Her manner with Mrs. Driffield was perfect. It was affable, but not condescending. She always thanked her very prettily for having allowed her to come and see her and complimented her on her appearance. If she praised Edward Driffield to her, telling her with a little envy in her tone what a privilege it was to enjoy the companionship of such a great man, it was certainly from pure kindness, and not because she knew that there is nothing that exasperates the wife of a literary man more than to have another woman tell her flattering things about him. She talked to Mrs. Driffield of the simple things her simple nature might be supposed to be interested in, of cooking and servants and Edward’s health and how careful she must be with him. Mrs. Barton Trafford treated her exactly as you would expect a woman of very good Scotch family, which she was, to treat an ex-barmaid with whom a distinguished man of letters had made an unfortunate marriage. She was cordial, playful, and gently determined to put her at her ease.
It was strange that Rosie could not bear her; indeed, Mrs. Barton Trafford was the only person that I ever knew her dislike. In those days even barmaids did not habitually use the “bitches” and “bloodys” that are part and parcel of the current vocabulary of the best-brought-up young ladies, and I never heard Rosie use a word that would have shocked my Aunt Sophie. When anyone told a story that was a little near the knuckle she would blush to the roots of her hair. But she referred to Mrs. Barton Trafford as “that damned old cat.” It needed the most urgent persuasions of her more intimate friends to induce her to be civil to her.
“Don’t be a fool, Rosie,” they said. They all called her Rosie and presently I, though very shyly, got in the habit of doing so too. “If she wants to she can make him. He must play up to her. She can work the trick if anyone can.”
Though most of the Driffields’ visitors were occasional, appearing every other Saturday, say, or every third, there was a little band that, like myself, came almost every week. We were the standbys; we arrived early and stayed late. Of these the most faithful were Quentin Forde, Harry Retford, and Lionel Hillier.
Quentin Forde was a stocky little man with a fine head of the type that was afterward for a time much admired in the moving pictures, a straight nose and handsome eyes, neatly cropped gray hair, and a black moustache; if he had been four or five inches taller he would have been the perfect type of the villain of melodrama. He was known to be very “well connected,” and he was affluent; his only occupation was to cultivate the arts. He went to all the first nights and all the private views. He had the amateur’s severity, and cherished for the productions of his contemporaries a polite but sweeping contempt. I discovered that he did not come to the Driffields’ because Edward was a genius, but because Rosie was beautiful.
Now that I look back I cannot get over my surprise that I should have had to be told what was surely so obvious. When I first knew her it never occurred to me to ask myself whether she was pretty or plain, and when, seeing her again after five years, I noticed for the first time that she was very pretty, I was interested but did not trouble to think much about it. I took it as part of the natural order of things, just as I took the sun setting over the North Sea or the towers of Tercanbury Cathedral. I was quite startled when I heard people speak of Rosie’s beauty, and when they complimented Edward on her looks and his eyes rested on her for a moment, mine followed his. Lionel Hillier was a painter and he asked her to sit for him. When he talked of the picture he wanted to paint and told me what he saw in her, I listened to him stupidly. I was puzzled and confused. Harry Retford knew one of the fashionable photographers of the period and, arranging special terms, he took Rosie to be photographed. A Saturday or two later the proofs were there and we all looked at them. I had never seen Rosie in evening dress. She was wearing a dress of white satin, with a long train and puffy sleeves, and it was cut low; her hair was more elaborately done than usual. She looked very different from the strapping young woman I had first met in Joy Lane in a boater and a starched shirt. But Lionel Hillier tossed the photographs aside impatiently.
“Rotten,” he said. “What can a photograph give of Rosie? The thing about her is her colour.” He turned to her. “Rosie, don’t you know that your colour is the great miracle of the age?”
She looked at him without answering, but her full red lips broke into their childlike, mischievous smile.
“If I can only get a suggestion of it I’m made for life,” he said. “All the rich stockbrokers’ wives will come on their bended knees and beg me to paint them like you.”
Presently I learned that Rosie was sitting to him,
