“We have been betrayed,” Sylvia assured Willie. “Do not forget to avenge my capture.”
Willie vowed he would let nothing interfere with his vengeance, not even if the traitor turned out to be his own brother Ernie.
Sylvia asked if he would kill him, and reminded Willie that it was a serious thing to betray a secret society when that society was doing something more than dressing up. Willie doubted if it would be possible to kill the culprit, but swore that he should prefer death to what should happen to him.
Sylvia was so much gratified by Willie’s severity that she led him into a corner, where, having exacted his silence with the most solemn oaths, she betrayed herself and the secret of her sex; then they embraced. When they parted forever next day, Sylvia felt that she had left behind her in Willie’s heart a romantic memory that would never fade.
Mrs. Meares, who kept the house in Lillie Road, was an Irishwoman whose husband had grown tired of her gentility and left her. She did not herself sum up her past so tersely as this, but Sylvia was sure that Mr. Meares had left her because he could no longer endure the stories about her royal descent. Perhaps he might have been able to endure his wife’s royal descent, because, after all, he had married into the family and might have extracted some pride out of that fact; but all her friends apparently came from kings and queens, too. Ireland, if Mrs. Meares was to be believed, consisted of one large poverty-stricken royal family, which must have cheapened the alliance for Mr. Meares. It was lucky that he was still alive, for otherwise Sylvia was sure that her father would have married their new landlady, such admiration did he always express for the manner in which she struggled against misfortune without losing her dignity. This, from what Sylvia could see, consisted of wearing silk skirts that trailed in the dust of her ill-kept house and of her fanning herself in an arm-chair however cold the weather. The only thing that stirred her to action was the necessity of averting an ill-omen. Thus, she would turn back on a flight of stairs rather than pass anybody descending; although ordinarily when she went up-stairs she used to sigh and hold her heart at every step. Sylvia remembered her mother’s scrupulous care of her house, even in the poorest days; she could not help contrasting her dignity with this Irish dignity that was content to see indefinite fried eggs on her table, cockroaches in the bedrooms, and her own placket always agape. Mrs. Meares used to say that she would never let any of her rooms to ladies, because ladies always fussed.
“Gentlemen are so much more considerate,” said Mrs. Meares.
Their willingness to be imposed upon made Sylvia contemptuous of the sex she had adopted, and she tried to spur her father to protest when his bed was still unmade at four o’clock in the afternoon.
“Why don’t you make it?” he suggested. “I don’t like to worry poor Mrs. Meares.”
Sylvia, however contemptuous of manhood, had no intention of relinquishing its privileges; she firmly declined to have anything to do with the making of beds.
The breakfast-room was placed below the level of the street. Here, in an atmosphere of cat-haunted upholstery and broken springs, of overcooked vegetables and dingy fires, yet withal of a kind of frowsy comfort, Sylvia sometimes met the other lodgers. One of them was Baron von Statten, a queer German, whom Sylvia could not make out at all, for he spoke English as if he had been taught by a maid-of-all-work with a bad cold, powdered his pink face, and wore three rings, yet was so poor that sometimes he stayed in bed for a week at a stretch, pending negotiations with his laundress. The last piece of information Sylvia obtained from Clara, the servant, who professed a great contempt for the baron. Mrs. Meares, on the other hand, derived much pride from his position in her house, which she pointed out was really that of an honored guest, since he owed now nearly seven weeks’ rent; she never failed to refer to him by his title with warm affection. Another lodger was a Welsh pianist called Morgan, who played the piano all day long and billiards for as much of the night as he could. He was a bad-tempered young man with long black hair and a great antipathy to the baron, whom he was always trying to insult; indeed, once at breakfast he actually poured a cup of coffee over him.