Chapter IV: Part I: Dulce Domum (4)

From the cheap print, the lurid relishing headlines, the blurred semi-grotesque photographs of criminals, the whole sinister underworld came swarming up at her. Creatures who lived within reaching grasp of the law, creatures who crawled into the papers.... Subterranean folk, dwelling where gas hissed and cisterns dripped, and half-starved cats slunk through the gutter. And they had faces with swollen lips and large, fierce eyes, and their names were not the names of people one knew, and their clothes were unfamiliar. Their last incoherent letters were printed in neat, straight, passionless lines down the column. Something more complex than just “the poor”; a twilight more sinister, where drunken sexless figures dealt each other blows with, oddly, implements that were meant for homely use, pokers, and rolling-pins and chairs. In this stunted sallow underworld, boys and girls actually killed themselves in sudden rages of love and despair. And the inhabitants were hungrier than ordinary hunger. “Any previous conviction?” asked the magistrate. “Two against the woman Hobbs, Your Worship.”... A world where women were known by their surnames to magistrate and policeman and court missionary.... To Ursula it seemed as though into the room had drifted a raw fog, and beyond it the strident yell of newsboys. Over a barrow of rusty old garments, a row of naphtha lights flapped uneasily ... a lad furtively running was pursued by two policemen.... He was wanted for theft.... As, breathing hard, he padded round the corner, Ursula saw his face ... Hal’s face!

Hal had brought the underworld quite close to the Laburnums. He had done something which might--oh no! no!--which might get into the papers.

Wild with panic, Ursula scrambled to her feet. What time was it? How long had she been squatting there with that horrible beastly paper, reading it and imagining things. It was getting dark. Six--seven o’clock. And Mr. Fennimore came at eight. And Aunt Lavvy was going to tell him, and he might think it his duty--as Stanley would--to tell the police. And Hal....

It wasn’t safe to wait a second longer. What had to be done was urgent. Without even a conscious glance of renunciation at her room, Ursula left it, and knocked at Aunt Lavvy’s door.

“Come in.”

With direct action, panic had vanished. She was confident now, and powerfully gentle, and even, with a tinting of irony, amused. Leaping ten or fifteen years of slow development to the grown-up Ursula she would undoubtedly become.

“Aunt Lavvy, I wondered if you would be a darling”--Aunt Lavvy, with a stiffening of her concealed obstinacies, waited for the plea for Hal--“and visit me in my room. You see, I’ve lit my first fire--you remember my birthday present?--and it seems silly to sit in front of it by oneself, and, well, it would be ever so jolly if you came in for a little while,” with a rush of shy impulsiveness--calculated.

Aunt Lavvy beamed like a cluster of little pink and silver suns.

“Why, what a delightful surprise. The rain is so dreary, I was simply longing for firelight, but I had no idea an invitation was on its way.”

“Then may I borrow one of your cushions?” Ursula was a spectacle of pretty, though rather childish excitement. She pulled Aunt Lavvy by the hand into the next-door room, and arranged her in the one armchair, and poked the smouldering coal to flames, and tugged at the window-curtains anew, and then settled herself with crossed legs, tailor-fashion, on the rag-mat on the opposite side of the hearth. She looked over at Aunt Lavvy with an air of affectionate content.

“It was lonely--till I brought you in,” she said. “I sometimes wish I shared a room with somebody.”

“This one would be too small, of course. But you’ve made it look so nice, Ursula dear.”

“Have I? But you can’t do much with a bed and dressing-table sticking themselves out .... It ought really to be a sitting-room with a bedroom next door.” And Ursula’s gaze at Aunt Lavvy was full and pure and empty of all significance.

Aunt Lavvy reflected for a moment or two ... and understood.

“Let’s pretend, then,” she suggested at last, her plump little mouth bent to a whimsical smile, “that I have been whisked away to Terra del Fuego on a broomstick, so that you are able to have my room for your bedroom, and could do as you liked with this one. How would you plan it?”

Aunt Lavvy might be a sweet-scented malignant little bundle of implacability, but she had to her credit a delightfully light and sensitive touch with the situation. Ursula, to whom clumsiness would have been unbearable in her own inspired mood of fine execution, appreciated the bland twist by which Aunt Lavvy had made it appear that _she_ was to be the one eliminated from tenancy.

