The house was like Maisie, in that it never seemed to have anything new—none of those bright, picturesque cushions and screens and Japaneseries which she adored through the plate-glass windows of the big local draper. The curtains were of old damask, faded but rich; the furniture was mahogany, old and solid; the carpets were Turkey and Aubusson—patched and darned this last, but still beautiful. Maisie knew all about old oak—she had read her Home Hints and her Gentlewoman’s Guide—but she had no idea that mahogany could be fashionable. None of the photographs of the drawing-rooms of celebrities in her favourite papers were anything like the little sitting-room where her mother sat knitting by the hearth, surrounded by the relics of a house that had been handsome in the ’sixties, when it was her girlhood’s home. Maisie hated it all: the chairs covered in Berlin-wool needlework, the dark, polished surfaces of the tables and bureaux, the tinkling lustres of Bohemian glass, the shining brass trivet on which the toast kept itself warm, the crude colours of the tea-service, the smell of eau-de-Cologne mingling with the faint scent of beeswax and cedar-wood. She would have liked to change the old water-colours in their rubbed gilt frames for dark-mounted autotypes. How should she know that those hideous pigs were Morlands, and that the cow picture was a David Cox. She would have liked Japanese blue transfers instead of the gold-and-white china—old Bristol, by the way, but Maisie knew nothing of Bristol. The regular, sober orderliness of the house chafed and fretted her; the recurrent duties, all dull; the few guests who came to tea. Decent poverty cannot give dinner parties or dances. She visited her school friends, and when she came home again it seemed to her sometimes as though the atmosphere of the place would choke her.
“I want to go out and earn my own living,” she said to her cousin Edward one Sunday afternoon when her mother was resting and he and she were roasting chestnuts on the bars of the dining-room fire. “I’m simply useless here.”
Edward was a second cousin. To him the little house was the ideal home, just as Maisie was—well, not, perhaps, the ideal girl, but the only girl in the world, which comes to much the same thing. But he never told her so: he dared not risk losing the cousin’s place and missing for ever the lover’s.
So, in his anxiety lest she should know how much he cared, he scolded her a good deal. But he took her to picture galleries and to matinées, and softened her life in a hundred ways that she never noticed. He was only “Poor old Edward,” and he knew it.
“How can you?” he said. “Why, what on earth would Aunt do without you? Here, have this one—it’s a beauty.”
“I ought to have been taught a trade, like other poor girls,” she went on, waving away the roasted chestnut. “Lots of the girls I was at school with are earning as much as a pound a week now—typewriting or painting birthday cards, and some of them are in the Post Office—and I do nothing but drudge away at home. It’s too bad.”
Edward would have given a decent sum at that moment to be inspired with exactly the right thing to say. As it was he looked at her helplessly.
“I don’t understand, I’m afraid,” said he.
“You never do,” she answered crossly. There was a silence in which she felt the growth of a need to justify herself—to herself as well as to him. “Why, don’t you see,” she urged, “it’s my plain duty to go out and earn something. Why, we’re as poor as ever we can be—I haven’t any pocket-money hardly—I can’t even buy presents for people. I have to make presents out of odds and ends of old things, instead of buying them, like other girls.”
“I think you make awfully pretty things,” he said; “much prettier than any one can buy.”