"After she died I got a job in Southampton Row. I lived in a hostel for women workers. It was all right in a way, but deadly lonely. And I wasn't used to the sort of girls who live at those places, and I thought myself too good for them—and of course they saw it. They used to play cards in the evening, or some of them played the piano, and sometimes they made up parties to go to the pit at the theatre—but after I'd been disagreeable once or twice, naturally they didn't ask me any more. And I never sat in the public sitting-room downstairs, but always went up to my own bedroom. And I read a book at meals. You don't know how people who do that are hated. So they ought to be, I suppose, but in those days I thought it was quite worth while to make them all indignant, and find myself left in peace. But all the time I was more and more lonely, and I used to sit and think in the evenings, wondering how I could bear it if all my life was going to be like that—just working on and on and then becoming like one of the older women at that hostel—there were dozens of them—pinched and discontented, always worrying over expense, and why there weren't two helpings of pudding at dinner, with nothing to do, nothing to remember, nothing to look forward to—knowing themselves utterly and absolutely unnecessary in the world. And they'd got used to it—that was the ghastly part of it—and yet they couldn't always have been like that. Once they must have passed through awful phases of rebellion and despair, like me, and hoping against hope that something glorious and brilliant would turn up—the sort of things that only happen in books—and then gradually they'd got resigned—and hopeless, and indifferent—the worst of all. And I felt that all that, year after year, would be coming nearer and nearer to me——"
"It couldn't," muttered Julian. "Marriage, for instance——"
"Of course, everyone said that. My mother said it—she kept on talking about 'When you marry, Pauline,' as though it was something almost inevitable. My aunt said it, when I spent my holidays at her house. At first I used to say it myself—thinking, like fools of girls always do, that love meant happiness and that it was bound to come."
The bitterness in her tone shocked him, but he said nothing.
"As I'm telling you these things that I've never told anyone, I'd better tell you the whole truth," said Miss Marchrose, her voice coldly dispassionate all at once. "I am not in the least attractive. No one, except Clarence Isbister, has ever wanted to marry me. Some girls—sometimes quite pretty ones—are like that. They don't know what it means to be wanted by anyone."
"Stop that," said Julian. "I can't stand it. No man has any right to hear this sort of thing. Besides, it's nonsense. You were never in a position to know any men of your own sort."
"I used to tell myself that. But it wasn't altogether true. There were always plenty of people at my aunt's house—she lived in Hampstead—and both my cousins went to a school of art, and had any number of friends, and they were always nice to me, and took me to all their parties when I was with them. That's how I met Clarence Isbister—at the Chelsea Arts Ball. He'd come with a party of people, and one of them knew my cousin Dolly, and she introduced him to me, and he brought Mr. Isbister and said he wanted to know me. He was only a boy—twenty-one, I think."
"Quite old enough to know his own mind."
"Was he? To my dying day," said Miss Marchrose very simply, "I shall never understand why he fell in love with me. I danced very badly, but he didn't seem to mind, and asked me to sit out with him instead. We talked, but I don't think we had anything much in common. I told him I was a teacher of shorthand, having my holiday. He kept beside me the whole evening and asked to be introduced to Dolly and if he might come and see us in Hampstead. Of course she said yes. I always remember Dolly when we got back, after the ball, and how she said, 'Pauline, that man's fallen in love with you. And, mark my words, he's the sort who'd ask one to marry him.'
"And she was quite right. Dolly was always right about men, though the sort of men she knew weren't the same sort as Clarence.