and I, a weary little dark-haired princess dressed all in white——”
“That shift might come in useful again.”
“—Would come plodding towards him through the storm like—like a weary little dark-haired princess. Then I told him what I really looked like in really cold weather.... And so his dawn of love was shattered in the bud——”
Antonia groaned at the metaphor. And Deb, who was getting tired, even of the expression in Winifred’s eyes, grew ever briefer and more inconsequent in her memoirs.
“Tremayne said quickly: ‘You can trust me, Deb—You needn’t be afraid....’ And then looked like a sulky steamroller when I cried back, ‘I’mnotafraid ... I’m hurt!’—And I told him he ought to take a few lessons in comparative anatomy—and then he sulked again. What is comparative anatomy, Jill? Would it mean comparing one girl with another, in his case? Anyhow he’s not as deft as that dear old coachman who was sixty-four and wanted me to come out with him to Canada and make a fresh start with him there. But he’d always driven the Brighton coaches, so I was sure he’dfeel the change and I wouldn’t be able to make up to him for it.... He was just a year younger than Grandfather Mackenzie, whom I’d always snuggled up to and curled my little hand confidingly in his big shaggy paw. That was before I learnt that sixty-four was no age at all, though his wife had looked at me queerly once or twice ... and when I met Etienne Dalison at their garden-party, and grandfather said: ‘Is he your fairy prince?’ I laughed saucily up at his whiskers: ‘Why not?’ ‘Because I want you all to myself,’ and jumped at me—Lord! how I ran!
“Etienne Dalison was the velvet hand inside the iron glove—and he never forgot it. ‘Certainly you may go,’ with a sort of deadly quiet. That was in his house at midnight—or it might have been a quarter to eleven. ‘Is it likely I would detain you?’ And courteously and quietly he helped me on with my cloak the instant I requested it. That was his quiet courtesy....
“And he opened the door for me, and quietly stood aside to let me pass, saying quietly: ‘You will telephone when you are ready.’ He knew I would.
“And I didn’t.
“Hedid, though. He rang up twice, just to make sure that I understood his silence was a tense controlled silence, the silence of quiet strength ... it would have been too terrible for words if I had thought it just ordinary silence!
“But he had an awfully voluptuous house; æsthetic and luxurious and barbaric—you know the style—all mosaics and art treasures and rose-leaves floating in the blood-red finger-bowls, and silken hangings and richly crocheted antimacassars, and Moorish fretwork and poker-work ... oh, I forget what else. An invisible flutist or a lutist during meals to whip up your senses like cream ... and an inner apartment with Louis the sixteenth’s own bed standing encanopied in gold on an ivory platform, and an expensive little negligée thrown lightly for your use across the towel-horse, in case love dawns——”
Gillian sprang up abruptly from her chair, kicked away the surrounding billows of underwear, and walked firmly across to the couch; stood looking down with an unusual air of sternness:
“Deborah, I don’t know if Winifred is shocked or not. The point is,I am. Your revelations have ceased to be funny—they’remerely pitiful. I take it, by the way, that they’re mostly true?”
“I’m not a novelist,” responded Deb, shifting rather uneasily under Gillian Sherwood’s censure. “What’s up, Jill? Do you imagine I’ve sinned with all these heroes in turn?”
“No, I don’t. That’s just it. All this dabbling—it isn’t worth while. You know much too much—you know everything. You’ve got a rotten name—as bad as mine. And nothing to show for it. You’re smothered with dust from the arena—but you never ride. Deb, Deb, a little honest sin, for Heaven’s sake! I’m not keen on this demi-game!”
“A little honest sin—or a little honest chastity——” Antonia took up her stand by Gillian’s side, and put one arm about her shoulders....
“Two of you!” Deb raised herself on one elbow and prepared for battle; “les extrèmes se touchent!”
“What does that mean?” laboriously from Winifred.
“Look next time there’s a fried whiting on your plate. Yes—two of us, Deb—we’ve been meaning to pitch into you since some time, Antonia and I. What are you doing with Blair Stevenson?”
“What’s Blair Stevenson doing with you?” Antonia amended.
Their victim protested. “I could tell you better if you wouldn’t both hover over me in that menacing way. Do, please, go back to your seats. Pair of bullies!”
