The Girl Who Had Nothing

by A. M. Williamson

At the present moment she was walking on the plage, pleasantly conscious that she was one of the prettiest and best-dressed women among many who were pretty and well-dressed. Then a blonde girl passed her, a blonde girl who was new to Biarritz, but who, somehow, did not seem new to Joan's retina. Her photograph was somewhere in the book of memory, and, oddly enough, it seemed to have a background of sea and blue sky, as it had to-day.

The girl was pretty, as a beautifully dressed, golden-haired doll in a shop window is pretty. She was also exceedingly "good form," and she was vouched for as a young person of importance by a remarkably distinguished-looking old man who strolled beside her.

They turned, and in passing the "Comtesse" for the second time, the girl looked full in Joan's face, with a lingering gaze such as a spoiled beauty often directs upon a possible rival.

Then, all in an instant, Joan knew.

"Why," she reminded herself, "it's the girl I saw at Brighton--the girl I envied. I know it is she. That's eight years ago, but I can't be mistaken."

Somehow this seemed an important discovery. If Joan, a miserable, overworked slavey of twelve, nursing her tyrant's baby, had not been bitten with consuming jealousy of a child no older but a thousand times more fortunate than herself, she might have gone on indefinitely as a slavey, and might never have had a career.

The little girl at Brighton had looked scornfully from under her softly drooping Leghorn hat at the shabby child-nurse, and a rage of resentment had boiled in Joan's passionate young heart. Now, the tall girl at Biarritz looked with half-reluctant admiration from under an equally becoming hat at the Comtesse de Merival, who was more beautiful and apparently quite as fortunate as she. Nevertheless the old scar suddenly throbbed again, so that Joan remembered there had once been a wound; and she knew that she had no gratitude for the girl to whom, indirectly, she owed her rise in the world.

Joan was usually generous to women, even when she had no cause to love them, for, with all her faults, there was nothing of the "cat" in her nature; yet, to her surprise, she felt that she would like to hurt this girl in some way. "What a brute I must be!" she said to herself. "I didn't know I was so bad. Really I mustn't let this sort of thing grow on me, otherwise I shall degenerate from a highwayman (rather a gallant one, I think) into a cad, and I should lose interest in foraging for myself if I were a cad."

As she thought this, the girl and her companion were joined by a man. Joan glanced, then gazed, and decided that he was the most interesting man to look at whom she had ever seen in her life. Not that he was the handsomest, as mere beauty of feature goes, but he was of exactly the type which Joan and most women admire at heart above all others.

One did not need to be told, to know that he was a soldier. As he stood talking to his friends, with his hat off, and the sun chiselling the ripples of his close-cropped hair in bronze, his head towered above those of the other men who came and went. His face was bronze, too, of a lighter shade, blending into ivory half way up the forehead, and his features were strong and clear-cut as a bronze man's should always be. He wore no moustache or beard, and his mouth and chin were self-reliant, firm, and generous, but Joan liked his eyes best of all. As she passed slowly, they met hers for a second, and their clear depths were brown and bright as a Devonshire brook when the noonday sun shines into it.