The bogey “out of work” haunted me down into the Tube lift, along the Embankment, all the way back up our grey Battersea street, with the red-faced pavement-artist who always touches his cap to me, smiles and points to his lurid chalk-drawing of a wreck with the legend: “Like the Artist—On the Rocks!”
“I’m on the rocks myself, Blossom. This is probably the last penny I shall be able to give you!” I told him, with a desperate little laugh.
Then I turned in at the entrance to Marconi Mansions, and climbed up our stone stairs to the cheap but cosy little top-flat which has for six months meant “Home” to us two bachelor girls.
How long should I be able to afford to share it?
CHAPTER III
THINKING IT OVER——
I always expect to be in long before Cicely Harradine, the girl who shares the place with me. We first made friends in a ten-shillings-a-week bedroom at the Twentieth Century Club, when she was left much as I was, a waif without any friends that counted, and with just a tiny lump of capital. This she used up in paying her fees at the Slade School of Art, where she’d gone, in her innocence, with a view to taking up fashion-drawing. They all used to say at home that she’d “a gift” for sketching, and she’d heard—we’ve all heard!—that there are fortunes to be made out of fashion-plates. Only she hadn’t realized that for a girl of her sort, lovely and good-hearted and “gormless,” there’s only one way of getting a fortune; namely, by marrying it. And how can you marry, as she often says plaintively, if you never even see any “possible” men? All the people she seems to see nowadays—besides Slade students—are the gorgeous Jewesses who deal at the “studio” where Cicely’s one real “gift” (that of a tall, willowy figure) is now turned to advantage by showing off the evening-frocks and opera-wraps of Madame Chérisette, in Bond Street, in the show-rooms she can seldom leave until well after seven o’clock.
So to-day I was astonished to find the second-hand, cretonne-covered couch in our sitting-room already occupied by what looked like a bundle of rugs, dishevelled red curls, and arnica bandages, whence proceeded the sound of dismal sobs.
“Cicely!” I cried, alarmed. “You back already? Why, what’s happened?”