This befell upon one of the days when Mrs. Willowes was lying down with a headache. “Something always goes wrong when I have one of my days,” the poor lady would complain. It was also upon one of Mrs. Willowes’s days that Everard fed Laura with the preserved cherries out of the drawing-room cake. Laura soon became very sick, and the stable-boy was sent off post-haste upon Everard’s mare to summon the doctor.
Mrs. Willowes made a poor recovery after Laura’s birth; as time went on, she became more and more invalidish, though always pleasantly so. She was seldom well enough to entertain, so Laura grew up in a quiet household. Ladies in mantles of silk or of sealskin, according to the season of the year, would come to call, and sitting by the sofa would say: “Laura is growing a big girl now. I suppose before long you will be sending her to a school.” Mrs. Willowes heard them with half-shut eyes. Holding her head deprecatingly upon one side, she returned evasive answers. When by quite shutting her eyes she had persuaded them to go, she would call Laura and say: “Darling, aren’t your skirts getting a little short?”
Then Nannie would let out another tuck in Laura’s ginghams and merinos, and some months would pass before the ladies returned to the attack. They all liked Mrs. Willowes, but they were agreed amongst themselves that she needed bracing up to a sense of her responsibilities, especially her responsibilities about Laura. It really was not right that Laura should be left so much to herself. Poor dear Miss Taylor was an excellent creature. Had she not inquired about peninsulas in all the neighbouring schoolrooms of consequence? But Miss Taylor for three hours daily and Mme. Brevet’s dancing classes in winter did not, could not, supply all Laura’s needs. She should have the companionship of girls of her own age, or she might grow up eccentric. Another little hint to Mrs. Willowes would surely open the poor lady’s eyes. But though Mrs. Willowes received their good counsel with a flattering air of being just about to become impressed by it, and filled up their teacups with a great deal of delicious cream, the silk and sealskin ladies hinted in vain, for Laura was still at home when her mother died.
During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill. It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, “I think I will go to my grave now,” and had left the room, her white shawl trailing behind her.
Laura mourned for her mother in skirts that almost reached the ground, for Miss Boddle, the family dressmaker, had nice sensibilities and did not think that legs could look sorrowful. Indeed, Laura’s legs were very slim and frisky, they liked climbing trees and jumping over haycocks, they had no wish to retire from the world and belong to a young lady. But when she had put on the new clothes that smelt so queerly, and looking in the mirror saw herself sad and grown-up, Laura accepted the inevitable. Sooner or later she must be subdued into young-ladyhood; and it seemed befitting that the change should come gravely, rather than with the conventional polite uproar and fuss of “coming-out”—which odd term meant, as far as she could see, and when once the champagne bottles were emptied and the flimsy ball-dress lifted off the thin shoulders, going-in.
As things were, she had a recompense for the loss of her liberty. For Everard needed comfort, he needed a woman to comfort him, and abetted by Miss Boddle’s insinuations Laura was soon able to persuade him that her comfortings were of the legitimate womanly kind. It was easy, much easier than she had supposed, to be grown-up; to be clearheaded and watchful, to move sedately and think before she spoke. Already her hands looked much whiter on the black lap. She could not take her mother’s place—that was as impossible as