“Well--help me, then! I’d have the wallpapers that very deep cream tint that you’re so fond of, Aunt Lavvy----”

“More primrose than cream,” supplied Aunt Lavvy. “And wistaria cretonne curtains, Ursula, and the same on two armchairs, and a lot of cushions, mauve and blue and primrose-yellow. Wouldn’t that be rather quaint and pretty?”

“And a bluey-mauve carpet, also the colour of wistaria.” Ursula threw the same enthusiasm into these furnishings as though she were not intuitively leading Aunt Lavvy on to describe exactly how, again and again, from the farther side of the door, she must have imagined Ursula’s room furnished to her own private desires. The more these desires were allowed to escape and take form, the easier would she fall to the bribe ... presently, when the time came to talk about Hal.

“And your lovely tea-set--Spode, isn’t it? Would you bring that in here, and have shelves put up for it?”

“That wouldn’t be very safe, would it? No, shelves for my books, and my low cupboard with the glass doors could be moved in for the china.” Aunt Lavvy had forgotten that they were arranging the room for Ursula. “A primrose silk shade for the light, I think, and a small round table for potpourri. I wonder if my little davenport would fit slantwise across that corner recess near the window?”

“With a shade to match for the lamp, and a whole lot of mauve and yellow bowls and vases. Oh, there are such lots of flowers that would look too heavenly in here: violas and pansies and blue irises and primroses and larkspur and Michaelmas daisies--anything that isn’t pink or red. Daffodils, of course--and cowslips. And your miniatures hung over the fireplace.... Aunt Lavvy, if you said nothing to Mr. Fennimore tonight, but explained to them at the Bank tomorrow that after all you had found the pound note loose at the bottom of your bag, I’m sure they’d believe you.”

“Will you be quite frank with me, my dear child?” With a sudden tender seriousness, Aunt Lavvy set aside the irrelevancy of rooms and a room. She had her data now! “You really called me in here to plead for poor Hal.”

“I’m not pleading, Aunt Lavvy,” steadily.

“It’s dreadful for me that you should all think me hard and unforgiving. Nina came to me last night----”

“Yes, I know. I suppose she was rude, and blurted things out.”

“She hurt me,” Aunt Lavvy confessed, with a little sigh. “And your mother, too. Ursula”--with a gesture of confidence--“you’re a wise girl, and we’ve always been friends, haven’t we? Do _you_ see how unfair they are? I love Hal--but what am I to do?” She threw out her hands, and her diamond rings twinkled as the firelight burnished them.

Ursula comprehended that she _was_ to plead, and so give Aunt Lavvy an excuse for “coming off her perch”--to borrow a phrase from Bunny. She accepted the cue for a sedate, sensible little sister, rather old-fashioned, a bit of a prig, perhaps.... Her hidden demon was doubled up with laughter!

“Wouldn’t you say that Hal had been punished enough, Aunt Lavvy darling?”

After about ten minutes of parleying along these lines, Aunt Lavvy conceded that Hal’s moral chastisement had indeed been severe. Quite suddenly she gave way, admitting, with the impulsiveness of a contemporary, that she had longed to do so all along.... Her glance strayed to the niche beside the window, still not quite satisfied that it was wide enough for her davenport to stand there.

“And I’ll move for good into Nina’s room,” said Ursula, speaking aloud the last line of their contract.

[XIII]

MR. FENNIMORE came that evening to the Laburnums, and Mr. Fennimore went. Aunt Lavvy did not betray Hal to him, though the Maxwells were taut with apprehension from minute to minute. After he had gone, Ursula privately informed her mother that she was henceforth going to share Nina’s bedroom, and that Aunt Lavvy, in consideration of the gift of an adjoining sitting-room to her present apartment, would gloss the matter over with the Bank tomorrow.

“So Hal’s all right, and I’m moving my things over so’s to sleep with Nina tonight.”

“But, darling,” exclaimed Mrs. Maxwell, almost weeping with relief, “won’t it do in the morning?”

“No, _tonight_,” insisted Ursula, who had passed from the ageless wisdom of Medea, to a stage of crude and intensely youthful heroics, when it seemed urgent that her sacrifice should begin immediately, without the anti-climax of postponement. Because, beyond surrender of the room, and beyond suffering, lay that diffusion of gold over a grey world which was to be her recognition from the gods. She knew that “Virtue is its own reward,” must not be taken materially, in the sense that an automatic machine promptly doles out chocolate on insertion of a penny--(bent or battered coins not accepted); but--oh, surely she might count on _something_ happening! “People would be different” ... and she, too, would be different, conscious of a deepening of colour, a more vivid meaning, scents sharper and sweeter, all sounds harmonized, everywhere a lightness and a quickening up, less drag and shuffle, the same clean happy intoxication of spirit that can usually be won by actual high speed ... by gallop on horseback over soft turf, or two-reefed sailing, or a race in one of those long lean cars that crouch low to the road.

