Valérie smiled.
The other new friend was Winnie Ambrose—raspberries and cream and flaxen hair and dimpled chin and upper lip curling and a snub nose. She was one of those girls who never suggest the presence of stays, who always wear white blouses of crêpe de chine, cut low round a plump neck. They have bangles strung on their arms, and each one possesses a locket containing the inadequate portrait of an inadequate young man. But Winnie was very nice, always ready for a joke.
The train swept them on northwards. Once, as it slowed to make a sharp curve, Jenny looked out of the window and saw the great express, like a line of dominoes with its black and white carriages. There was not much to look at, however, as they cleft the gray December airs, as they roared through echoing stations into tunnels and out again into the dreary light. They ate lunch, and Jenny drank Bass out of a bottle and spluttered and made queer faces and wrinkled up her gay, deep eyes in laughter unquenchable. They swept on through Lancashire with its chimneys and furnaces and barren heaps of refuse. They swung clear of these huddled populations and, through the gathering twilight, cut a way across the rolling dales of Cumberland. Jenny thought what horrible places they were, these sweeping moorland wastes with gray cottages no bigger than sheep, with switchback stone walls whence the crows flew as the train surged by. She was glad to be in the powdered, scented, untidy compartment in warmth and light. The child grew tired and, leaning her head on Valérie's breast, went to sleep; she was drowsily glad when Valérie kissed her, murmuring in a whisper melodious as the splash of the Saône against the warm piers of her native Lyons:
"Comme elle est gentille, la gosse."
Pillowed thus, Jenny spent the last hours of the journey with the dark crossing of the border, waking in the raw station air, waking to bundles being pulled down and papers gathered together and porters peering in through the door. Madame Aldavini said before she left them:
"To-morrow, girls, eleven o'clock at the theater."
And all the girls said, "Yes, Madame," and packed themselves into a cab with velvet cushions of faded peacock-blue and a smell of damp straps. There they sat with bundles heaped on their knees, and were jolted through the cold Glasgow streets. It was Saturday night, and all the curbstones were occupied by rocking drunkards, except in one wide street very golden and beautiful, from which they turned off to climb laboriously up the cobbles of a steep hill and pull up at last before a tall house in a tall, dark, quiet road.
They walked up the stairs and rang the bell. The big door swung open, to Jenny's great surprise, apparently without human agency. They stood in the well of a great winding stone staircase, while a husky voice called from somewhere high above them to come up.
They had a large sitting-room, too full of hangings and overburdened with photographs of rigid groups; but the fire was blazing up the chimney and the lamp was throwing a warm and comfortable halo on the ceiling. Jenny peeped out of the window and could see the black roofs of Glasgow in the starlight. They had tea when they arrived, with porridge, which Jenny disliked extremely, and oatcakes which made her cough; and after tea they unpacked. It was settled that Jenny should sleep with Valérie. The bedroom was cosy with slanting bits of ceiling flung anywhere, like a box of toy bricks put carelessly away. The bed, to Jenny's enormous diversion, was buried in a deep alcove.
"Whoever heard?" she asked.