They humoured her in that, but Deb saw there was no escape from their quiet persistence of enquiry.
“Did I tell you about a man in the train——” she began.
“We were asking you about Blair Stevenson, Deb.”
“Yes, but the man in the train bears on the question—he does, honestly. And I’m sure Winnie would like to hear about him—it raises an interesting point of etiquette, ... Well, once upon a time,” in a great hurry, for she saw that Antonia and Gillian would immediately blockade any gap she exposed to them—“I was travelling, and there were lots of people in the carriage, and one quite nice-looking man, and presently all the other people got out, and we both had a sort of feeling of release ... at least, I had, and I knew he had too. He asked if I minded whether he smoked, and I said I didn’t a bit, so he offered me a cigarette, and I took it and thanked him nicely. Well, it would have been so ridiculous to have glared at himand been porcupiny all over, and to have sat there consciously and conspicuously hugging my virtue as though I suspected from the very first moment that he had designs upon it. I made some remark about having to hurry with the cigarette as I got out at the next station—‘Oh, then we haven’t got very much time, have we?’”
Deb broke off. Her hands were hotly clenched, and her eyes a sombre, crepuscular blue....
“Jill—I fought for it like a—a—devil-cat, for what I had—God knows why—but Ihadguarded it by flight and by cunning and by instinct, for years and years—since the very beginning.... And now this perfectly casual stranger takes it for granted it was his for the asking. I was up against it—and I fought—so that he was astonished—let me go. I walked to the other end of the carriage and sat there, looking out. Presently he said in a different way altogether—not ashamed of himself and perfectly cool, butdifferent: ‘You can come back to your seat opposite me. It’s all right.’ It was all right, and I came back and said slowly: ‘Not exactly playing the game, was it?’ You see, he was sure to have been a public-school boy, and if he had winced, I’d have gone on to say something about how would he like it if his sister....”
“Deb—is nothing sacred to you?”
“That’s whatIwas going to askhim. But he proved a fairly unusual type. He speculated a moment, and then shook his head, smiling: ‘Yes—but you shouldn’t have taken the cigarette. That’s an accepted cue, you know—or if you didn’t know, you ought to have.’ It struck me for the very first time that there is something in it when our mothers and aunts warn us not to let unknown young men talk to us.”
“Yes, but they ought to tell us why and they never do,” in one long breath from Nell, whom the other girls had forgotten was present.
“Our aunts and mothers, most of them, have Weldon’s-Paper-Pattern still in their systems, however tolerant and lax they may appear on the surface.”
“Then no wonder we get into messes, scrabbling about for wisdom. Our aunts and mothers weren’t allowed to scrabble by their aunts and mothers.... And our children won’t need to scrabble.”
“Our children,” murmured Jill, and her hand touched Nell’s hair regretfully.... Nell was such a baby still!
“We’re at the transition period—do you remember that sketch I did of you, Deb? And the transition period has to pay, always.”
“Then is there a male of the transition period—to match the girl? or are we transitting alone?”
“Same old male—the one I met in the train. And experiment clashed with habit. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell about.”
Winnie roused herself to make contribution to the chorus: “It was awful of you to have gone on letting him talk to you after he had insulted you.”
“Why? I was curious what he had done it for. It can’t have been passion, romance—not even the dawn of love, Winnie—for any stray girl in a railway carriage. I had just wanted to be friendly. And I was frightened out of being friendly, by ... well, the male habit.I’d had no desire to spring upon him the moment we were alone. I told him so.”
“You didn’t! Deb, youare! What did he say?”
“Grinned and said: ‘You’re an odd kid. Here’s your station, isn’t it? Good-bye and good luck.’ He helped me out, and I asked if I might finish the cigarette or if under the circumstances it was etiquette to throw it away?... Oh, the incident was nothing; the whole moral of it is, that it wouldn’t have happened to Antonia, so it’s no good lecturing me according to the Antonian standard. Or the Gillian standard either—great loves don’t come to such as me.”
“Because you experiment in small loves,” Gillian lit a cigarette and planted both feet on the mantelpiece, “small loves and small loaves and half loaves——”
“Better than no bread.”
“Wrong again. You must have learnt by now that it’s either Heaven ... or always the same.”
