“Then, darling, a lot of you are silly.”
“Oh, I shall be glad when next week I go to the Fergussons. It is dull.”
Look, there she is. She’s sixteen. She’s beautiful. She’s pretty as a picture, and she knows she is. She’s grown out of the rather early fullness of figure that had been hers. She’s slim and tall and straight and supple and slender as a willow wand. If she had her hair up and her skirts lengthened (skirts then were only starting on their diminution to the knees), she’d pass for twenty anywhere, and a twenty singularly attractive, curiously self-possessed, strikingly suggestive in her pale and beautiful countenance, and in an alternating sleepiness and glinting in her eyes; strikingly suggestive of, well, strikingly suggestive according to the predilictions and the principles of the beholder.
This was in 1917. She was beginning rather to hate school now. She wanted to be out and doing some war work of some kind. Oh, those sickening scarves and things they were eternally knitting, that wasn’t war work. It was fun at first. They were fed to death with doing them now. She didn’t much want to go into a hospital or into any of these women’s corps. They were a jolly sight too cooped up in those things from what she’d heard. She wanted to go into one of the Government offices and do clerical work. Several of the school Old Girls who had been there with her were doing that and it was the most ripping rag. Of course you had to work, and of course it was jolly good patriotic work, but you had a topping time in many ways. That was what she wanted to do. Oh, mother, do let her chuck school now and get to it! Not till she was seventeen? Well, it was sickening. Well, it was only another term, thank goodness.
It was in the holidays—in her brief days at home of the holidays—in which these wishes were expressed, that Rosalie found Doda was corresponding with officers at the front.
Doda was appallingly untidy in her habits. She was out one evening to a party—she managed to get a considerable number of parties into her dull days at home. Rosalie, come in from Field’s, peeped into her bedroom to find her. She had not known that Doda was going out. The bedroom cried aloud that Doda had gone out. Drawers were open and articles of dress hanging out of them. One drawer, no doubt stubborn in its yieldings, was bodily out in the middle of the room. Clothes were on the floor. Clothes strewed the bed. Powder was all over the mirror. It was as if a whirlwind had passed through the room.
“Powder!” murmured Rosalie.
The state of the room dismayed her. The intense orderliness of her own character forbade her ringing for a maid. She simply could not look at untidiness like that without tidying it. She started to tidy. Doda’s box was open. Its contents looked as if a dog had burrowed in it, throwing up the things as he worked down. If anything was to go in, everything must first come out. Rosalie lifted out an initial clearance.
There lay scattered beneath it quite half a dozen photographs of officers in khaki.
There were all inscribed. “To the school kid.” “Wishing you were here.” “With kisses.” “Till we meet.” And with slangy nicknames of the writers. There lay with them a number of letters, all in their envelopes. There lay also a sheet of paper covered in Doda’s bold handwriting. It began “Wonderful Old Thing.”