Into the small hours she had crouched in her kimono on the edge of Leslie's camp bedstead in the light that came from the street lamp outside the window; and she had talked and talked and talked.
For by "not saying anything about it" she had never meant keeping her happiness from that close chum.
Miss Long, sincerely delighted, had listened and had nodded her wise black head from the pillow. She had thrown in the confidante's running comments of "There! What did Leslie tell you?... Oh, he would, of course.... Good.... Oh, my dear, how exactly like them all.... No, no; I didn't mean that. (Of course there's nobody like him); I meant 'Fancy!' ... Yes and then what did Paul say, Virginia?" At last repetitions had cropped up again and again into the softly chattered recital, with all its girlish italics of: "Oh, but you don't know what he's like; oh, Leslie, no, you can't imagine!"—At last Leslie had sighed, a trifle enviously. And little Gwenna, pattering to the head of the bed, had put her cheek to the other girl's and had whispered earnestly: "Oh, Leslie, if I only could, d'you know what I'd do? I'd arrange so that he had a twin-brother exactly like him, to fall in love with you!"
"Taffy! you are too ... sweet," the elder girl had whispered back in a stifled voice.
Gwenna never guessed how Leslie Long had had much ado not to giggle aloud over that idea. To think of her, Leslie, finding rapture with any one of the type of the Dampier boy....
A twin-brother of his? Another equally bread-and-buttery blonde infant—an infant-in-arms who was even "simpler" than Monty Scott? Oh, Ishtar!... For thus does one woman count as profoundest boredom what brings to her sister Ecstasy itself.
And now here was Gwenna, all in white, coming down to the Club's Sunday breakfast with her broad hat already on her head and her gloves and her vanity-bag in her hand.
At the head of the table sat the Vicar's widow with the gold curb brooch and the look of resigned disapproval. Over the table Miss Armitage and the other suffrage-workers were discussing the Cat-and-Mouse Act. Opposite to them one of the art-students, with her hair cut à la Trilby, was listening bewildered, ready to be convinced.... Not one of the usual things remained unsaid....
Presently Gwenna's neighbour and bête noire, Miss Armitage, was denouncing the few remaining members of her sex who still seemed to acquiesce in the Oriental attitude towards Woman; who still remained serfs or chattels or toys.
"However! Thy needn't think thy caount," declared the lecturer firmly, stretching without apology across her neighbour to get the salt. With some distaste Gwenna regarded her. She had spots on her face. "Pleasers of Men!" she pursued, with noble scorn. "The remnant of the Slyve-girl Type, now happily extinct——"