“Humph! You look older, my dear. You look more than nineteen and a half. You’re rather glad, though, aren’t you, to have finished with the last three months? You feel degraded, don’t you? What’s that you say? You don’t feel degraded any more by what you’ve done now than by what you did when you were married? You consider the net result of the last three months has simply been to prove what you’d suspected for a long time—the wrong you did yourself in marrying Philip Iredale? Wait a minute; don’t go so fast; there’s something wrong with your moral sense. You know perfectly well your contention is impossible; or do you accuse every woman who marries to have a position and a home of being a prostitute? Ah, but you didn’t marry Philip for either of those reasons, you say? Yes, you did—you married him to make something like Arbour End.”
Tears welled up in Sylvia’s eyes. She thought she had driven Arbour End from her mind forever.
“Come, come, we don’t want any tears. What are you crying for? You knew when you left Green Lanes that everything which had come into your life through Philip Iredale must be given up. You were rather proud of your ruthlessness. Don’t spoil it now. That’s right, no more tears. You’re feeling a bit abrutie, aren’t you? My advice to you is to obliterate the last three months from your imagination. I quite understand that you suffered a good deal, but novices must be prepared to suffer. In my opinion you can congratulate yourself on having come through so easily. Here you are, a jolly little cabetine with a complete contempt for men. You’re not yet twenty; you’re not likely to fall in love, for you must admit that after those three months the word sounds more than usually idiotic. From what I’ve seen of you I should say that for the future you’ll be very well able to look after yourself; you might even become a famous actress. Ah, that makes you smile, eh?”
Sylvia dabbed her face with the powder-puff and went down-stairs to dinner. Her two companions had not yet begun; for this was the first meal at which they would all sit down together, and an atmosphere of politeness hung over life at present. Lily Haden and Dorothy Lonsdale had joined the “Miss Elsie of Chelsea” company at the same time as Sylvia, and were making their first appearance on any stage, having known each other in the dullness of West Kensington. For a fortnight they had clung together, but, having been given an address for rooms in Birmingham that required a third person’s contribution, they had invited Sylvia to join them. Lily was a tall, slim girl with very fair, golden hair, who had an air of romantic mystery that was due to indolence of mind and body. Dorothy also was fair, with a mass of light-brown hair, a perfect complexion, profile, and figure, and, what finally gave her a really distinguished beauty in such a setting, brown eyes instead of blue. Lily’s languorous grace of manner and body was so remarkable that in a room it was difficult to choose between her and Dorothy, but behind the footlights there was no comparison; there Dorothy had everybody’s glances, and Lily’s less definite features went for nothing.
Each girl was prompt to take Sylvia into her confidence about the other. Thus from Lily she learned that Dorothy’s real name was Norah Caffyn; that she was the eldest of a very large family; that Lily had known her at school; that she had been engaged to a journalist who was disapproved of by her family; that she had offered to break with Wilfred Curlew, if she were allowed to go on the stage; and that she had taken the name of Lonsdale from the road where she lived, and Dorothy from the sister next to her.
“I suppose in the same way as she used to take her dolls?” Sylvia suggested.
Lily looked embarrassed. She was evidently not sure whether a joke was intended, and when Sylvia encouraged her to suppose it was, she laughed a little timidly, being rather doubtful if it were not a pun.
“Her sister was awfully annoyed about it, because she hasn’t got a second name. She’s the only one in the family who hasn’t.”
Lily also told Sylvia something about herself, how her mother had lately died and how she could not get on with her sister, who had married an actor and was called Doris. Her mother had been a reciter, and there had always been lots of theatrical people at their house, so it had been easy for her to get an introduction to Mr. Walter Keal, who had the touring rights of all John Richards’s great Vanity Theater productions.
From Dorothy Sylvia learned that she had known Lily at school, but not for long, as Mrs. Haden never paid her daughters’ fees; that Mr. Haden had always been supposed to live in Burmah, but that people who knew Mrs. Haden declared he had never existed; and finally that Lily had been “awfully nice” to herself and helped her to get an introduction to Mr. Walter Keal.