In fact, Ursula’s modest expectation demanded, in return for one room delivered, to dwell henceforth and continually in that state of jubilant ecstasy which may have come to our one or two really great poets for two or three minutes on completion of their three or four most perfect lines.

She moved into Nina’s room that night. Nina helped her carry her things. And Mrs. Maxwell went to Mr. Maxwell--whom she found in his study, having a distinct row with his only son-in-law--and told him it was all right about Hal. And Stanley told Grace, who told Miss Roberts, who woke up Lottie to tell her. And Mr. Maxwell told Bunny, who told Hal. And everybody at the Laburnums slept better that night, because of the news, except William, who had remained asleep and slept well in spite of it.

The next day, the effect of Ursula’s act on the household was like a window flung open on to an enclosure where there had been a gas-escape. Gradually the fumes noticed the window and crept out and were dissipated.

Aunt Lavvy walked along the pleasant half-country road towards the shops of Buckler’s Cross. And, passing the branch of Platt’s Bank, dropped in, and told the clerk, leaning politely over the polished counter, that she had, after all, been the thief of that pound-note which he had missed on Saturday morning. She used the word “thief” whimsically, and the young man’s amusement proved to her that certainly her name had not suffered from the incident. “At the bottom of my bag. They weren’t pinned together, and it must have been the outside one. I collect so many bills and papers and letters loose in my bag--you men will always blame me for that....” She dimpled at the bank-clerk, and handed him back the pound. And he thought what a delightful little old lady she was, and wished his mother, a large, gaunt and incredulous woman, were more in that style. He apologized for his own carelessness, and hoped she would not punish them by depositing elsewhere. They parted in the attitudes of a Marcus Stone picture. Then Aunt Lavvy went on into the town, and arranged with the local decorators to paper her sitting-room at once, a deep cream with a wistaria frieze. Luckily, they were able to show her a sample of the latter in stock; but for her cretonne and carpet she knew she would have to take a day in London. Impulsively, she determined to go that very afternoon.

Mr. Maxwell and Stanley were, of course, at business. They were still resenting each other when they left the house; but before they reached the station, they had realized the flatness of disputing over a bank-clerk who, as far as the moral point at issue was concerned, no longer existed. But with regard to Mr. Maxwell’s taunt that Stanley, if he wanted his own opinions, ought also to maintain his wife and child in his own home--Stanley left private injunctions with Grace ... and she, too, was out most of the day. She did not tell Miss Roberts where, as she was afraid she had rather let herself go too much to poor Gums the last day or two, and it was not quite a nice thing to do, to grumble about your parents to the governess in their employ.

It was awfully sweet of Aunt Lavvy to put things right with the Bank, without involving Hal. And distinctly clever of Ursula, too, to think of offering her the room. It looked as though Ursula were going to be unselfish, “and that would be so nice for Mother when Nina marries, and I....”

Miss Roberts and Nurse resumed a courteous recognition of each other’s claim to the nursery-schoolroom. Nurse said she was sorry if she’d spoken too plain, and Miss Roberts understood that it _was_ very irritating to come in with the babies and find the only table strong enough for the sewing-machine, littered up with lesson-books.

Nina, when they were dressing the next morning, asked Ursula suddenly and fiercely:

“What did you expect to get out of it?”

“Out of what?” Ursula, with the comb, swept her long hair to a veil in front of her face.

“Giving up your room. Look here, Ursula, squarely, between you and me, you must have meant to get something out of it. What?”

Ursula understood that if she disclaimed all hidden purpose of a benefit in the matter, there would be no other name for her than a prig, from the viewpoint of her sister and brothers. Simple nobility was indeed a completely priggish quality. Ursula felt ashamed. Even Bunny would censure her for it, in his soul. Even Hal, whom she had rescued....

“Well, d’you suppose I was just ‘being good’ for its own sake?” scoffed Ursula, thereby thoroughly deserving to be termed traitor.

Nina nodded, placated. “Tell me, though?”

“It’s my business.”

“Something from Aunt Lavvy? From Dad? From Hal?”