“Men always the same?—indeed they’re not!” Zoe had returned mentally refreshed from pantry society. “Ifthey were always the same, we needn’t bother so to keep on changing them, need we? It’s the different ways of approach that are so perfectly fascinating; and the different idea each one has of the same identical you; and how long each is going to take, and what sort of places they choose, and their pasts, and their way of holding you—I do like to be nicely held, don’t you, Antonia?—Oh no, I forgot, you don’t! There are dozens and thousands of differences, and each has to be manageddifferently; and what encourages one kind, puts another right off ... even what they prefer to eat, and if they like their kisses hard or soft—I say, doesn’t that sound like eggs? Oh, I do think, I really do, that variety is most of the fun; and seeing how they get to the point. They bore me when they’re within shouting distance.... Besides, I get so specially interested in what each new man is going to give me. You would soon get to know that, if you always kept to the same. Pinto, for instance ... he gives me olives, and I hate them. You don’t think me greedy, do you? I’d hate to be greedy, but Idolike presents!”
“I believe you’re the demi-maid by temperament,” Gillian said, smiling at her, while she reflected that as fast as that greedy right hand of Zoe plundered, the generous left hand of Zoe gave. “Deb isn’t. And that’s why Deb has to be spoken to seriously by her pals. We’re waiting to hear about Blair.”
“What about Blair?” Deb seemed inclined to sulk. “Throw me a cig, Winnie. And a match.Andthe box to strike it on—thanks. What about Blair? He’s the demi-man, if you like, as far as I’m concerned. I was wrong when I said the male of the transition period didn’t exist. The Male who Pursues has ceased to exist. Nowadays he implies, more or less delicately, that he has no wish to make you his wife and you needn’t think it; but being your own mistress—well, will you? And you imply equally delicately: ‘Yes, but not yours, soyouneedn’t think it!’ Then you both know where you are. The rest is on debatable ground.”
Zoe cried, appalled at Deb’s elasticity of speech, “Well, I must say, Deb, I think you’re horrid. I do, really. I’m not a prig, but I don’t think you’re a bit nice. I suppose I’m old-fashioned. And I’m not at all surprised at Winnie....” who, with a crimson face at the word “mistress,” had marched out of the room.
“Thatdoesn’t matter,” Gillian defended Deb, with that odd incongruous air of casual authority which was unconsciously based on her years of vital work and clear thinking and swift unerring sense of values; on a courageous judgment that hummed through the air like an arrow, and stuck quivering in the gold; on the deference she received from her equals, men with good brains and of good quality; men of genius, even, who had deferred to her in her own line. “Winnie does quitea good deal of what one might call ‘spooning’ ... ‘adventuring on debatable ground’ ... ‘half-a-loafing’ ... whatever you like. But it’s just that she can’t bear—the labels. While one is vague about the name of a thing, it’s all right, according to Winnie. She’s not a conscious humbug; belongs to a type. And she enjoys the half-loaf—like Zoe. Well, call it her quarter-loaf. The point is—do you enjoy yours, Deb? I don’t believe you do. And if you don’t, it’s not worth it. In the case of Blair Stevenson, for instance?”
Deb made a desperate attempt to shed all her psycho-entanglements, and be honest—because it was Jill who asked. And this, even though she had long ago discovered that the self one pretends to is much more convincing to the hearer, than the self nearer to reality. A detached attitude helps expression.
“It pleases him and it doesn’t hurt me,” she summed up slowly.
“And what’s the object of pleasing him?” Antonia enquired, in scorn of the masculine claim.
“That it doesn’t hurt me.”
“Ithashurt you. It has hurt all of us—through you.” Her lower lip quivered; proudly she fastened it to composure with her teeth.
“Well?” Deb flung at Gillian; and thoughtfully came the answer:
“I’m not sitting in judgment, Deb. Who am I, etc. But it seems to me the natural thing to draw such pleasure from the touch of a man, that contact becomes beautiful and therefore true. Or else to be so repelled by it ... that you sit up and behave. But what possible reason you can have to lie there and merely suffer it without joy or fulfilment——”
“It does become annoying at times to think he’s having so much more fun than I,” flippantly. She pushed her hands impatiently through the hot thick masses of her hair. “Oh, I’m tired of being a girl, anyway. I’ll cut my hair short for a start, and be a boy. Have you got some big scissors, Jill?”
