Why couldn't she grow up all of a sudden and do as she liked? But then grown-up people, whom she always regarded as entirely at liberty, did not seem to be able to do as they liked. Her mother had said, "No, thank you," to a cosy house, just as she was taught to say, "No, thank you," to old gentlemen who offered her pennies to turn somersaults over railings—surely a harmless way of getting money. But her mother had not wanted to say "No, thank you." That Jenny recognized as a fact, although, if she had been asked why, she would have had nothing approaching a reason.
"I will do as I like," Jenny vowed to herself. "I will, I will. I won't be told." Here she bit the sheet in rage at her powerlessness. Desire for action was stirring strongly in her now. "Why can't I grow up all at once? Why must I be a little girl? Why can't I be like a kitten?" Kittens had become cats within Jenny's experience.
"I will be disobedient. I will be disobedient. I won't be stopped." Suddenly a curious sensation seized her of not being there at all. She bit the bedclothes again. Then she sat up in bed and looked at her petticoats hanging over the chair. She was there, after all, and she fell asleep with wilful ambitions dancing lightly through the gay simplicities of her child's brain, and, as she lay there with tightly closed, determined lips, her mother with shaded candle looked down at her and wondered whether, after all, she and Jenny would not have been better off under the rich-voiced, cigar-haunted protection of Mr. Timpany.
And then Mrs. Raeburn went to bed and fell asleep to the snoring of Charlie, just as truly unsatisfied as most of the women in this world.
Only Charlie was all right. He had spent a royal evening in bragging to a circle of pipe-armed friends of his firmness and virility at a moment of conjugal stress.
And outside the cold January stars were reflected in the puddles of Hagworth Street.
Chapter VI: Shepherd's Calendar
IT was unlikely that Jenny's dancing could always be kept a secret. The day came at last when her mother, in passing the playground of the school, looked over the railings and saw her daughter's legs above a semicircle of applauding children. Mrs. Raeburn was more than shocked: she was profoundly alarmed. The visit of the aunts rose up before her like a ghost from the heart of forgotten years. They had faded into a gradual and secure insignificance, only momentarily displaced by the death of Aunt Fanny. But the other two lived on in Carminia House like skeletons of an outraged morality.
Something must be done about this dancing craze. Something must be done to check the first signs of a prophecy fulfilled. She thought of Barnsbury; but Mrs. Purkiss had now two pasty-faced boys of her own, and was no longer willing to act as deputy-mother to the children of her sister. Something must certainly be done about Jenny's wilfulness.
"How dare you go making such an exhibition of yourself?" she demanded, when Jenny came home. "How dare you, you naughty girl?"