The Story Book Girls Part 48

Mabel and Jean imagined that it was more a pose on the part of the fencing girl than any talent of Elsie's which immediately impressed her on this afternoon. They were later to discover that a thrill of expectancy, of interest, was Elsie's first gift to strangers.

"Oh, no," breathed the fencing girl to herself, "you are not beautiful, really; you are a personality--that's it."

Elsie sat pulling her gloves through her white hands.

"Lance says Mrs. Clutterbuck has a legacy," said Jean bluntly. "I suppose it's true, but we are never sure of Lance, you know."

She pa.s.sed a cup and some b.u.t.tered toast.

"Oh, yes, it's true," said Elsie. "I do so envy mamma."

"Why? Doesn't she--haven't you the benefit of it too?" asked Mabel in surprise.

"Oh, yes. It isn't that, you know." Elsie swept forward, with a little furry cape falling up to her ears as she recovered a dropped glove.

"It's giving papa a holiday. I've thought all my life how I should love to grow up and become an heiress, and give my papa a holiday."

"You thought that," asked Jean accusingly. "Come now--when you were climbing lamp-posts and skimming down rain-pipes----"

"Yes, and breaking into other people's houses," said Elsie slowly.

"Did you do that too?" asked Jean.

"Once," said Elsie dreamily, "only once. I was a dreadful trial to my parents," she explained to the fencing girl.

"You weren't spanked enough," said Mabel, shaking her head at her.

"My papa was too busy, and mamma too concerned about him to attend to me," smiled Elsie. "Poor mamma! She knew if I told my father what I did, it would disturb his thoughts, and if his thoughts were disturbed he couldn't work, and if he couldn't work the rent wouldn't be paid."

"Oh," said Mabel with memories heaping on her, "had you really to worry about the rent?"

The fencing girl began to talk at last.

"It makes me tired," said she vigorously, "the way in which you people, brought up in provincial and suburban places, talk. Because you can't afford to be there unless your fathers have enough money to take you there, you think there's no struggle in the world. You ought to live a bit in towns where people are obliged to show the working side as well as the retired and affluent side. You poor thing, stuck in suburbia, among those Philistines, and thinking about the rent! I suppose they only thought you were bad tempered."

The fencing girl had landed them into a conversation more intimate than any they had attempted together.

"Oh," said Elsie, and she looked shyly at Mabel and Jean. "I was a tiny little thing when I got my first lesson. A lady and her daughter called on mamma the second week we were in Ridgetown. I came on them in the garden afterwards. They were going out at the gate, and they didn't see me coming in. This lady said to her daughter, quite amiably: 'It's no use, my dear; I suppose you observed they have only one maid.' They never called again."

The fencing girl bit her lip with an interrupted laugh.

"Isn't that suburbia?" she asked. "Now, isn't it?"

"It made me a little wild cat," said Elsie. "Everybody in Ridgetown had at least two maids, except ourselves."

"Do you know," said Jean, "I know the time when we would have wept at that if it had ever happened to us. It isn't a joke," she told the fencing girl.

Elsie gave a long, quiet laugh. "If I ever have children," she said, "I hope I may keep them from being silly about a trifle of that sort."

"That's one of the jokes of life though. You won't have children who need any support in that way.

"Won't I?" asked Elsie with round eyes.

"No, they'll all be quite different. They'll be giving you points on the simple life, and advising you to dispense with maids altogether,"

said the fencing girl. "I'm not joking. It's a fact, you know, that children are awfully unlike their parents. Are you like your mother?"

she asked Elsie.

"Not a bit," said Elsie laughing.

"Don't study yourself merely in order to know about children. You may just have been a selfish little prig, you know," said the fencing girl cheerily. "Study them by the dozen, be public-spirited about it. Then some day you may be able to understand the soul of a child when you get it all to yourself. You won't just sit and say in a blank way, 'In my day children were different.'"

"Oh," cried Jean. "Now don't. If there's anything I hate, it's when Evelyn begins to preach about children."

"Oh, well," said the fencing girl with a shrug, "if Mrs.----, whatever your mother's name is, had known as much about their little ways as I do, she would never have let you worry about that one maid. We are all wrong with domestic life at present. The one lot stays in too much and loses touch with the world, and the other lot are too busy touching the world to stay in enough. We are putting it right, however," she said amiably. "We are----" She spread her hands in the direction of the company collected. "We are getting up our world at present. After that we may be of some use in it."

Elsie looked at her rather admiringly.

"My father would love to hear you talk," she said amiably.

"Talk," said the fencing girl in a fallen voice, "and I hate the talkers so!"

"Nevertheless," said Mabel, "given a friend of ours in for tea--who does the talking?"

"Evelyn," said Jean, "and invariably her own subjects too."

It seems that this girl was not always fencing.

She controlled the collecting of rents and practically managed the domestic matters in three streets of tenements of new buildings recently erected in a working part of London. She was also engaged to be married.

"Doesn't this sort of independent life unsettle you for a quiet one?"

she was often asked by her friends.

"And it's quite different," she would explain. "Knowing the stress and the difficulties of this side of it make me long for that little haven of a home we are getting ready at Richmond. I would bury myself there for ever, from a selfish point of view that is, and probably vegetate like the others. But I've made a pledge never to forget--never to forget what I've seen in London, and never to stop working for it somewhere or somehow."

"What about your poor husband?" asked Jean.

"He isn't poor," said the fencing girl with a grin. "He is getting quite rich. He fell in love with me at the tenements. He built them. I should think he would divorce me if I turned narrow-minded."

She gazed in a searching way at Elsie.

"You have the makings of a somebody," she said gravely, "more than these two, though they are perfectly charming."

"I want to go to the Balkans," said Elsie. She turned to Mabel.

"Cousin Arthur declared he really would take me."

"Is Mr. Symington there now?" asked Jean. Mabel thanked her from the bottom of a heart that couldn't prompt a single word at that supreme moment.

"No, but he said he was going some day," said Elsie. That was all.

Mabel had seen a blaze of suns.h.i.+ne and then blackness again.