Love in a Muddle

by Christine Jope-Slade

The next day I started to hunt for work. I was paying forty shillings a week, and had only four pounds ten left of my money.

I found it at once. I took the money in a cinema booking-office. It was dull, and I got thirty shillings a week; I took it because it gave me the entire morning to hunt for more remunerative work.

I met with no adventures in my hutch. I was sworn at several times for giving the wrong change, and the gorgeous gentleman in Prussian blue and silver uniform, who waved the people to their seats inside, gave me a packet of butterscotch. But the more remunerative work did not present itself. I was untrained. I could not type or do shorthand, and I had no previous experience. The men who interviewed me were most civil, they suggested Clark's College or Pitman's. I was no good to them.

I had to change my boarding-house. I went to one near Kentish Town, it was very clean, and the landlady had been a professional cook. I boarded with the family, and a Polish Jewess also lived there, a skirt hand in a big West End tailor's. She used to press my skirts.

I wondered if anybody was advertising for me, or if there was any fussation going on. I did not think I was worth a whole detective for one minute. I did not attempt to hide. I had read somewhere that to live an ordinary life was the surest way to escape detection.

I wondered, as the months slipped by, if Cheneston had married Grace Gilpin.

I did not lose Cheneston. I could always step right back in memory into the days I had spent with him, days of infinite and dear delight.

I knew I loved Cheneston, that I wanted passionately to be his wife; that if he were to ask me to marry him I would marry him rapturously and thankfully, even though I knew he didn't care two straws about me and would need a photograph to remember the way I did my hair.

I believe the "if she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she be" sort of people are very, very jelly-fishy.

If you care for a man you care for him, and that's all there is to it; the fact that he cares for someone else or doesn't care for you doesn't alter your feelings, it only makes the pain and hurt of it an artistic success.