She smiled and went on as if I had not spoken.
"No, if your uncle were well, it would be different; but as things are, I cannot send you. I do not see what is to be done; but I must talk it over with your father."
Then she went away to attend to her domestic duties, and I lay back on my pillows, feeling utterly limp and wretched. Mother had bidden me be brave, but I was far from brave at that hour. My mood was one of flat rebellion against the doctor's decree. A whole year without study! How could I bear it? It was preposterous. He need not think I was going to obey him. It would mean that I should be earning nothing all that time, a burden on my parents' straitened means, an additional care to my mother, whose anxieties were so numerous.
I was the second in a family of five girls and one small pickle of a boy. We lived in a long, uninteresting road, which, being treeless, was called an avenue, running between Wandsworth Road and Clapham Common. Ours was a refined but by no means a luxurious home. My father was a man of science and the curator of a learned society. His position was an honourable one, and brought him into connection with many eminent and interesting persons, but, unfortunately for his wife and children, the salary attached to the office was small. So it was that in our home there was a never-ending struggle to make ends meet. Sometimes the ends gaped hopelessly wide apart, and strain as we would, it was impossible to bring them together. Then it became a question of what we could do without.
It is wonderful how many things with which we cumber our lives are really unnecessary and can be dispensed with if we choose. I remember that once we did without a servant for twelve months. It was a question of doing so, or of taking me from school a year sooner than my parents had intended, and there was no doubt in my mother's mind as to which was the more important, the progress of my education or the smoother running of the domestic machinery. She and Olive did the work of the house with the help of a rough girl who came in for a few hours every morning. Olive had been attending a cookery class, and she hailed this opportunity of showing her skill. So dainty were the dishes she set before us that we children rather liked the change of administration.
It was a happy circumstance that we were all fairly gifted with a sense of humour. As charity covereth a multitude of sins, so this gift, said to be rare in womankind, enables one to combat successfully with a host of petty annoyances. We laughed together over the pinchings of our poverty, and we took pride in the contrivances by which we presented a brave front to the world. Thus it was that our pecuniary straits made us neither sordid nor sour. There are many worse experiences than that of being poor. As I look back on those old days, I am often moved to thank God that we had not an easy, luxurious upbringing. The difficulties that marked our home life were unheroic, but they drew us closely together and taught us many useful lessons we might not otherwise have learned.
Olive, the eldest of the family, was mother's right hand. She was not only, as I have said, a clever cook; her skill in needlework surpassed her culinary accomplishments. I have rarely seen finer sewing and stitching than Olive could put into her daintiest work. Moreover, she could boast a valuable attainment in a household of girls, the art of dressmaking. It was wonderful how cleverly she would remodel old garments and make them look like new ones. What we owed to this gift of hers I cannot tell. Between us all we kept her needle busy.
Happily Olive had an engagement to act as reader and amanuensis for an old lady, which took her from home every afternoon and thus prevented her becoming a slave of the needle. Mrs. Smythe, who lived in a large house overlooking the Common, was a cultured woman, with a fine literary taste, so Olive learned much in her society, and was saved from the narrowness and barrenness of mind which is too often the fate of the domestic drudge.
Not that Olive was exactly one's idea of a drudge. She was a tall, well-set-up girl, with fine, dark eyes, and an abundance of brown hair which was always beautifully dressed. The last statement might be made of Olive herself. Her clothes were never costly, unless the cost had been defrayed by some one else, but they were always smart. She knew how to wear them, as people say. Sewing or cooking, whatever Olive was about, her appearance was sure to be neat and trim, her dress adapted to the occasion and eminently becoming.
Dear old Olive! What a blessing she was to us all! Old she was not at this time, though, for she had not yet passed her twenty-first birthday. She and I were great chums. I think she understood even better than mother what this disappointment was to me. I read it in her eyes when presently she brought her work—a frock she was finishing for Ethel, the youngest of the five—and seated herself beside my bed, for the doctor had advised my lying still all that day. But Olive did not say much by way of sympathy. Like mother she bade me be brave. Mother herself was the bravest of women, and we had all been trained to despise cowardice, physical or moral.