“I hope your mother won’t give me anything fancy to do,” Anna said. “I’m no good at anything except plain sewing.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Beatrice answered carelessly. “It’s all plain sewing.” She drew a cardboard box from her pocket, and offered it to Anna. “Here, have one.” They were chocolate creams.
“Thanks,” said Anna, taking one. “Aren’t they very expensive? I’ve never seen any like these before.”
“Oh! Just ordinary. Four shillings a pound. Papa buys them for me: I simply dote on them. I love to eat them in bed, if I can’t sleep.” Beatrice made these statements with her mouth full. “Don’t you adore chocolates?” she added.
“I don’t know,” Anna lamely replied. “Yes, I like them.” She only adored her sister, and perhaps God; and this was the first time she had tasted chocolate.
“I couldn’t live without them,” said Beatrice. “Your hair is lovely. I never saw such a brown. What wash do you use?”
“Wash?” Anna repeated.
“Yes, don’t you put anything on it?”
“No, never.”
“Well! Take care you don’t lose it, that’s all. Now, will you come and have just a peep at my studio—where I paint, you know? I’d like you to see it before we go down.”
They proceeded to a small room on the second floor, with a sloping ceiling and a dormer window.
“I’m obliged to have this room,” Beatrice explained, “because it’s the only one in the house with a north light, and of course you can’t do without that. How do you like it?”
Anna said that she liked it very much.
The walls of the room were hung with various odd curtains of Eastern design. Attached somehow to these curtains some coloured plates, bits of pewter, and a few fans were hung high in apparently precarious suspense. Lower down on the walls were pictures and sketches, chiefly unframed, of flowers, fishes, loaves of bread, candlesticks, mugs, oranges and tea-trays. On an immense easel in the middle of the room was an unfinished portrait of a man.
“Who’s that?” Anna asked, ignorant of those rules of caution which are observed by the practised frequenter of studios.
“Don’t you know?” Beatrice exclaimed, shocked. “That’s papa; I’m doing his portrait; he sits in that chair there. The silly old master at the school won’t let me draw from life yet—he keeps me to the antique—so I said to myself I would study the living model at home. I’m dreadfully in earnest about it, you know—I really am. Mother says I work far too long up here.”
Anna was unable to perceive that the picture bore any resemblance to Alderman Sutton, except in the matter of the aldermanic robe, which she could now trace beneath the portrait’s neck. The studies on the walls pleased her much better. Their realism amazed her. One could make out not only that here for instance, was a fish—there was no doubt that it was a hallibut; the solid roundness of the oranges and the glitter on the tea-trays seemed miraculously achieved. “Have you actually done all these?” she asked, in genuine admiration. “I think they’re splendid.”
“Oh, yes, they’re all mine; they’re only still-life studies,” Beatrice said contemptuously of them, but she was nevertheless flattered.
“I see now that that is Mr. Sutton,” Anna said, pointing to the easel picture.
“Yes, it’s pa right enough. But I’m sure I’m boring you. Let’s go down now, or perhaps we shall catch it from mother.”
As Anna, in the wake of Beatrice, entered the drawing-room, a dozen or more women glanced at her with keen curiosity, and the even flow of conversation ceased for a moment, to be immediately resumed. In the centre of the room, with her back to the fireplace, Mrs. Sutton was seated at a square table, cutting out. Although the afternoon was warm she had a white woollen wrap over her shoulders; for the rest she was attired in plain black silk, with a large stuff apron containing a pocket for scissors and chalk. She jumped up with the activity of which Beatrice had inherited a part, and greeted Anna, kissing her heartily.
“How are you, my dear? So pleased you have come.” The timeworn phrases came from her thin, nervous lips full of sincere and kindly welcome. Her wrinkled face broke into a warm, life-giving smile. “Beatrice, find Miss Anna a chair.” There were two chairs in the bay of the window, and one of them was occupied by Miss Dickinson, whom Anna slightly knew. The other, being empty, was assigned to the latecomer.
“Now you want something to do, I suppose,” said Beatrice.
“Please.”
“Mother, let Miss Tellwright have something to get on with at once. She has a lot of time to make up.”
Mrs. Sutton, who had sat down again, smiled across at Anna. “Let me see, now, what can we give her?”
“There’s several of those boys’ nightgowns ready tacked,” said Miss Dickinson, who was stitching at a boy’s nightgown. “Here’s one half-finished,” and she picked up an inchoate garment from the floor. “Perhaps Miss Tellwright wouldn’t mind finishing it.”
“Yes, I will do my best at it,” said Anna.
The thoughtless girl had arrived at the sewing meeting without needles or thimble or scissors, but one lady or another supplied these deficiencies, and soon she was at work. She stitched her best and her hardest, with head bent, and all her wits concentrated on the task. Most of the others seemed to be doing likewise, though not to the detriment of conversation. Beatrice sank down on a stool near her mother, and, threading a needle with coloured silk, took up a long piece of elaborate embroidery.
The general subjects of talk were the Revival, now over, with a superb record of seventy saved souls, the school-treat shortly to occur, the summer holidays, the fashions, and the change of ministers which would take place in August. The talkers were the wives and daughters of tradesmen and small manufacturers, together with a few girls of a somewhat lower status, employed in shops: it was for the sake of these latter that the sewing meeting
