And yet, though my little Bowater parlour looked cheap and dingy after the splendours of No. 2, Fanny somehow survived every odious comparison. She was very intelligent, I whispered to myself. Mrs. Monnerie would certainly approve of that. And I prickled at the thought. And I—I was too “concentrated.” In spite of my plumping “figure,” I could never, never be full-size. If only Fanny had meant that as a compliment, or even as a kind of explanation to go on with. No, she had meant it for the truth. And it must be far easier for a leopard to change his spots than his inside. The accusation set all the machinery of my mind emptily whirring.
My glance fell on my Paris frock, left in a shimmering slovenly ring on the floor. It wandered off to Fanny’s postal order, spread over my lap like an expensive antimacassar. She had worked for that money; while I had never been anything more useful than “an angel.” In fancy I saw her blooming in a house as sumptuous as Mrs. Monnerie’s. Bloom indeed! I hated the thought, yet realized, too, that it was safer—even if for the time being not so profitable—to be life-size. And, as if out of the listening air, a cold dart pierced me through. Suppose my Messrs Harris and Harris and Harris might not be such honest trustees as Miss Fenne had vouched for. Suppose they decamped with my £110 per annum!—I caught a horrifying glimpse of the wolf that was always sniffing at Fanny’s door.
Mrs. Bowater brought in my luncheon, and—as I insisted—her own, too. The ice from Mr. Tidy, the fishmonger’s, had given a slightly marine flavour to the cream, and I had to keep my face averted as much as possible from the scorched red chop sprawling and oozing on her plate. How could she bring herself to eat it? We are such stuff as dreams are made on, said Hamlet. So then was Mrs. Bowater. What a mystery then was this mutton fat! But chop or no chop, it was a happy meal.
Having waved my extremely “Fannyish” letter at her, I rapidly dammed that current of her thoughts by explaining that I had changed my clothes not (as a gleam from her eye had seemed to suspect) because I was afraid of spoiling my London finery, but in order to be really at home. For the first time I surprised her muttering a grace over the bone on her plate. Then she removed the tray, accepted a strawberry, folded her hands in her lap, and we began to talk. She asked a hundred and one questions concerning my health and happiness, but never once mentioned Mrs. Monnerie; and at last, after a small pause, filled by us both with the same thought, she remarked that “that young Mr. Anon was nothing if not persistent.”
Since I had gone, not a week had passed, she told me, but he had come rapping at the door after dusk to inquire after me. “Though why he should scowl like a pitchpot to hear that you are enjoying the lap of luxury—” The angular shoulders achieved a shrug at least as Parisian as my discarded gown.
“Why doesn’t he write to me, then? Twice in ten weeks!”
“Well it’s six, miss, I’ve counted, though seemingly sixty. But that being the question, he is there to answer it, at any time this evening, or at six tomorrow morning, if London ways haven’t cured you of early-rising.”
So we went off together, Mrs. Bowater and I, in the cool of the evening about half an hour after sunset—she, alas, a little ruffled because I had refused to change back again into my Monnerie finery. “But Mrs. Bowater, imagine such a thing in a real wild garden!” I protested, but without mollifying her, and without further explaining—how could I do that?—that the gown which Miss Sentimentality (or Miss Coquette) was actually wearing was that in which she had first met Mr. Anon.
XXXVI
I trod close in Mrs. Bowater’s track as she convoyed me through a sea of greenery breaking here and there to my waist and even above my hat. Summer had been busy in Wanderslore. Honeysuckle and acid-sweet brier were in bloom; sleeping bindweed and pimpernel. The air was liquidly sweet with uncountable odours. And the fading skies dyed bright the frowning front of the house, about which the new-come swifts shrieked in their play over my wilderness. Mr. Anon looked peculiar, standing alone there.
Having bidden him a gracious good evening, Mrs. Bowater after a long, ruminating glance at us, decided that she would “take a stroll through the grounds.” We watched her black figure trail slowly away up the overgrown terraces towards the house. Then he turned. His clear, dwelling eyes, with that darker line encircling the grey-black iris, fixed themselves on me, his mouth tight-shut.
“Well,” he said at last, almost wearily. “It has been a long waiting.”
I was unprepared for this sighing. “It has indeed,” I replied. “But it is exceedingly pleasant to see Beechwood Hill again. I wrote; but you did not answer my letter, at least not the last.”
My voice dropped away; every one of the fine little speeches I had thought to make, forgotten.
“And now you are here.”
“Yes,” I said quickly, a little timid of any silence between us, “and that’s pleasant too. You can have no notion what a stiff, glaring garden it is up there—geraniums and gravel, you know, and windows, windows, windows. They are wonderfully kind to me—but I don’t much love it.”
“Then why stay?” he smiled. “Still, you are, at least, safely out of her clutches.”
“Clutches!” I hated the way we were talking. “Thank you very much. You forget you