“Nail-scissors, curved; in the shape of a stork.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Deb—your glorious mane....”
“Oh, Deb——”
But in spite of the protests of Antonia, Nell and Zoe—Gillian sat silent, probably thinking any distraction good for Deb’s soul at the moment—she unpinned her hair and let it fall ina dense blue-black web over her face; her voice came in muffled jerks from the improvised tent:
“It’s that once started ... it seems so silly to stop. So silly and affected. Anyway, they won’t believe you—once you’ve let them start. And I want to be appreciated just a little ... I’m twenty-five; and—and—how—how are you to know it’s going to be the real thing at last, unless you let them begin?... Or even a bit of the real thing? Or even one single thrill.... I don’t know what’s the matter with me that I never thrill. I—I’d go back to be chaste and white if I could. But I’ve had too much tolerance, and my moral sense has got slack and messy. And men know—the sort of thing you allow. It gets about: Blair knew.... One might as well live up to it.” All this confession, while the scissors had been snip-snipping; an occasional soft swish of hair falling to the carpet—disconcerting sound, that made young Nell suddenly wince and cover her ears.
“But you can go on—if you can’t go back.”
“This from you, O vestal!” Deb shook back her ragged curtain, and scissors suspended, gazed in sheer surprise at Antonia. “Or was it Jill speaking in Antonia’s voice?”
“The whole way—or no way. The last, for me. But you’ve proved that it’s impossible for you, now. So the whole way. I despise—debatable ground.”
“It’s too late for the whole way, too. Yes, I’m quite logical. You either rush headlong from chastity into wantonness—forgive me, Jill, it’s the wrong word, but I can’t think of another—or else into matrimony. Debatable ground is for those who hesitate. And hesitation makes the demi-maid!” She gripped a long strand of hair, held it out and slashed at it savagely.
“And it’s queer,” she went on, “but I’ve still got the inborn conviction that wantonness gets the worst of it. I seem to see a little woodcut, like the illustration of a very familiar old book, of a man forsaking the girl he has betrayed, to die or drag on in squalor and shame and bitterness, while he returns to his wife, the sheltered woman, the law-sanctified mother of his children. I may be all wrong—but that’s how it comes to me.”
“It comes to me in exactly opposite form,” Gillian laughed. “Not from personal motives, but from the same sense as Deb, of a familiar picture.... The wife forsaken, worn and weeping,face downwards on a sofa, while the man hurries away to the woman who is free, insolent and triumphant. The wanton scores—and that’s why I’ve always avoided being the wife.”
“The wife scores—and that’s why I’ve always dreaded being the wanton.”
Gillian laughed again. “I don’t mind if you call me a wanton, as long as you don’t call me a pioneer. And——”
“Oh, Jill,” cried Zoe in clamorous distress, “I thought you’d prefer it, I did really; or I should never have—but whenever I found people talking about you, I always excused you by saying you were a Pioneer of the New Era of Womanhood....”
“God!...” murmured the victim thus mislabelled.
“But aren’t you? I mean, don’t you believe that this is the beginning of a sort of New Era when we shall be as free as men?”
“I don’t!” Antonia cut in clearly. “I hope it’s rather the beginning of a New Era (as you call it) when men shall be as self-controlled as us. Why on earth should development always seem to be along the lines of licence? Girls nowadays will run wild all over the place for a bit, just to prove they’ve got their money and their independence and the vote and a special prerogative and a latitude and a longitude ... all that. And then they’ll get a sense of responsibility and cool down and settle down, and ask for limitations—and with that, a new phase, and perhaps a finer one, will begin. Your Era is nine times out of ten only a phase. I hold by the law—the old social law of monogamy. It has made itself out of the instinctive need of it, and it recurs again and again down the whole cycle of civilization—out of the instinctive need for it. There have been maidens, wives and harlots through all the ages—surely there’s no genuine need to muddle them all up? no need for free love, except for the exceptions from the herd?—and the exceptions can always be trusted to look out for themselves.”
“But it isn’t monogamy that Gillian & Co. are opposing,” Zoe contested—with the air of a wise little Bubbles, sitting on a footstool, with her primrose curls haloed in lamplight—“it’s marriage.”
