"I will hold your hat, since it is for me that you take him off," said the girl whom they called Baker.
Her real name was Becker; Ottilie Becker. She worked at the German correspondence of that London office where the other two girls, Gwenna Williams and Mabel Butcher, were typists. It was one of the many small jokes of the place to allude to themselves as the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick-maker.
All three were excellent friends....
The other two scarcely realised that Gwenna, the Celt, was different from themselves; more absent-minded, yet more alive. A passer-by might have summed her up as "a pretty, commonplace little thing;" a girl like millions of others. But under the ready-made muslin blouse of that season's style there was ripening, all unsuspected, the dormant bud of Passion. This is no flower of the commonplace. And her eyes were full of dreams, innocent dreams. Some of them had come true already. For hadn't she broken away from home to follow them? Hadn't she left the valley where nothing ever went on except the eternal Welsh rain that blurred the skylines of the mountains opposite, and that drooped in curtains of silver-grey gauze over the slate roofs of the quarry-village, set in that brook-threaded wedge between wooded hillsides? Hadn't she escaped from that cage of a chapel house sitting-room with its kitchen-range and its many bookshelves and its steel print of John Bunyan and its maddening old grandfather-clock that always said half-pastt two and its everlasting smell of singeing hearthrug, and never a window open? Yes! she'd given her uncle-guardian no peace until he'd washed his hands over Gwenna's coming up to London. So here she was in London now, making fresh discoveries every day, and enjoying that mixture of drudgery and frivolling that makes up the life of the London bachelor-girl. She was still "fancy-free," as people say of a girl who loves and lives in fancies, and she was still at the age for bosom-friendships. One sincerely adored girl-chum had her confidence. This was a young woman at the Residential Club, where Gwenna lived; not one of these from the office.
But the office trio could take an occasional Saturday jaunt together as enjoyingly as if they never met during the week.
"Postcards, picture postcards!" chanted a shrill treble voice above the buzz of the talking, waiting crowds.
Before the seats a small boy passed with a tray of photographs. These showed views of the hangars and of the ground; portraits of the aviators.
"Postcards!" He paused before that cluster of blue and white and pink frocks. "Any picture postcards?"
"Yes! Wait a minute. Let's choose some," said Miss Butcher. And three heads bent together over the display of glazed cards. "Tell you what, Baker; we'll send one off to your soldier-brother in Germany. Shall we? All sign it, like we did that one to your mother, from the Zoo."