Tiny green imps twinkled for a second in Ursula’s eyes.... Already Nina was mentioning Hal’s name with some of the old reverence. Already Nina was arrogant.... Ursula had not been to school herself, but she had learnt enough from her brothers and sisters not to remind Nina of hysterics, though not enough to refrain from regret that decency should forbid such gentle reminder.

“Don’t be a nuisance, Nina. I’ll say what I like, and shut up when I like.”

“You needn’t think you can be as cheeky as you like, though, in this room. It was mine before you came to share it, so in a way I’ve given up as much as you.”

Ursula turned, not an indignant scarlet as Nina expected, but white. Nina?--why, Nina had never cared about her room except to sleep in it, never minded how many visitors at the Laburnums overlapped her return home from her own visits, was quite content to have the shrine spoken of as the “spare-room” during her absence. Nina never fled to her room during trouble, she’d be just as content if her hockey group photographs and silver cups had their place anywhere else in the house. Oh, Ursula was sure--surer than sure--that the strange listening _growing_ feeling never happened to Nina in solitude.

And now Nina was claiming an equal part in the sacrifice.... Put in that desperately reasonable way, it certainly had the appearance of being a half-and-half affair, but--would it truly look like that to--to whoever attended to haphazard sacrifices which came drifting up from the world? Might Ursula not even say to herself that she, and no one else, responsible by seeing Hal in his lordliness, was also responsible for keeping him so?

For there was no damage done that would not be covered by the new skin even now growing thickly over his rawness.

Nina, with a last sturdy backward brush at her gleaming hair, swung to the door, ready for breakfast. She was careless and spruce and clear-cut as ever. Ursula remembered the days when she had worshipped her for these effects.

“I say, kid, I didn’t mean half of what I said just now, so you needn’t look so wretchedly serious. I rather appreciate having you in here, really. It’s some one to talk to while I’m putting on my stockings. And it really was quite decent of you to fix things up with Aunt Lavvy--though, mind you, I don’t believe she’d have told old Fennimore when it came to it. She was ruffled up the wrong way, but she’s rather an old darling, and frightfully fond of Hal and the rest of us.”

[XIV]

THE weather was not sufficiently self-conscious to clear up at precisely the same instant as the psychological clearing-up; but the day after, the sun flashed out, and the workman sang as he distempered Aunt Lavvy’s sitting-room, and the carrier’s boy whistled as he delivered her carpet and other packages from Whiteley’s furnishing department. And Hal and Nina and Bunny and Ursula and Maisie and Dorothy played their last tennis foursomes on the doctor’s asphalt court, taking turns to be the two out, because on Wednesday the boys were due back at Winborough. Hal was a great deal easier in his mind when he discovered that the blend of Maisie and Michaelmas daisies--though she played a jolly good game, and of course the daisies were all right in their way--yet did not make a second attempt to play any incomprehensible wizard trick with him which had resulted in the bad dream of the week-end just over. He was not quite comfortable yet, though, with his family, and consoled by the prospect of Winborough, where nobody except Bunny knew anything about his downfall; and, a term after that, Oxford, where nobody at all would know. By Jove! Supposing Aunt Lavvy had kept her word, and had spread the whole hateful business all over the place.... It was clever of that kid Ursula to have thought of a way to bribe her. Decent of her, too ... gratefully he served her with a soft ball, which she missed, because she was expecting a hard one.

Hal and Maisie won their set against Ursula and Bunny. Then Hal and Dorothy played Nina and Bunny, and again Hal and his partner won.

“Not one of you is any good at the net,” he pronounced at last. “And you ought to practise your backhand shots, Dorothy.”

Meanwhile, Aunt Lavvy and Florrie Maxwell, sitting by the French windows of the drawing-room, open to the garden, were drifting into leisurely intimate talk ... the children at tennis ... the croquet they had played as girls ... that odd man with the canary-silk waistcoat and the lively eyes who had wanted to marry Aunt Lavvy.... “D’you remember, Florrie, that picnic when I wore the rose-coloured dress which looked so awful near his waistcoat, and he couldn’t understand why I ran away from him all day ...” (and remembering, they giggled, two silly girls together). From the rose-coloured to other dresses ... the present time, and what suited Nina, and what suited Ursula--not Grace, because the Decisive Dress which suited Grace had already been worn--the dress which first attracted her husband’s attention. The “marrying mother” dies hard. “Mr. Barry Noyes once said that Ursula would be the beauty of the family; and really, I don’t think men like fine girls as they used to ...” and Tom’s taste in women ... and Tom ... and--confidence finally unleashed--what Tom had brought up against her about poor little Ronnie!

