Very soon she had ceased to dwell upon any remembrance of the criterion of St. Gwenllian. She had let herself go.
There had been brief, giggling intimacies with girls and young women whom Valeria could certainly not visualize as intimates in her own home, allusions and catchwords shared with the men or the orderlies, childish, undignified escapades which she was aware that the Canon would have regarded and apostrophised as vulgar. Those days now seemed like a dream.
Even the girl with whom she had shared a room for six months no longer wrote to her.
She, the bobbed-haired, twenty-two-year-old Pollie Gordon, had had love-affairs. Valeria remembered certain confidences made by Pollie, and still blushed. Pollie had been strangely outspoken, to Miss Morchard’s way of thinking, but she had been interesting—revealing even.
Valeria ruefully realized perfectly that Pollie Gordon, whether one’s taste approved of her or not, had lived every moment of her short life to the full. She was acutely aware of contrast.
“And I’m twenty-seven!” thought Val. “I’d better go and be a cook somewhere. If only I could! Or marry Owen—supposing he asks me. Anyway, one might have children.”
A humourous wonder crossed her mind as to her ability to cope with the intelligent, eclectically-minded children that Owen Quentillian might be expected to father.
“It’s a pity he isn’t poor. I believe I should be better as a poor man’s wife, having to do everything for him, and for the babies, if there were babies.... The Colonies, for instance....”
Although she was alone, Val coloured again and tears stood in her eyes.
“What a fool I am!”