Love in a Muddle

by Christine Jope-Slade

I would so like to be angry with someone for being plain, but I did it absolutely on my own, because mother is quite a beautiful person and father is frightfully aristocratic and romanish—they are both rather splendidly beaky, but mine is a pure and unadulterated snub.

I suppose I have a petty, shallow nature, but I pine to be romantic and wonderful like Grace Gilpin, and simply draw people to me; no one but deaf old ladies who think I look kind and good ever ask to be introduced to me; and only chivalrous men who think I look tired and anæmic and work for my living ever offer me seats in buses or tubes.

Grace Gilpin takes her surroundings and uses them as a background—she is always to the fore. I sink into the background and become part of them.

Yesterday we took out lunch on the links, caviare sandwiches and stuff, and Grace sat down by a flaming gorse-bush in a grey frock and a grey jersey. She just used that glorious bit of flame as an "effect." I sat on the other side, and they all nearly forgot me and went off without me.

"I didn't see you," Walter Markham said.

It's true; there are heaps of people in this life you don't see because of the more ornamental people.

I would have given almost anything to have been born showy, so that people would look at me. I want Cheneston to look at me as he, and other men, look at Grace, as if she were a splendid vision vouchsafed to them for five minutes.

I do love that man, and love isn't one bit what I thought it was. I always imagined it was a mixture of bubble and scorch, but it isn't—it's so sweet to love. I could be good! It makes me feel good right to my finger-nails, and full of that after-church-on-a-summer-Sunday evening-in-peace-time feeling; that's why I think that my love for the man isn't anything to be ashamed of or humiliated about. He doesn't love me, I know; but I have a conviction you can't grow unless you love, and I feel so much more use in the world since I've started growing.

Loving Cheneston has made life perfectly wonderful for me. He doesn't know it and he never will, but he's shown me all the dear beauty of the world—and it is beautiful.

Walter Markham is awfully nice to me; sometimes he leaves Grace Gilpin to Cheneston and walks with me, and he is teaching me tennis in the mornings before breakfast. He is much older than Cheneston, Grace, or I—he must be forty—and he is very rich.