“Marriage is quite a good institution, for those who want it. You arid Intellectuals never see that where two peopleneed a symbolic or a religious or even a civic recognition that they belong together, they should be allowed to have it.”
“But the millions of cases where it has turned out badly——”
“Would have turned out just as badly if the couple had been living together in free love.”
“But, Antonia, then they could just have walked away from each other!”
“It’s very rare that it’s a simultaneous walk-away. The one walks ... and the other suffers. And this wrench would occur in any case. The legal wrench is a bit of a bother—and I grant you that the divorce laws might be reformed—but the human wrench is inevitable, in spite of all progress and propagandists and pioneers!”
Antonia was in battle mood, and Gillian gave her battle. They confronted each other not unlike a pair of splendid boys, the one erect with her back to the peacock window-curtains, hands clasped behind her, her head, a red-brown oval, slewed defiantly upwards; while the other rested her arms and chin along the back of a precariously tilted chair, which she vehemently bumped forward again to safety at the alliterative peroration of Antonia’s speech.
“Propagandists and pioneers—no! By heaven, you’re unjust!—do you suppose we’re out to be as intolerant of the Merely Married, as they have hitherto been of us? Look here—I loathe theoretical talk—I just claim a right to do what my own circumstances dictate, without being preached at and interfered with. There’s no such thing as Gillian & Co.—if I and my like are accidentally in the van of progress, we advance separately, each to her own peril. And if we’re only freaks and exceptions, lawbreakers and wantons—then again, each to her own peril. But what I do resent, savagely, is that Theo and I can’t have a child, without raising a stinging pestering swarm of minor considerations—servants, landladies, schoolmistresses, tradesmen—once there’s a family there’s got to be a permanent home, and that translates into all this sordid beastliness of prying and inspection, gossiping and blackmail, deceiving and finding-out, and the intolerant officialdom you’re so keen on, Antonia. And I daresay the kid would have to pay too, somehow, sometime. Well—we’re not going to give all this a chance. But I maintain that the arid Intellectuals are finer, truer stuff than the Herd, because they don’t bother the Herd, and the Herd will never stop bothering us.Never. They’re bothering now because Theo has a wife living. It doesn’t matter to them that I’m doing far better work and he’s a far better man, because we live together. The mind of the Herd can’t stretch to individual demand. It can’t be tender or intuitive—it just fusses. So—yes—call me a pioneer if you like; not of any glucose Movement to link people together for a common cause and so forth—there’s too much of that—but for the right to unlink oneself and to unlink one’s thoughts from other people’s thoughts—the right of detachment.”
“Oh dear!” exclaimed Zoe. “Isn’t it funny, how people who used to just talk, ever since the war have talked as though they were making speeches?”
Antonia and Gillian looked guiltily at one another. “I’m afraid she’s right,” Antonia sighed. “Sorry, Zoe. As a matter of fact, it’s perfectly ridiculous to be discussing the sex problem at all, since the war. Ancient cobwebs which the great broom has still left clinging....”
Again Gillian leapt to the assault. “The ‘sex problem,’ as you call it—a horrid phrase which suggests pamphlets and tracts—has survived a million wars and even caused one or two. So there’s no earthly reason why we shouldn’t be discussing it. Here we sit in proof of my statement—five girls who are all employed on war work (good thing Winnie’s out of the room for this reckoning), who still find some difficulty in sexually disposing of themselves—I mean, in the abstract. If Deb and Nell weren’t at the canteen, and Antonia a chauffeuse, and Zoe an affliction to the War Office, and I in my laboratory spying out new diseases that resent bitterly not being allowed to keep themselves to themselves; if we were just mooching and flirting and grumbling, and prodding our emotions, people might be justified in saying we were all in an unhealthy frame of mind from lack of topical co-operation. But as it is, the war goes on, and sex goes on, quite self-reliantly. You can’t cancel one against the other. It’s false mathematics.”
“My dear Jill, you can’t state in that arbitrary fashion that war isn’t going to affect the sex problem—it’s all right, Zoe, I’m not going to speak for long; take up the ‘Tatler’ in the meanwhile!—It will affect it in every possible way: lack of men; abnormal conditions; economic liberty for girls hitherto dependent——”
“I’m wrong. Oh, I’m totally wrong!... Deb, comeout of what’s left of your hair and save me! I don’twantto hear about economic conditions. The off-side is yards shorter than the other.”
