“I thought you weren’t coming,” said young Roberts, reproachfully. “It’s long after eight.” He wore a light overcoat and he, also, had turned up his collar as a protection against the rain.
“I had to help mother, of course. And if you want to know, I ought to be there now.” She laughed up at him provocatively.
“Come on in,” he said, pulling her hand through his arm.
II
This was Elsie’s real life.
Although quite incapable of formulating the thought to herself, she already knew instinctively that only in her relations with some man could she find self-expression.
In the course of the past two years she had gradually discovered that she possessed a power over men that other girls either did not possess at all, or in a very much lesser degree. From the exercise of unconscious magnetism, she had by imperceptible degrees passed to a breathless, intermittent exploitation of her own attractiveness.
She did not know why boys so often wished to kiss her, nor why she was sometimes followed, or spoken to, in the street, by men. At first she had thought that she must be growing prettier, but her personal preference was for dark eyes, a bright colour, and a slim, tall figure, and she honestly did not admire her own appearance. Moreover, her looks varied almost from day to day, and very often she seemed plain. She had never received any instruction in questions of sex, excepting whispered mis-information from girls at school as to the origin of babies. The signs of physical development that had come to her early were either not commented upon except in half-disgusted, half-facetious innuendo from Geraldine, or else dismissed by Mrs. Palmer curtly:
“Nice gurls don’t think about those things. I’m ashamed of you, Elsie. You should try and be nice-minded, as mother’s always told her gurls.”
A sort of garbled knowledge came to her after a time, knowledge that comprised the actual crude facts as to physical union between men and women, and explained in part certain violent bodily reactions to which she had been prone almost since childhood.