Chapter NINE: I

Angelica’s new business suited her exactly. It absorbed her mind, and it trained and shaped and educated her to an extraordinary degree. Her bravado vanished when she no longer felt herself inferior; now that she was openly acknowledged to be a clever and rising young woman, she had no need of her old-time self-assertion. She throve in an atmosphere of praise. Miss Sillon and Miss Devery loved her and her brilliant hats. They lauded her, petted her, and took all possible means to advance her interests, because they liked her, and because her interests and theirs were inseperable.

Miss Devery, who was the artistic member of the firm, went outside in a purple linen smock one morning and put a crêpe paper hat on the peacock. As often as the rain soaked it, or the wind tore or carried it off, she fastened on another. It was very odd and whimsical, and it suited the unique character of their shop.

This unique character was their chief stock in trade, and they both knew very well how to use it to advantage.

"The awfully chic, exclusive thing has really been overdone," Miss Sillon told Angelica. "All the people with money are crazy now for anything they imagine is artistic and quaint. They think it shows that they’re artistic to like such things; and just now, of course, it’s _the_ thing to be artistic."

She was a complete contrast to the dimpled, red-haired Miss Devery, with her air of polite amusement. She was a short, energetic, very dark little body, lively, talkative, and witty.

"I’m a perfect dressmaker," she told Angelica. "God made me so. Just to look at me makes people turn red with shame and make up their minds on the spot to have something nice and new and trim."

Angelica acknowledged that never had she seen a better-dressed woman, or a neater one.

"I dye my hair and lace as tight as I dare," Miss Sillon continued, "but I do it with pride and vainglory. I boldly call it a duty. I tell these silly women it’s the most important thing in life to keep oneself looking one’s best, and they always agree. Not one of them ever had the sense to inquire what it’s done for _me_. Here I’ve been looking my best for forty years, and look at me, still digging away for a living, while these wretched, slovenly little chits with holes in their stockings and all their buttons off are settled down with fine husbands and babies and everything else they want! Look at Devery--sloppy kid! She’s never without a man hanging about after her."

Devery smiled.

"They’re mostly bad ones," she said. "Dishonourable intentions, sometimes, but generally _no_ intentions at all. I don’t get no ‘forrader,’ Sillon. But this Angélique--she’s the one! She’s just made for a millionaire’s bride."

Miss Sillon turned to stare at her.

"Devery," she said suddenly, "she’s not quaint enough. Get to work and make her quaint!"

"That I can’t do. She’s not built along quaint lines; but I’ll make her bizarre."

So Miss Devery set to work. She designed and made for Angelica an extraordinary dress of dark red jersey cloth that fitted her like a snake-skin, as she said. It was entirely plain and severe, with long sleeves and a skirt reaching to her ankles. It made her look lean, tall, and savage. Then she parted her hair in the middle and knotted it low on her neck, hung big gold earrings in her ears, and around her neck a string of cloudy pale-green beads reaching to her knees. When all this was done, she called in Miss Sillon.

"_Now!_" she said. "_What_, eh?"

"Barbaric," said Miss Sillon; "but Lord, how attractive the creature is! Seriously, though," she added, "do you think she fits in with our nice little quaintness? She’s positively terrible!"

"A new thing in milliners," said Miss Devery. "Sillon, I’m proud! She’s my masterpiece."

"Very well," said Miss Sillon. "We won’t touch her. She shall stand as you have made her; but, Angélique, my child, _how_ you will have to design to keep up with your appearance!"

"I can do it," said Angelica firmly. "I’ve got some fine ideas."

For what had she been doing of late but visiting the Public Library and studying the lives of all of Eddie’s magnificent women whom she could remember, and, from their portraits, gleaning the suggestions upon which she later worked?

She was supremely happy at her work. To sit sewing with Miss Devery and Miss Sillon all the morning, listening to their bright and jolly talk, and entering into it, was unfailing delight. They quite frankly admired her brains and her beauty, and treated her exactly as one of themselves. If they saw any difference, anything inferior in her, they concealed it.

Angelica felt that they didn’t know, that they imagined her to be of the same class as themselves. It didn’t occur to her that they didn’t care; that so long as she behaved herself with amiability and good sense, and was of value in their business, they were in no way concerned about her grammar or her table manners. She imagined that they were always looking for signs of good breeding, signs of bad breeding, little tricks she hadn’t learned yet. She used to read all that sort of thing in the women’s magazines, and she often discovered, to her deep distress, that she had been doing horrible things, even in the presence of Devery and Sillon. She had, for instance, put on her gloves in the street; she had said "phone" and "auto," and still they remained friendly.

They were a type entirely novel to her; she had not even read of their sort. Well-born and well-educated English-women, they had knocked about the world to an amazing extent. There was very little they didn’t know, although there was a very great deal they chose to ignore in life.

Miss Devery was the youngest in a family of nine--children of a poor clergyman in the south of England. She had begun her career as a governess in a French family. Leaving that, she had drifted about in Paris, studied drawing a little, and given English lessons, always charming and gay and perfectly at home. Then she had gone to a married brother in Australia, and after a few years of that, helping his wife with her babies on their sheep-farm, she had followed the commands of her own sweet and careless heart and gone to America. And here she was, at twenty-six, quite alone in the world, half-forgotten by her people at home, who were rather fond of her, but couldn’t keep her in mind.

Miss Sillon was different. Her father was a doctor who had ruined himself with drink, and she had had monstrous responsibilities and cares upon her shoulders ever since childhood, when her mother had died. God knows what she hadn’t tried, to earn her honest bread. She had been a children’s nurse in London, stewardess on a South American ship, librarian in a Canadian city; she had worked in a newspaper office and in a bakery, she had taught music in a suburban school. She was also entirely alone on earth, but it didn’t trouble her.

Both she and Miss Devery would have been able to pick up a living in any part of the civilized world. They were attached to each other, without being quite aware of their affection. They had met one day at a cheap lunch-room, and had rushed together like two morsels of quicksilver. Why not? They were more than harmonious; they were in essence identical.

II

How bitterly Mrs. Kennedy missed her wayward and troublesome child, who had ordered her about and sworn at her, and so vehemently kissed her! This neat young woman, busy at her books in the kitchen every evening, always up and dressed at the right time in the morning, was a stranger, was in no way hers. She would sit in the rocking-chair--after the kitchen was clean and tidy--and take up the newspaper Angelica had brought in, or perhaps a magazine, and pretend to read; but she never could. She had no habit of reading. Her great need was to talk.

She would look at her daughter, and rock and sigh. A weary world, where even rest had lost its beauty!

There were sometimes evenings when Miss Sillon and Miss Devery invited Angelica to go with them to one of the little Italian restaurants in the neighbourhood. In this case Angelica was always punctilious to telephone to her mother, and she was never out later than ten, so that it didn’t occur to her to pity the wretched woman.

She didn’t imagine how terrible those evenings were to Mrs. Kennedy, how she groped about the kitchen, blinded by tears, setting out her tiny meal, finding relief in loud sobs like hiccoughs. She saw that something was the matter with her mother, but she fancied that it was age, ill health, poverty, years of hardship.

It was none of these pains which so grievously afflicted Mrs. Kennedy. It was because she was being left behind. She who had all her life feared and foreseen that she would be obliged to die and leave her beloved child, now saw this child--as she had known her--quite dead and gone, and herself left desolate.