Daphne had come to say good-bye to Mrs. Foster.
This lady lived in a kind of model cottage in a garden in Ham Common. It was not at all like the ideal, 'quaint' model cottages that one sees advertised by well-known firms of furnishers, though it might have been. Mrs. Foster was rebellious to Waring, and sincerely disliked anything modern.
The little drawing-room, and indeed every other room in the house, was principally furnished by photographs and groups of her son Cyril—Cyril as a very plain boy, in a skirt, with hardly any eyes or hair, and a pout; Cyril as a 'perfect pet' of a sailor, at six. Then Cyril in cricketing groups (how he stood out against the other ordinary boys!)—in Etons (looking neat and supercilious), and then in his uniform, in which he looked simply lovely.
Daphne had an intense and growing desire to please his mother. In fact, curiously, she was more anxious to gain her approbation than that of Cyril himself. To this end she usually remade her hats, when possible, in the train on her way to Ham Common, and her pocket when she arrived there was usually filled with artificial flowers, feathers, or other ornaments that she had taken off her hat, so as to look simple. Also she turned it down all the way round to make it look as if it were merely a protection from the sun—not a hat.
To-day she wore a pink-spotted muslin dress and a straw hat, with pink ribbon. She certainly looked extremely pretty, and not at all what she had such a dread of before Mrs. Foster, smart. Mrs. Foster had a horror of smartness in the jeune fille.
Daphne delighted her. She was a very sentimental woman, with a strong theoretical bias for the practical. She was by way of teaching Daphne housekeeping and how to manage on a small income (of which art she knew very little herself, but was supposed to know a great deal because she wore a kind of cap). She had a pretty, delicate, kind face, and was wearing large wash-leather gloves, in case she should wish to do a little gardening later on.
Daphne had still much of the child in her, and there was nothing she enjoyed quite so much as gardening with Mrs. Foster, and occasionally stopping to eat a gingerbread-nut, and hear something about Cyril and the brilliant remarks he had made as a child.
Mrs. Foster had a chiffonnier of a kind Daphne had never seen before, which fascinated her because such queer delightful things came out of it in the middle of the morning—slices of seed cake, apples, and the gingerbread-nuts. There were pink shavings in the fireplace, and wherever there was not a photograph of Cyril there was one of the Prince Imperial. Evidently he had been the passion of Mrs. Foster's earlier life. She loved to tell the story of how she had seen him at Chislehurst, and how she thought he had looked at her.
There were other nice things in the cottage: there were two rather large vases of pink china on which were reproduced photographs of Cyril's great-uncle and great-aunt—one in whiskers, the other in parted but raised hair with an Alexandra curl on the left shoulder. In these vases folded slips of paper called spills were kept. A modern note was struck by the presence of a baby Grand—a jolly, clumsy, disproportioned youthful piano, rather like a colt, on which Daphne played Chopin to Mrs. Foster, and sometimes The Chocolate Soldier to Cyril; and Mrs. Foster, at twilight, sometimes played and even sang, "I cannot sing the old songs, they are too dear to me," which her mother used to sing, or, coming a little nearer to the present, "Ask nothing more, nothing more, all I can give thee, I give," a passionate song of the early eighties.
No one, except Daphne, ever did ask any more.