“It’ll match my hair, then,” had been the substance of Mrs. Smith’s reply to her daughter’s criticism, given with a certain grim humour. “However that girl in the hair-dresser’s could have recommended it the way she did, beats me. To hear her, you’d have thought there wasn’t a thing to touch it in heaven or earth. Not a dye, she said, but just a tonic to brighten the colour and clean the scalp. And look at me!”
The effect achieved by the tonic had indeed been remarkable.
“Don’t you ever have a thing to do with hair-dyes, dearie. You’ve got lovely hair, just exactly the colour mine was before I started monkeying with it.”
But Rose’s mother had shown no objection to her daughter’s semi-surreptitious use of the stick of lip-salve that lay in a drawer of the dressing-chest, amid a tangle of veils, hair-nets, twists of paper containing sweets, biscuit-crumbs, hair-pins, belts, stockings, old envelopes, gloves, powder-boxes, and a dozen other accumulated futilities.
Rose could never remember that her mother had given her more than two pieces of advice, besides that which related to her use of hair-dyes.
“Put on clean under-things when you’re going on a journey. You never know if there mayn’t be an accident, nor who’ll pick you up and save you. You don’t want to be taken unawares, is what I say.”
And the other:
“Know your own mind, Rose, and when you’ve found out what you want, you go for it. There’s nothing like Life, when all’s said and done, and if Life isn’t wanting, then I don’t know what it is. And your Mammy’ll help you to get what you want, if she can do it, my pretty.”
But Rose’s mother had been killed in a street accident, two days before Rose was to leave school for good.
For many years afterwards she had been unable to bear the thought of the months that followed. Her grief had been a kind of frenzy, coming upon her in gusts of overwhelming misery when she could barely force down rising screams for Mother, Mother, Mother, crouched upon the floor, biting at the bed-clothes, with clenched hands and streaming eyes.