On such occasions, while she undid her pretty muslin dress, unpinned the flowers she was never without, and loosened her gold-brown hair, which she had put up for the evening: while she undressed, Evelyn had to submit to a rigorous cross-examination. Laura demanded to know where she had been, what she had done, whom she had spoken to; and woe to her if she tried to shirk a question. Laura was not only jealous, she was extraordinarily suspicious; and the elder girl had need of all her laughing kindness to steer her way through the shallows of distrust. For a great doubt of Evelyn’s sincerity had implanted itself in Laura’s mind: she could not forget the incident of the “mostly fools”; and, after an evening of this kind, she never felt quite sure that Evelyn was not deceiving her afresh—out of sheer goodness of heart, of course—by assuring her that she had had a “horrid time,” been bored to death, and would have much preferred to stay with her; when the truth was that, in the company of some moustached idiot or other, she had enjoyed herself to the top of her bent.
On the night Laura learned that her friend had again met the loathly “Jim,” there was a great to-do. In vain Evelyn laughed, reasoned, expostulated. Laura was inconsolable.
“Look here, Poppet,” said Evelyn at last, and was so much in earnest that she laid her hairbrush down, and took Laura by both her bony little shoulders. “Look here, you surely don’t expect me to be an old maid, do you?—me?” The pronoun signified all she might not say: it meant wealth, youth, beauty, and an unbounded capacity for pleasure.
“Evvy, you’re not going to marry that horrid man?”
“Of course not, goosey. But that doesn’t mean that I’m never going to marry at all, does it?”
Laura supposed not—with a tremendous sniff.
“Well, then, what is all the fuss about?”
It was not so easy to say. She was of course reconciled, she sobbed, to Evelyn marrying some day: only plain and stupid girls were left to be old maids: but it must not happen for years and years and years to come, and when it did, it must be to someone much older than herself, someone she did not greatly care for: in short, Evelyn was to marry only to escape the odium of the single life.
Having drawn this sketch of her future word by word from the weeping Laura, Evelyn fell into a fit of laughter which she could not stifle. “Well, Poppet,” she said when she could speak, “if that’s your idea of happiness for me, we’ll postpone it just as long as ever we can. I’m all there. For I mean to have a good time first—a jolly good time—before I tie myself up forever, world without end, amen.”
“That’s just what I hate so—your good time, as you call it,” retorted Laura, smarting under the laughter.
“Everyone does, child. You’ll be after it yourself when you’re a little older.”
“Me?—never!”
“Oh, yes, indeed you will.”
“I won’t. I hate men and I always shall. And oh, I thought”—with an upward, sobbing breath—“I thought you liked me best.”
“Of course I like you, you silly child! But that’s altogether different. And I don’t like you any less because I enjoy having some fun with them, too.”
“I don’t want your old leavings!” said Laura savagely. It hurt, almost as much as having a tooth pulled out, did this knowledge that your friend’s affection was wholly yours only as long as no man was in question. And out of the sting, Laura added: “Wait till I’m grown up, and I’ll show them what I think of them—the pigs!”
This time Evelyn had to hold her hand in front of her mouth. “No, no, I don’t mean to laugh at you. Come, be good now,” she petted. “And you really must go to bed, Laura. It’s past twelve o’clock, and that infernal machine’ll be going off before you’ve had any sleep at all.”
The “machine” was Laura’s alarm, which ran down every night just now at two o’clock. For, if one thing was sure, it was that affairs with Laura were in a sorry muddle. In this, the last and most momentous year of her school life, at the close of which, like a steep wall to be scaled, rose the university examination, she was behindhand with her work, and occupied a mediocre place in her class. So steadfastly was her attention pitched on Evelyn that she could link it to nothing else: in the middle of an important task, her thoughts would stray to contemplate her friend or wonder what she was doing; while, if Evelyn were out for the evening, Laura gave up her meagre pretence of study altogether, and moodily propped her head in her hand. This was why she had hit on the small hours for the necessary cramming; then, there were no distractions: the great house was as still as an empty church; and Evelyn lay safe and sound before her. So, punctually at two o’clock Laura was startled, with a pounding heart, out of her first sleep; and lighting the gas she sat up in bed and pored over her books. Evelyn was not disturbed by the light, or at least she did not complain; and it was certainly a famous time for committing things to memory: the subsequent hours of sleep seemed rather to etch the facts into your brain than to blur them.
You cannot however rob Peter to pay Paul, with impunity, and in the weeks that followed, despite her nightly industry, Laura made no headway.
As the term tapered to an end, things went from bad to worse with her; and since, besides, the parting with Evelyn was at the door, she was
