When he signed to her that the house was quiet, and that she could safely enter, Elsie slipped past him like a shadow while he felt about for matches, and flew upstairs. Her mother slept in the back bedroom on the third floor, and Elsie saw that her door was shut and that no streak of light showed under it. Satisfied, she went up the next flight of stairs to the bedroom.
Geraldine, of course, was bound to know of her escapade, but Geraldine would either believe, or pretend to believe, that Elsie had been with Irene Tidmarsh, and the two Palmer girls always combined with one another against the sentimentalised tyranny that Mrs. Palmer called “a mother’s rights.”
Geraldine was lying in bed, reading a paper novelette by the light of a candle stuck into an empty medicine bottle that stood on a chair beside her. She looked sallower than ever now that she had undressed and put on a white flannelette nightgown with a frill high at the neck and another one at each wrist.
Her lank hair was rolled up into steel waving-pins. It was one of Geraldine’s grievances that she should be obliged to go to bed in curlers every night, while Elsie’s light curls lay loose and ruffled on her pillow. Sometimes, when they were on friendly terms, she and Elsie would speculate together as to how the difficulty could be overcome when Geraldine married, and could no longer go to bed and wake up “looking a sight.”
She rolled over as Elsie cautiously opened the door. “You’ve come at last, have you? How did you get in?”
“Mr. Roberts let me in. He knew I’d be late to-night,” said Elsie calmly, beginning to pull off her clothes.
“You’ve got a nerve, I must say. Mother thinks you were in bed ages ago. She came up after supper and said you were in the kitchen. She was in the drawing-room nearly all the evening, doing the polite to the Williamses.”
“Did she find out that supper hadn’t been cleared away?”
“I suppose she didn’t, or she’d have been up here after you. You’re in luck, young Elsie.”
“I shall have to go down and do it first thing to-morrow before she’s down,” said Elsie, yawning.