The new-comer was about twelve or thirteen, and she was more exquisitely dressed than any child Joan remembered to have met. Perhaps, if the apparition had been a good deal younger or older, the lodging-house drudge would not have observed so keenly, or realised with a quick stab of passionate pain the illimitable gulf dividing lives. But here was a girl of her own age, her own height, her own needs and capacities, and yet--the difference!
It struck her like a thrust of some thin, delicate surgical instrument which could inflict anguish, yet leave no trace. Joan's whole life was spent in dreaming; without the dreams, existence at 12, Seafoam Terrace would not have been tolerable to a young creature with the nerves of a racehorse and the imagination of a Scheherazade. She lived practically a double life within herself, but never until this moment had she been consciously jealous of the happier fate of a fellow-creature.
In looking from the shelter where she sat in shadow, at the other girl who walked in sunshine, she knew the crunching pain of the monster's fangs.
The other girl had long, fair hair; she wore white muslin, foaming with lace frills, white silk stockings, and shoes of white suede. Her face was shaded by a great, rose-crowned, leghorn hat, which flopped into soft curves and made a picture of small features which without it might have seemed insignificant. The magnetism that was in Joan Carthew's eyes forced the girl to turn and throw a glance as she passed at the shabby child in faded brown serge (a frock altered from a discarded one of Mrs. Boyle's) who sat huddled in the shelter, with a tawdrily dressed baby asleep by her side. The glance had all the primitive, merciless disdain of a sleek, fortunate young animal for a miserable, hunted one, and Joan felt the meaning of it in her soul.
"Why should she have everything and I nothing?" was the old-new question which shaped itself wordlessly in the child's brain. "She looks at me as if I were a rat. I'm not a rat! I'm as good as she is, if I had her clothes. I'm cleverer, and prettier, too, I know I am--heaps and heaps. Oh! I want to be like her, only better--I must be--I shall!"
She quivered with the fierceness of her revolt against fate, yet in it was no vulgar jealousy. The other girl's pale blue eyes, in one contemptuous glance, had found every patch on her frock and shoes, had criticised her old hat, and sneered at her little, rough, work-worn hands, scorning her for them as if she were a creature of an inferior race; but Joan had no personal hatred for the happier child, no wish for revenge, no desire to take from the other what she had. The feeling which shook her with sudden, stormy passion was merely the sharp realisation of injustice, the conviction that by nature she herself was worthy of the good things she had missed, the savage resolve to have what she ought to have, at any cost.
It was not tea-time yet, and Minnie was happily asleep; Joan was certain to be scolded just as sharply on her return as if she had stopped away for hours longer, therefore she might as well have drained her birthday cup of stolen pleasure to the dregs; but the good taste of the draught was gone. She yearned only to go home, to get the scolding over, and to have a few minutes to herself in the tiny back room which she shared with the baby. There seemed to be much to think of, much to decide.
The child waked Minnie, who was cross at being roused, and refused to walk. The quickest way of triumphing over the difficulty was to carry her, and this method Joan promptly adopted. But the baby was heavy and fractious. She wriggled in her young nurse's grasp, and just as Joan had staggered round the corner of Seafoam Terrace, with her disproportionate burden, she tripped and fell, under the windows of No. 12.
Minnie roared, and there was an echoing shriek from the house. Mrs. Boyle, who had been looking up and down the street in angry quest of her missing drudge, saw the catastrophe and rushed to the rescue of her offspring. She snatched the baby, who was more frightened than hurt, and holding her by one arm, proceeded to administer chastisement to Joan.
Instinctively she knew that the girl was sensitive and proud, though she had no kindred feelings in her own soul, and she delighted in humiliating her drudge before the whole street. As she screamed reproaches and harsh names, raining a shower of blows on Joan's ears and head and burning cheeks, a face appeared in at least one window of each house along the Terrace. Though a cataract of sparks cascaded before the child's eyes, somehow she saw the faces and imagined a dozen for every one.