"I was there," vowed Jenny. "Madame can't have noticed me."
So Mrs. Raeburn wrote and explained the mistake, and Jenny managed with great anxiety to obtain possession of the letter, ostensibly in order to post it, but really in order to tear it to a hundred pieces round the corner.
She was naturally a truthful child, but the long restraint of childhood had to be mitigated somehow, and lying to those in authority was no sacrifice of her egotism, the basis of all essential truthfulness. With her contemporaries she was always proudly, indeed painfully, frank.
This waiting to grow up was unendurable. Everybody else was emancipated except herself. Ruby went away to be married—a source of much speculation to Jenny, who could not understand anybody desiring to live in a state of such corporeal intimacy with Ruby.
"I'm positive he don't know she snores," said Jenny to her mother.
"Well, what's it got to do with you?"
What, indeed, had anything to do with her? It was shocking how utterly unimportant she was to Hagworth Street.
Edie had gone away to learn dressmaking, and Alfie had vanished into some Midland town to learn something else, and occupying his room there was another lodger whom she liked. Then one day he came into the kitchen in a queer brown suit and said he was "off to the Front."
"Gone for a soldier?" said her father, when he heard of it. "Good Lord! some people don't know when they're well off, and that's a fact."
There was nobody to inflame Jenny with the burning splendors of patriotism. It became merely a matter of clothes, like everything else. She gathered it was the correct thing to wear khaki ties, sometimes with scarlet for the soldiers or blue for the sailors. It was also not outrageous to wear a Union Jack waistcoat. But any conception of a small nation fighting inch by inch for their sun-parched country, of a great nation sacrificing even its sense of humor to consolidate an empire and avenge a disgrace, was entirely outside her imaginative experience.