“Yes, he seems a nice, sardonic fellow,” her mother remarked grimly, as they entered their house. “Why did you begin by saying we were engaged to-night? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
Dolly smiled. “Oh, I made that up, because I thought you were too prompt in accepting. He’ll want us all the more if we are stand-offish. Men are like that.”
Mrs. Darling sniffed. She was a lazy, plump, and rather languid little woman; and sometimes she grew impatient at her daughter’s ingenious method of dealing with these sorts of situations. She herself had grown more direct in her Yea and Nay: perhaps at the age of forty-five she was a little tired of dissimulation. The world had treated her scurvily; and, having a settled grievance, she was inclined now to take whatever pleasant things were to be had for the asking, without any subtle manœuvering for position.
Her husband had left her when Dolly was five years old, and, so far as she knew, he was now dead. For several years she had bravely maintained herself in a tiny Kensington flat by writing social and theatrical articles for pretentious papers. She had been a purveyor of gossip, a tattle-monger, a dealer in bibble-babble; and she had carried on her trade with an increasing inclination to yawn over it, and a growing consciousness of her daughter’s contempt, until the editors who had supported her became aware that her heart was not in her work, and five years ago gave her her congé.
Then, with a temporary display of energy, she had followed Dolly’s cultured advice, and had established a little business off Sloane Square, which she called “The Purple Shop.” Here she sold purple cushions and lamp-shades, poppy-heads dipped in purple paint, poetry-books in purple covers, sketches by Bakst in purple frames, lengths of purple damask, and so forth. But purple went out of fashion, and her once very considerable profits sank to the vanishing point. She introduced other colours, and softer shades of mauve and lilac. She sold a doll which had mauve hair and naughty black eyes; she took in a stock of bottled new potatoes tinged with a harmless purple liquid, and presented them to the jaded world of fashion as Pommes de terre pourpres de Tyr; she even sold brilliant bath-robes for bored bachelors, with coloured soap to match.
A financial crash followed, and, after a few months spent in dodging her creditors, she heard of this little cottage at Eversfield, and fled to it with her daughter, leaving no address. She was in receipt of a small annual allowance from the estate of a deceased brother, and this she supplemented by writing the monthly fashion article in one of the journals devoted to the world, the flesh and the devil. She wrote under the nom-de-plume of “Countess X”; and her material was obtained by a monthly visit to London and a tour of the leading modistes.
For eighteen months now she had lain low in this nook of the Midlands where Time stood still, and gradually she had ceased to dread the visit of the postman, and had begun to take a languid interest in the cottage. The colour purple no longer set her fat knees knocking together, and lately she had been able even to look up some of her old friends in London and to greet them with the sad, brave smile of a wronged woman.
To Dolly, however, the enforced seclusion had been a sore trial, and there were times when her pretty eyes were red with weeping. She had been utterly bored by the purposeless existence she was called upon to lead; but now the arrival of the new Squire at the manor, which had hardly seen its previous owner during the last year of his life, had aroused her from her sorrows and had set her heart in a flutter. She liked his strange, swarthy face and his moody eyes, and thought he looked artistic and even intellectual; and she liked his obvious embarrassment at the deference paid to him in this little kingdom which he had inherited.
She spent the afternoon, therefore, in a condition of pleasurable excitement, stitching at the dress she was going to wear and making certain alterations to the shape of the neck.
While she plied her needle, Mrs. Darling sat at the low window overlooking the orchard, and scribbled her monthly article upon a writing-pad resting on her knee. “Here is a charming little conceit I chanced upon in Bond Street t’other day,” she wrote. “It is really a tub-time frock; but its success in the drawing-room is likely to be immediate. Organdy ruchings of moonlight blue, and a soupçon of jet cabochons on the corsage. It is named ‘Hopes in turmoil.’” And again, “I noticed, too, a crisp little trotteur frock, with a nipped-in waist-line hesitating behind a moyenage girdle of beige velours delaine. They have called it ‘Cupid’s Teeth.’ Oh, very snappy, I assure you, my dears!”