And Florrie’s unspoken penitence for each hard thought she had ever had of Lavvy, separated the gossip like commas and semi-colons and exclamation marks. Lavvy was so sympathetic.... And how delicious for two women, how invigorating yet soothing--the resemblance to cocoa is accidental!--the ripple backward and forward between them, on those certain subjects in which neither men nor girls nor young married women nor one’s own husband nor anybody but just that other woman, are in the least intelligent.

Tom Maxwell came home on Monday evening to an atmosphere a-quiver with a few memories and traces of the recent heavy storm, but otherwise peaceful, united, and, metaphorically, lit by quiet sunshine. He thought: “When a good row clears the air, it always proves the air needed it!” By Tuesday evening it occurred to him, however, that the air was not clear between himself and Florrie; and he remembered, as one with the difficulty of remembering a grotesque nightmare, that he had been amazingly hectic on the subject of a baby who had died of measles eleven years ago. He marvelled at his agitation, now limp to his proddings as a dead caterpillar. Had he actually charged Florrie with neglecting the kid? Preposterous!

“It isn’t as though things didn’t happen,” blurted out Mr. Maxwell, bending over his trouser-press, to his wife already in bed. “And of course it stands to reason that if one could help them happening, one would. And, say what you like, to rear seven out of eight’s not bad. My mother lost three in a family of five.”

Florrie, understanding all that lay beyond the articulate apology, stretched out her hand towards her back view of him, and replied, after one or two happy gulps, “Lavvy and I had such a nice talk today while the children were out. It would be so dull for me here without her.”

[XV]

AMONG her other purchases in London, Aunt Lavvy had bought Hal a beautiful fountain pen--value about twenty-five shillings--which she gave him on his return to Winborough for the Christmas term. Bunny she tipped ten shillings. But her gift to Hal proved, among a variety of subtle points, that it was not the _money_ loss she had minded in the episode of the pound-note.

[XVI]

URSULA was just big enough to make a sacrifice, but not big enough to carry it off. For the first three or four days afterwards, she was able to behave gallantly enough, expectant of what Wordsworth, who had not, perhaps, a slender grace in titles, called “intimations of immortality”--but then, all at once, her belief snapped, and with it her patience, and she began to moon about the house in the spirit of a restive martyr who, after burning at the stake, has just discovered that the gates of heaven are only “cultured” pearl, and the streets an inferior rolled gold.

Then Aunt Lavvy remarked at breakfast one morning: “My little sitting-room is ready now, and it looks charming, but I’ve just remembered that there’s no key to the door between the two rooms. I must send for Marks to have the lock fitted. Oh dear, and I had hoped I had done with workmen. They’re such friendly dears, and _will_ talk to me about the Government. Haven’t you noticed, Tom, how sound I’ve been in my politics just lately?”

“Is the door locked, then?”

“Oh yes, it has been as long as I can remember. And the key lost.”

Mrs. Maxwell said breezily: “Ursula, it’s a topping day. It’d do you good to jump on your bike and pedal down to the town for Aunt Lavvy, before Miss Roberts is ready to study with you.”

“Nina can go,” suggested Ursula, hating the errand. “She’s bursting with loving-kindness this morning.”

“I’m going up by the eleven-forty to a matinée with Dorothy.”

Mrs. Maxwell teased Ursula merrily for being a “lazy-bones.” Stanley came in with a scientific fact about the stimulant of exercise just before mental concentration, together with statistics proving the large percentage of millionaires who had started their successful careers by living far enough from the station to entail a run for the train every morning. Mr. Maxwell waggishly remarked that, in that case, cooks ought to be bribed to serve the breakfast late; and Ursula said indolently: “Send Honor Rose to the locksmith’s. She’s got your steadfast sense of responsibility, Stan.”

Grace cried: “At _her_ age! Alone into Buckler’s Cross! You must be mad, Ursula. I sometimes let her toddle to the pillar-box at the corner, but----”

“Do let me go to the locksmith’s for you, Aunt Lavvy darling, directly Miss Roberts has finished with me. I’d love to.” The offer was Lottie’s.

“So as to miss your practising? What a brain!”

“Ursula, it’s right-down shabby of you to tease your sister because she’s more obliging than you are.”

Ursula flared up. “It wasn’t Lottie, was it, who gave up her room to Aunt Lavvy when she--when Hal----” She struggled with scalding tears at the back of the throat. Why do they always come hotter for injustice and self-pity than for sorrow?