“Wait one minute,” murmured Deb, industriously and wholly absorbed in her labours.
Antonia continued, in serene mockery of Gillian: “And I, for one, am not in the least difficulty, thanks, over how to dispose of myself sexually in the abstract. And I shouldn’t imagine from external evidence that you were either, Jill. Zoe, are you at all puzzled how to dispose of yourself sexually in the abstract? Henceforth and hereafter there’s always Pinto, isn’t there, when the supply of other friendly aliens is exhausted?”
“You may laugh,” cried that young person in eager defence of her continental tastes—“but it doesn’t seem natural to me to be made love to in English—it doesn’t really! I always have to turn it into French or Italian or Portuguese in my head, before it becomes decent somehow. Isn’t it funny? but it’s quite true. I suppose it’s a habit.”
“Nell is a minor and an adolescent, and, like Jill’s more obscure diseases, prefers to keep herself to herself,” Antonia went on, “so there’s no need to include her in our enquiry. Winifred lives mainly in a state of mental sloth, and is not, I think, wrestling very furiously with the sexual problem.”
“As long as she’s only kissed at the extremities,” Zoe threw in.
“Manon is, we hear, formally and decorously engaged to be married. So there really remains only Deb, of the whole group, who might be said to be in difficulties over the disposal of herself sexually in the abstract. And Deb is a goose.”
“And Deb is a goose!” echoed Zoe and Gillian in affirmative chorus.
Deb gave a final snip, flung the scissors down, and faced the company. “How do you like me?”
“Well,” remarked Gillian, after they had all stared in solemn criticism for several minutes, “I hardly think the shears have disposed of the problem....”
It was, indeed, a quaint enough perversity that Deb’s present flying mop of short black hair caused her to look even more girlish than hitherto; perhaps it was the pure beautiful curve of her throat, now visible from every angle. Her little round head was the head of a child-saint; her slim body, lightly-poisedand undeveloped, was pathetic anomaly to eyes and mouth which revealed a mind that had heard of all sin, and was blunt to all sin, and weary of all sin ... victim of the transition period.
“Don’t you like it?” disappointed at the silence of her comrades, broken only by Gillian’s one caustic comment. “I shall have to get it properly trimmed and trained at a hairdresser’s, of course. But I think it suits me, rather....”
“What are you going to do with your shorn femininity?” Gillian pointed to the showers of long hair lying about the carpet. “You can’t leave it here, you know—Theo’s so awfully impressionable.”
“My shorn femininity,” said Deb, gathering it up in her arms, “shall go into a brown paper parcel and be sold for the benefit of the Red Cross—‘And nothing in life became it like its death!’”
For a space of time parallel to this discussion, four men were sitting in Blair Stevenson’s library, drinking whisky and soda, and lazily depreciating the first-night play they had just witnessed, and of which Theo Pandos had to supply a dramatic criticism for “The Dawn.” He was dashing down his copy now, and occasionally pleading with Cliffe Kennedy to hold back his comic reminiscences about the Censorship, for just a few minutes longer.
“Why they don’t sack you——!”
“I’m a highly useful servant of the State,” Cliffe rejoined. “And I’ve never before had as big a private mail as I liked. I used to read my own letters and my mother’s, and my little sister Beth’s; and the letters of any stray guest who happened to be in the house, and the servants’ letters—and even then I wasn’t satisfied. Now I can glut myself opening letters.” He told a few more incredible and very delightful tales of these same letters. And then Pandos flung down the fountain-pen, to intimate he had finished a column of the “death-by-a-thousand-slices,” for which he had made a name, took up his glass of whisky and soda; and the conversation, as was usual directly he touched it, pivoted round to the subject of women....
“I don’t understand girls nowadays,” confessed the fourthof the quartette, who was little Timothy Fawcett of the Royal Flying Corps. Having been a whole year on continuous active service in France, he was now stationed at Hendon for a few months respite of light home duty.
