Your lover,
Maurice.
Jenny was lying in bed when she received this letter. The unfamiliar stamp and crackling paper suited somehow the bedroom at Stacpole Terrace to which she was not yet accustomed. Such a letter containing such a request would have seemed very much out of place in the little room she shared at home with May. But here, so dismal was the prospect of life, she felt inclined to abandon everything and join her lover.
The Dales were a slovenly family. Mr. Dale himself was a nebulous creature whom rumor had endowed with a pension. It never specified for what services nor even stated the amount in plain figures; and a more widely extended belief that the household was maintained by the Orient management through Winnie and Irene Dale's dancing, supplanted the more dignified tradition. Mr. Dale was generally comatose on a flock-exuding chair-bed in what was known as "dad's room." There in the dust, surrounded by a fortification of dented hatboxes, he perused old Sunday newspapers whose mildewed leaves were destroyed biennially like Canterbury Bells. Mrs. Dale was a beady-eyed, round woman with a passion for bonnets, capes, soliloquies and gin. Her appearance and her manners were equally unpleasant. She possessed a batch of grievances of which the one most often aired was her missing of the Clacton Belle one Sunday morning four years ago. Jenny disliked her more completely than anybody in the world, regarding her merely as something too large and too approximately human to extirpate. Winnie Dale, the smoothed-out replica of her mother, was equally obnoxious. She had long lost all the comeliness which still distinguished Irene, and possessed an irritating habit of apostrophizing her affection for a fishmonger—some prosperous libertine who occasionally cast an eye, glazed like one of his own cods, at Jenny herself. Ethel, the third sister, was still in short frocks because her intelligence had not kept pace with her age.
"The poor little thing talks like a child," Mrs. Dale would explain. "So I dresses her like a child. It's less noticeable."
"Which is silly," Jenny used to comment. "Because she's as tall as a house and everybody turns round to look after her."
Jenny would scarcely have tolerated this family for a week, if she had been brought at all closely or frequently in contact with them; but so much of the day was spent with Maurice and all the evening at the theater that Stacpole Terrace implied little beyond breakfast in bed and bed itself. Sometimes, indeed, when she went home to tea at Hagworth Street and saw the brightness of the glass and shimmer of clean crockery, she was on the verge of sinking her pride in a practical reconciliation. Nine weeks passed, however, making it more difficult every day to admit herself in the wrong; although, during the absence of Maurice, it became a great temptation. Therefore, when this letter arrived from Spain, inviting her to widen the breach with her family, she was half inclined to play with the idea of absolute severance. Flight, swift and sudden, appealed to her until the difficulty of making arrangements began to obscure other considerations. The thought of packing, of catching trains and steamers, of not knowing exactly what frocks to buy, oppressed her; then a fear took hold of her fancy lest, something happening to Maurice, she might find herself alone in a foreign city; and at the end of it all there was her childhood in a vista of time, her childhood with the presence of her mother brooding over it, her mother dearly loved whatever old-fashioned notions she preserved of obedience and strictness of behavior. It would be mean to outrage, as she knew she would, her mother's pride, and to hand her over to the criticisms of a mob of relatives. It would be mean to desert May, who even now might be crying on a solitary pillow. But when she went downstairs dressed and saw the Dale family in morning deshabille, uncorseted, flabby and heavy-eyed, crouching over the parlor fire, and when she thought of Maurice and the empty studio, Jenny's resolution was shaken and she was inclined to renounce every duty, face every difficulty and leave her world behind.
"You do look a sulky thing," said Irene. "Coming to sit round the fire?"
"No, thanks," said Jenny. "I haven't got the time."
"Your young chap's away, isn't he?" asked Winnie.
"What's it got to do with you where he is?"