The Children's Book

The three good fairies looked at each other. Which of them could be most calm, most reasonable, most pragmatic?

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In the end they decided they would all three speak to Elsie, and deputed Frank to ask Philip to bring her to Miss Dace’s little house. They were enjoying each other’s company—each felt—in the discussion of this intimate problem, that they had discovered new, real, friends.

Elsie came into Miss Dace’s drawing-room and stood to attention, looking angry. She was wearing her hat, and one of Imogen’s loose mediaeval gowns, neatly darned and patched. Miss Dace begged her to sit down, and gave her a cup of tea, some cubes of sugar, a slice of fruitcake. They had agreed that they must not frighten the young woman with moral lectures. She sipped her tea, and drew her head back, like, Marian Oakeshott thought, a frightened snake ready to strike. Miss Dace spoke. It was her drawing-room.

“We know about your problem, Elsie, your predicament, and we haven’t asked you here to lecture you, but to tell you how we intend to help you. I myself know a respectable—and kindly, very kindly—lady who will help with— with the birth of the child.”

“We don’t know,” said Marian Oakeshott, “what you will want to do when the child is born. I should like to say that—if you so wish, if you want to… if you like… I would be happy to ask Tabitha to take on its care so that you could continue to work for Mrs. Fludd and to be with your brother.”

Elsie was silent, her head still back. Marian said

“Then you could come to the child, or he could come to you, in your time off—you would not be separated.” Elsie said nothing.

Phoebe Methley said “We propose to speak on your behalf to Mrs. Fludd, and make the arrangements clear and satisfactory.” Elsie said slowly

“There’s been a deal of talking about me behind my back.”

“You are in a situation,” said Marian, “where that inevitably happens. We are truly trying to help.”

“I came to your meeting about women. I suppose I’m a single woman, and a Fallen Woman.” She paused. She said, looking pale, “I really don’t feel very well. I don’t know as I can go on, anyway, hauling buckets and hanging over stoves.”

“I shall ask my good doctor to examine you,” said Miss Dace. “He will tell you what you may and may not do, in your condition, and give you tonics to help you, things like that.”

“I am grateful,” Elsie said slowly and flatly. “It’s more than I could hope for.”

“But—” said Marian Oakeshott, “there is a but in your voice. You may speak freely to us, we should prefer it.”

“I never meant to go into Service, ma’am. What I do not want is to slave in someone else’s kitchen and wash their clothes for the rest of my life. I didn’t and don’t want that. And now it seems my only way forward. I thought it was temporary, till Philip got to know his craft and got well known, as he will, and has the help here he needs. My mother was a paintress—she was a good paintress, the most delicate with her brushes of any in the studio—she died of it, of the chemicals in the air. She wasn’t a skivvy, she wasn’t a scullery-maid, she was an artist. You care about women’s work, I’ve heard you talk. All of you. So I’ll admit to you, I don’t have Philip’s talent. He has a right to expect to be an artist. I don’t. But that don’t mean I want to be a skivvy.”

A sudden moment of involuntary spite came over her.

“And that lot are so useless and helpless and don’t pay me a penny. And I’ve got this lump in me, that turns about and about, and will come out and need vests and caps and milk, and how can I make do, when I get nothing—”

“Don’t cry,” said Marian.

Elsie gulped.

“I shan’t. I daren’t. I’ve got to keep myself together.”

Phoebe Methley said “What you say is true and moving. But you must admit—you are in this situation because of things you have done—about which Philip tells us it is no good to ask, so we are not asking. You are probably not the most guilty person in this muddle, but we are talking about help, not about guilt. And there is one entirely innocent person, who is not yet born, and must be cared for.”

“Will you agree to us talking to Mrs. Fludd?” asked Miss Dace.

“I don’t seem to have much choice. No, don’t listen to me, that’s not fair of me. I am grateful to you ladies—I couldn’t have expected so much—I am, I am. But I am scared stiff, too. I’ve always been a strong one.”

The three good ladies became more frank as they grew more intimate over the moral problem of the fate of Elsie Warren’s baby. They held, and enjoyed, a long discussion of how best to approach Seraphita Fludd. They agreed that they had little idea what she thought or felt about anything. “Never have I met a woman so determinedly vague,” said Miss Dace, whose disposition was the opposite of vagueness. They imparted to each other what was common knowledge about her history. Her name was not Seraphita. She had been separated from her class by her great beauty. She had been, in late Pre- Raphaelite, early Aesthetic days, a “Stunner” and had modelled for Millais. The ladies agreed that she was still a lovely woman. The proportions of her facial bones were perfect, said Marian Oakeshott. “And all that mass of hair, hardly faded,” said Phoebe Methley. “She doesn’t look you in the eye, ever,” said Patty Dace. “It isn’t that she’s devious, it is that she’s absent.” They agreed comfortably that she had no idea how to run a house, or how to bring up children. Geraint had run wild, and the poor girls—though lovely to look at, as their mother was—had no social nous, no common sense even. They had heard that Geraint was doing well in the City, having thrown over the whole pastoral aesthetic.

Marian said it was quite possible that Seraphita had come from much the same world as Elsie, but she entirely lacked her common sense or her willingness to make do.

Patty Dace said that that fact could make her harsher with Elsie’s predicament, or more sympathetic, there was no way of knowing. She might feel she had to keep up appearances.

“What appearances?” asked Phoebe Methley, tartly. “They’re all darned and