Timothy was rather a nice boy. He was fair and shy and solemn, with those soft cherub curves to his mouth that remind one of dewy sleep and of a mother fondly shading the candle from the eyes of her baby son in his cradle. And his innocent appearance did not call for the conventional corollary that it masked the biggest dare-devil in the squadron. His appearance coincided exactly with his disposition. Timothy was undoubtedly both shy and solemn, with wits that moved but slowly, and nerves and courage as steady as his steady questioning blue eyes.
“I don’t understand women nowadays,” he began. And Blair, with whom he was rather a favourite, said encouragingly:
“Go on, Sonny!”
Timothy loosened his Sam Browne, and stared at his puttees; then, by an inspiration, emptied his glass; and thus fortified, was able to continue:
“What I mean is—there used to be the girls you met in your own set, and they went about with your sisters, and there was no harm if you kissed ’em on the river, but of course you took jolly good care what you talked about to ’em. Sometimes you married ’em.”
“Exactly,” Kennedy commented. “Sometimes you married ’em. Proceed, Timothy.”
“And then—there was the other kind.” Timothy came to a full stop.
And the little Greek, his eyes vivid with mischief, took up the sequel of events:
“And these you kissed also ... and not only on the river. And you told them those droll stories that could not be told to the girls you married sometimes. And they laughed with flattering appreciation.”
“What I mean,” Timothy began anew, with obstinate determination to finish up the subject in as few words as possible, “is that a fellow used to be able to tell the two sorts apart in half a jiff, and now they’ve gone and got themselves so muddled up ... you take out one of the first kind, thoroughly nice girl and all that—and she talks about—well—dash it—about—about——”
“—The second kind,” suggested Stevenson.
“And she wants you to take her to a night-club, and laughs at you for bein’ shocked, an’ argues about it—no end knowing! And so one takes the cue and follows up—and then half times out of ten she turns on the freezin’ tap, and quite right too, only she ought to have done it from the beginning. And they’ve got quite pally, too, with—well—the other sort. It’s so rum. You meet ’em with their arms round each other’s waists.... It’s all a mix-up an’ you never know where you are or what you’re safe to say, or who knows who or how much you’re let in for——”
“Tim likes to know where a good woman ends and a bad one begins—that’s the trouble in brief, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Timothy answered his host. And drew a long breath ... waiting for enlightenment.
“Keep ’em divided in your own mind, Tim, and it will be all right. The shuffle is mostly intellectual, and needn’t concern you. Your nice girl, because she knows rather more than she used to, believes she can compete with professionals.Mais ce n’est pas son métier—and she’ll discover that in time. Meanwhile, we know where to find our wives and where to find our mistresses; and those who wish to be met on half-way ground, let us meet them on half-way ground. It’s not for us to be pushing them back into innocence or toppling them forward into guilt.” Stevenson lay back with arms crossed behind his head, in his wonted state of unruffled good-humour.
Kennedy, greatly excited, contested this bland point of view: “Iobjectto half-way ground. Strongly. Besides, it’s a form of blacklegging. Give me sharp divisions—sand and rock. Confound it, I don’t want my wife, when I get her, to be able to chatter like a frank comrade about all the ins and outs of my squalid existence before I met her. I hate frank comrades. They’re too—too reasonable altogether. I hate an intellectual mate, and a pure white friend of my little sister Beth, and almost a harlot, all combined, like one of those beastly mechanical book-cases and step-ladder and kitchen-table patent arrangements ... and pull out whichever you want. Conveniences bore me. Subtleties bore me still more. And you can never tell, with these new-fangled girls, just how many degrees they’re still good and how many they’re prepared to be bad. Oh, Lord! Lord!—give me another one, stiff, Pandos.”
“And yet,” remarked Theo Pandos, complying, “I gathered that you were on very excellent terms with our special little group of—what do you call them?—new-fangled girls?”
Cliffe’s features puckered to a gnome-like grin: “Ask ’em. I’m dear old Cliffe—just dear old Cliffe—quite sexless y’know—never been known to love—in—er—thatway. It’s funny, but I don’t believe hecould....”
Blair Stevenson shrugged his shoulders composedly. “I’m of a grateful nature. What God sends me, I take. And what He refuses me, I refuse to desire. Some people are always returning a gift with requests for alteration.”
Timothy sat listening; his eyes rested seriously on first one speaker and then the other. “Yes,” he said at last; “But what’s it all about? I mean—what are they up to, those girls?”