"It's like a fairy tale!" she murmured. "Think of picking them in December! Muvvie, if I could go and stay at the place where these flowers grow I should get well."
"I verily believe you would," said Mrs. Ramsay thoughtfully, as she fetched vases and began to place the drooping violets in warm water.
Mavis, at the time our story begins, was fifteen and a half, and exactly fourteen months older than Merle. It is necessary to state her age, because people always forgot it, and set her down as the younger of the two. Everybody, friends and strangers alike, gave precedence to Merle, the taller, stronger, more confident, and more dominating individuality. Mavis was an ethereal little person, who might be described as a spirit very lightly embodied in flesh. With Merle soul and body were balanced, with a bias towards the latter—on the whole she was of the earth, earthy. There was a sufficient likeness between the sisters to suggest that nature had reproduced an identical type in different mediums. She had painted the first delicately in water-colours, then had copied the same model more strongly in oils. Which picture you preferred was a matter of taste.
Fortunately there was a complete understanding between the girls. Their particular faults and virtues seemed to dovetail into one another without friction, and they were excellent chums, a useful factor at school, where Mavis often needed a defender, and Merle was constantly requiring the services of someone to help to pull her out of her numerous scrapes.
Dr. Ramsay lived at the north-country manufacturing town of Whinburn, a prosperous but bleak corner of the kingdom, where smoke had stunted the trees and soiled the herbage, where flowers were scarce and bloomed late, and winter stretched its icy fingers well into autumn and spring. The house, like most doctors' houses, was on the main high road, and part of the garden behind had been turned into a garage, so there was very little room for the bed of bulbs and the perennial border upon which Mavis concentrated most of her outdoor energies. She toiled hard to have a floral display in the summer months, but it was disheartening work, for the frost always killed her wallflowers, and only the hardiest of plants would consent to make a sulky struggle against the smoky atmosphere that seemed to blight the very heart of vegetation and turn the choicest bedding varieties into sickly specimens. Merle, less deeply wedded to nature, had long given up gardening as a bad job, and had handed over her patch of unkindly northern soil to her sister. She was more interested in the car: she liked to watch the chauffeur clean it, and the high-water mark of her bliss came on the days when, on a quiet road and with no policeman within sight, her father would allow her for a brief space to assume command of the driving-wheel.
"I'll be your chauffeur, Dad, when I'm old enough to leave school," she would assure him airily. "I do think you might get me a driving licence now! Too young? What nonsense! We've no need to tell the Government I'm only fourteen. I'd soon drive as well as Greenhalgh if you'd let me try. I'm not afraid of anything."
"I dare say not, but think of my feelings with a harum-scarum like you at the helm!" her father would reply. "You'd soon collide with a lorry, or land us in the ditch. I'll stick to Greenhalgh, thank you. He doesn't want to run at forty miles an hour."
"I'll take proper motoring lessons when I've left school," Merle would declare, "then I'll be ready to drive any car in the United Kingdom—that's to say, if I haven't made up my mind to be a lady detective."
Mavis, who was in bed when our story begins, weathered her December attack of bronchitis and came downstairs in time for Christmas Day, but with such white roses in her cheeks that her father looked at her anxiously, and called Mother into the consulting-room for a private confabulation, the result of which was a long private letter addressed Dr. Tremayne, Durracombe, Devonshire, which was posted without the girls' knowledge. Several other letters followed, and the brisk correspondence had just reached a satisfactory conclusion on a certain January day when Mavis, with a shawl round her shoulders, was peering out of the window at the flying snowflakes.
"Watching the feathers from Mother Carey's chickens, bairns?" said Mrs. Ramsay. "I'm afraid it's going to be a wild night. The wind's rising. I like the snow when it's newly fallen, but it gets dirty directly in Whinburn."