“Oh, ta gueule! I’m not going to be a boy any longer.”
CHAPTER III
WHILE her hair was growing long again Sylvia developed a taste for reading. She had nothing else to do, for it was not to be supposed that with her head cropped close she could show herself to the world in petticoats. Her refusal any longer to wear male attire gave Monkley and her father an excuse to make one of their hurried moves from Kennington Park Road, where by this time they owed enough money to justify the trouble of evading payment. Henry had for some time expressed a desire to be more central; and a partially furnished top floor was found in Fitzroy Street, or, as the landlord preferred to call it, a self-contained and well-appointed flat. The top floor had certainly been separated from the rest of the house by a wooden partition and a door of its own, which possibly justified the first half of the description, but the good appointments were limited to a bath that looked like an old palette, and a geyser that was not always safe according to Mrs. Bullwinkle, a decrepit charwoman, left behind by the last tenants, together with some under-linen and two jars containing a morbid growth that may formerly have been pickles.
“How d’ye mean, not safe?” Henry asked. “Is it liable to blow up?”
“It went off with a big bang last April and hasn’t been lit since,” the charwoman said. “But perhaps it ’ll be all right now. The worst of it is I never can remember which tap you put the match to.”
“You leave it alone, old lady,” Henry advised. “Nobody’s likely to do much bathing in here; from what I can see of it that bath gives more than it gets. What did the last people use it for—growing watercress or keeping chickens?”
“It was a very nice bath once,” the charwoman said.
“Do you mean to say you’ve ever tried it? Go on! You’re mixing it up with the font in which you were baptized. There’s never been any water in this bath since the flood.”
Nevertheless, however inadequately appointed, the new abode had one great advantage over any other they had known, which was a large raftered garret with windows at either end that ran the whole depth of the house. The windows at the back opened on a limitless expanse of roofs and chimneys, those in front looked across to a dancing-academy on the top floor but one of the house opposite, a view that gave perpetual pleasure to Sylvia during the long period of her seclusion.
Now that Sylvia had become herself again, her father and Monkley insisted upon her doing the housework, which, as Henry reminded her, she was perfectly able to do on account of the excellent training she had received in that respect from her mother. Sylvia perceived the logic of this and made no attempt to contest it; though she stipulated that Mrs. Bullwinkle should not be considered to be helping her.