Her hearers were startled and embarrassed beyond words at the reminder. They wanted to forget that episode, now that they were all united and kind and jovial again. It was indecent of Ursula to have hurled their obligation at them in this violent fashion, especially as there was no reply possible. They had all been grateful and thanked her. She could not exact gratitude twice over. Downcast eyelids and tightly-pressed mouths all round the table.... Of course she was only a child still, a charming undisciplined young colt, but even then----

The fact was that Ursula’s rather-more-than-usually-good deed had created a greater uneasiness among the Maxwells than Hal’s rather-more-than-bad deed which had preceded it. A thoroughly average family is not accustomed to either extension from the normal. Both Hal and Ursula were disturbingly “different.” Hal’s moral lapse had rapidly developed into a problem of consequences, which had been as rapidly wiped out, leaving next to nothing of the original shock. And then he had gone back to school.... Somehow, it was all not so uncomfortably evident as the sight of Ursula round the house, a disconsolate moping Peri emphasizing her yielded Paradise. For if she could be as noble as all that, she might at any moment be equally noble, or nobler. And the rest of them would have to live up to it, or else feel inferior.

So that Hal, who could be forgiven, and who was eager to forget, was easily a more popular figure than Ursula, who had been their rescuer, and now prevented them from forgetting.

“But I shall enjoy a walk to Marks, to see about a new key.” Aunt Lavvy broke the silence. “The hedges are just beginning to turn colour all along the road. It’s my favourite season.”

Ursula had dashed out of the room, they all thought, in tears ... but presently she came back like a gale, and flung a small heavy object on to the breakfast-table.

“There’s your key,” defiantly.

“The key of the door between?” Aunt Lavvy picked it up. “You clever child! Where did you find it?”

“I didn’t find it. I had hidden it--at the bottom of my handkerchief-box.”

“You had hidden it? And why, pray?” demanded her father.

Ursula thrust her hands into the pockets of her jersey, and tilted back her head. She was not crying now--indeed, there was urchin roguery sparkling in her eyes, and the corners of her lips were enigmatic:

“To protect myself from visitors,” she replied sweetly.

“Plain speech is a short cut,” said Tom Maxwell, getting angry with this young daughter, who, from being more or less of a cipher, had dared first to place him under an obligation, and then to taunt his helplessness with insubordination.

“Well, then”--Ursula spoke with even greater sweetness--“to protect myself from our Paying Guest.”

[XVII]

BUT in spite of these impertinences, Aunt Lavvy had the room, and Aunt Lavvy had the laugh of her. Moreover, now that the room was completely ready to sit in, and charming in its lilac and primrose tints as when their imaginations had planned it together, Aunt Lavvy did not sit in it. She sat downstairs with the others. She was more than usually convivial, and fragrant with content when somebody--Mrs. Maxwell or Nina or Lottie or Miss Roberts--asserted playfully that she could not be spared from them to go and sit in solitude.

Tenacious in her desire to own a sitting-room, it now stood empty and unused in that packed house.

Ursula, moping homeless about the stairs and landings of her home, was conscious of that sequestered oblong of space as though it were alive. She infected the rest of the household, who also became conscious of it--and, more than ever, of her. One or the other of them was wont to say to her, guiltily off-hand: “Oh, by the way, Ursula, there’s nobody in the dining-room for half an hour, if you want to be alone. I looked in on my way up,” and “Then I’ll tell Minnie not to disturb you.”... And behold Ursula, mooching disconsolately round the dining-room, a conspicuous captive to the misapprehension that she “liked to be alone sometimes.”

“Look here,” Mr. Maxwell anxiously consulted his wife one evening. “What’s all this trouble about Ursula? I mean, she’s quite comfortable digging-in with Nina, isn’t she? Sisters, and all that. What’s she in such a deuced queer state about ever since----Damn it, it was the girl’s own suggestion to change rooms.”

“Nina’s much easier to understand than Ursula. Nina’s much more like me--hot-tempered and says right out what’s in her mind and then it’s all over.”

For it is a pet illusion with most people that they have exactly this popular sort of temper, and no other.

Her husband drew closer. “Look here, Florrie. Hadn’t you better have a quiet talk with Ursula. A serious talk. You’re the girl’s mother. Get her to confide in you. I dunno--but it doesn’t seem ... natural to me, this fuss about not sleeping alone. Was there anything wrong going on when she----Well, what do you think?”

