For three mornings in the week therefore, Pollyooly, taking the Lump with her, went to Madame Correlli's dancing class in Soho; and thanks to her active early life at Muttle Deeping, was esteemed by that accomplished lady one of her most promising pupils. It is no wonder that Pollyooly and her young friend and fiancé Lord Ronald Ricksborough, the heir of the Duke of Osterley, looked forward with confidence to the day when she should be a shining light of musical comedy and the proper wife for a British nobleman.
Madame Correlli read the Honourable John Ruffin's note with indulgence, accepted the excuse, and set Pollyooly to work.
Pollyooly was disinclined to make friends, close friends, of the other little girls in her class. She was indeed very civil to them, like the well-mannered child she was; but they did not greatly attract her. Belonging to hard-working, dancing families, they talked a great deal in their high-pitched, twanging voices about their friends and relations who danced at the Varolium, Panjandrum, and other music halls, friends of whom, since she herself aspired to higher things, Pollyooly had but a poor opinion. Moreover, many of them powdered their little faces, penciled their eyebrows, and deepened the roses in their cheeks with rose-carmine or rouge; and to Pollyooly, a daughter of Muttle Deeping, these practices were repugnant.
But she had formed one friendship among them, a friendship born of her protective instinct, with Millicent Saunders, a frail, pale wisp of a child, whose black eyes looked very big indeed in her thin face, framed in a mass of black hair. The other pupils were apt to look down on Millicent, because, though few of them ran to finery, Millicent was shabby indeed. Pollyooly was quite unaffected by this, for in the days when she had lived in the dreadful fear that she and the Lump might be driven by necessity into the workhouse, she had gone shabby herself. She knew that Millicent's mother, who had once been a dancer, was now a charwoman, often out of work, and in feeble health. It was Millicent's perpetual complaint that she herself was so slow growing up to the age at which she would be earning money and supporting her ailing mother. Down the vista of the future she saw a splendid vision in which her mother should always have a bloater with her tea. To Pollyooly Millicent always looked hungry.
It was Millicent's great pleasure to sit with the Lump on her knee in the intervals of their work, mothering him as long as he would suffer it; and it was her privilege to take his left hand as Pollyooly led him from Soho, across the dangerous crossings to the safe stretch of the embankment from Charing-Cross to the Temple. As they went Pollyooly and Millicent talked of the price of provisions and the trials of housekeeping.
But for the whole week before Pollyooly's trip to Devon Millicent had not been to the class. Pollyooly enquired and Madame Correlli enquired the reason for her absence, but none of the other pupils could tell them. It was now ten days since Pollyooly had seen her, and she was feeling anxious indeed about her.
Then, after the class was over, as she was leading the Lump down St. Martin's Lane on their way to the embankment he projected an arm and broke his placid and perpetual silence with one of his rare, but pregnant grunts. Pollyooly looked where he pointed, saw Millicent on the island in the middle of the roadway, and called to her.
Millicent turned her head and looked at them with somewhat dazed eyes. Her face did not as usual light up at the sight of the Lump. She crossed the road to them feebly.
"How are you? Why haven't you come to the classes for so long?" said Pollyooly.
"Mother's dead," said Millicent dully; and her big eyes which had been so dull, shone suddenly bright with tears.