She turned her back and went upstairs, conscious that her withdrawal lacked dignity. She hated her brother-in-law with the simple, undisciplined intensity that characterised all her emotions.
Her not very long life had, indeed, run altogether upon emotional lines. Her earliest remembrance was of her widowed mother crying piteously because they were being “sold up,” and she had insisted upon attending the sale, only to break down ignominiously. The six-year-old Rose had roared sympathetically, and Uncle Alfred Smith, very angry, had taken them both away.
They had lived with him in London after that, and Rose’s mother had helped in the business, and Rose had gone to school, enjoying violent and ephemeral friendships with other girls, giggling and idling and whispering just as they did, and working by fits and starts when Uncle Alfred wrote her a severe letter or her mother came to see her. The keenest happiness she knew—and it was so intense as to be almost pain—was connected with those occasional visits, when her mother’s big, blowsy person, always dressed in some vivid colour with a fluttering accompaniment of scarf-ends, veil, ribbons, and feathers, would be inducted into the dingy school-parlour to which Rose would rush—hurling herself rapturously against that substantial form, in a mutually enthusiastic exchange of hugs and kisses.
“Shall I take you out, lovey?”
“Oh, do, Mother.”
They had gone out together, very often hand-in-hand, even after Rose was quite a big girl, and looked into the drapers’ shop windows, for which both had exactly the same passion, and planned all the fine things that they would buy when Rose was grown up and married to a millionaire.
“Only mind, you’ll have to love him, ducky. He must be awfully rich, but you must be awfully in love with him, too, or you won’t get any of the best out of life.”
“All right. I’d like to be in love with him, too.”
The afternoon generally finished with tea in a tea-shop.
“Eat up all the cakes you want, my precious. I expect you get enough bread-and-scrape at that school of yours. Can’t you manage another? That little pink one isn’t very large.”