His suggestion of an interview with Ursula in the spirit of “you’re the girl’s mother” was a parallel to his serious talk with Hal--“After all, I’m your father.”... Thus, twice in the last week or two, parenthood had ceased to be nominal.

“What do you think, Florrie?” He had been nice to her ever since their reconciliation, and especially nice in insisting on her prior right to be consulted and even listened to with deference, on all subjects connected with the children.

Mrs. Maxwell said slowly: “Yes--I’ll talk to Ursula. But I think I know.... A sort of shyness--some girls are like that. Oh, _I_ wasn’t--not I!” and she laughed heartily.

“Look here, Ursula, my dear”--it was always easiest to approach a significant interview with “look here”--“I’m not going to mince words with you. If the trouble is that you don’t like undressing right down in front of Nina, because you’re not used to it--well, it’s false modesty, my dear, that’s what it is, but you can’t help your feelings.” And, very red in the face, but determined not to be put off either from her theory or her remedy, she described how Ursula could put on her nightgown over all her underclothes, and undress decently beneath it, manœuvering unseen knots and buttons until each garment flapped from concealment on to the floor; and, in the same way, could dress completely underneath her nightgown, and then only take it off--“It’s just a knack, and you’re not clumsy, so with a bit of practice--though, mind you, Ursula, you may say I’m too broad-minded, but it’s better than being morbid, which you are when you act as though your body’s something to be ashamed of.”

“Darling Mummie, I don’t care twopence if Nina or anybody else sees me stark naked.”

Florrie Maxwell collapsed on to the ledge of the landing-window. For though the Laburnums was now in its wonted pleasant humour, it still gave father the advantage of a study for “serious talks” with his offspring, and left mother to be despised for her less successful efforts in the uncertain privacy of the landings or the stairs.

Mrs. Maxwell was annoyed with Ursula. She had enjoyed being broad-minded and advanced, in a wind-on-the-open-heath voice, to a prim, shy, absurd little daughter ... but Ursula’s “stark naked” had at once reversed their positions, and discouragingly forced her back into the distasteful attitude of a slightly shocked parent.... For why “stark” naked? “Stark” nakedness contains an impropriety beyond the mere heartiness of a body unclothed.

“Then if it’s not that that’s upsetting you, what is it?” bluntly.

Ursula became impenetrable. Oh, Nina with her “What did you hope to get out of it?” and now the grown-ups with “Why do you mind not sleeping alone?” hinting at--Ursula did not know what they were hinting at; and nor, as a matter of course, did they, except for an uneasy conviction that it was unnatural.

But Aunt Lavvy understood. That was what so exasperated Ursula. Of all of them, Aunt Lavvy, who did not belong to them, who did not love them (not really), and who was, moreover, her enemy, should alone possess subtle mastery of whatever situation arose at the Laburnums. She did not _want_ to be understood by Aunt Lavvy. But in truth she was, and to herself she owned it.

When--when would it begin ... the glorious transformation of the commonplace, reward of sacrifice? Would it never begin? Not today? Not tomorrow? If there were any place to cry and cry and cry out the fulness of her heart and the tightness of her throat, the disappointment might not press so heavily. The room had been a lovely place to cry in.

[XVIII]

“SHE’D be best at boarding-school,” said Mr. Maxwell one evening in the drawing-room, after Ursula had gone to bed. His wife and Aunt Lavvy and Grace and Nina and Stanley and Miss Roberts all agreed. Grace, because she had liked school, and was sure Ursula would like it, and had always pitied her for being cheated of it; Nina, because she honestly believed it would supply some qualities lacking in her young sister--sporting Winborough qualities; Miss Roberts, because Ursula was growing beyond her in temperament, intelligence and impertinence--and anyway, Lottie would suffice to keep her in employment until Honor Rose was old enough to require a governess; and Aunt Lavvy for a reason dissimilar to Grace’s, and also from a feeling not dissimilar to Ursula’s--that she disliked a presence at the Laburnums that understood where it did not love her. But the main reason for agreement with all of them was not mentioned; that it was impossible for the scar of recent conflict to be properly healed, or for the Laburnums to settle down to its former complacency, while the main reminder of the unusual was still in the house--reminding them. Metaphorically, they still twitched their shoulders when Ursula was about. Ursula was a dear, quaint kid, but--when people took to sacrifices you could never be sure what would be their next out-of-the-way freak. Something higher, nobler still perhaps, and even more uncomfortable.... They did not see that there was nothing to be frightened of in poor little Ursula, who was just not big enough to carry it off. If, indeed, she had followed up her lapse from the average by letting them all forget it--ah, then their spirits might well have been awed by the sudden distance separating her from the rest of them.

“I’ll go and see Miss Luther tomorrow,” said Florrie Maxwell. “As you say, Nina, the term will have started, but it’s too long to wait for the half-term, so perhaps they’ll make an exception, as you and Grace were there, and let her enter at once.”

Then Stanley broke it to them. “I may as well tell you now, Mother and Father”--he only called them thus when on the brink of some significant announcement--“that I’ve been negotiating for the remainder of the lease of ‘The Kopje’--we shan’t call it that, naturally. Old Gurney wants to move out at once; it’s too small for him. I think it’s fairly certain that we’ll get it. It’s time Grace and the babies had the run of their own house; and, quite frankly, sir”--turning with good-humour to his father-in-law--“from something you said to me the other day, I gathered you’d prefer it.”

“Well, well.” Mr. Maxwell remembered with regret that he had been irritable in the matter. “Perhaps we are rather tumbling over each other’s toes in the old Laburnums. And as long as you’re still in the same road--we can’t let our grandchildren go too far away, can we, mother?”

Mrs. Maxwell nodded absently, for her thoughts were already bustling about the rooms, re-arranging them. It really seemed as though the sudden exodus would be like releasing a spring, and that they would all reel out into spaciousness, rather crumpled and breathless from having been packed so close. Lottie and Miss Roberts could now have an undisputed schoolroom, and also move down into their old bedroom, where Nurse and the Watson babies had been sleeping. Because an attic was much more suitable for boys--she had always known it, and if Hal were going to college next year, that was the signal that he was grown-up--her grown-up son!--and ought to have a room to himself. Bunny and William would be perfectly happy, rampaging about the attic. And Mrs. Maxwell realized with pride that at last they would actually be able to boast a spare-room, at present Grace and Stanley’s bedroom. “And that makes Nina’s room much more hers as well--I must say she’s been very good about visitors in it--but now she won’t be plagued except during Ursula’s holidays. And the spare-room will do splendidly if Hal wants to bring home his college pals.”

[XIX]

MISS Luther, headmistress of Regina Hall, Tunbridge Wells, had just said good-bye to Mrs. Maxwell; and was discussing the prospective new pupil with Miss Greyling, her second in command:

“Her sisters were both thoroughly nice girls, and Nina, I remember, was one of our best hockey captains. But there seems to be something mysterious about this one--Ursula. At all events, they’re in a special hurry to get rid of her. As far as I can gather from the mother’s manner, she had got herself into some sort of a scrape at home....”

[XX]

THINGS were not different after a sacrifice. Things were exactly the same--only horrider. Ursula knew now.

The taxi sprang away from the open front door of the Laburnums. Sitting on a back seat, she was able to see, through the rain-blurred windows, her mother in the porch, and Aunt Lavvy and Lottie.... They drew in out of the wet, their last smiles still encouraging her with the formula: “You’ll love it when the first homesickness is over.”

Nina and Grace were taking her down, both eager for a glimpse of their old school.

Ursula’s beautiful mouth was set and grave, her eyelids downcast, her hands, as usual, clenched in the deep pockets of her coat. It was simply not worth while to be good. At Regina Hall would be dozens of girls, eating, working, sleeping together. Herded even in thought. There would be confidences and slop and brimming-over affection.... “Oh, a _mess_ of girls!”

But after all, Hal was all right. She had given him back to the world as a complete specimen of hero--a careless, lordly, invulnerable being, good-natured, with a voice of lazy authority. Anything so complete was surely precious, though it was said that only suffering and humiliation enriched the soul ... but so many people with doubtlessly enriched souls, yet dragged about, to all appearances maimed and burdened and spoilt. So might not an occasional Hal remain splendidly poised, neither fretted by consciousness, nor torn by imagination? And Ursula had achieved that for him. She had power. There was sudden dazzlement in the thought.... She lifted her head proudly.... To have secret vision, and to act on it, swiftly, clearly, successfully ... why, she was almost God!

The luminous moment was swept into grey commonplace again, and only a disconsolate little girl in a taxi was on her way to the station.

But she broke into a happy gurgle of laughter, remembering how Lottie had tried to deal with the situation by arranging pins in a pattern on Aunt Lavvy’s cushion.