[p175]
“But, Bee,” began Dora imploringly, “it is not quite the same with me as with you, is it? I’m only seventeen, and I’m the eldest. Don’t you think I could have just a little more fun?”
But the marvellous product of a worldly mother and a fashionable boarding-school shook her pretty head vigorously.
“It’s every bit as serious for you, Dora,” she said. “Look at you, your father’s only a barrister, and you know you don’t get a big dress allowance, and there are lots of things you can’t go to for want of money. Then you have three sisters coming on. You owe it to them to marry early and get out of the way. If Floss had taken that man——”
“The five-foot one?”
“Yes, certainly—don’t be so frivolous, Dora—I repeat if Floss had married—he was well off and clever, and really very nice, she owns—the chances are the other three girls would have gone off early and been the heads of beautiful homes to-day instead of dragging the rounds of season after season and making me stay up at school till I simply refused point blank to keep my hair down another day.”
Dora heaved a submissive sigh. Those three chubby, pretty little sisters of hers at home were very dear to her. And it was true they were “coming on;” Amy, the eldest [p176] of them was thirteen. She would not stand in their light.
“There’s one thing,” she said a little more hopefully, “I’m sure it won’t be me—he talks to you a lot more, Bee.”
“That’s only because I talk a lot more to him,” said Bee, nipping the hope. “I notice he looks at you most.”
Dora gazed at herself in the glass, and the reflection of the young rounded face and the candid eyes and the pretty hair was so pleasing that the instinct of conquest braced her.
“After all, Bee,” she said more brightly, “he is really very nice. And except when you’re behind him you don’t notice he’s going bald. Perhaps he’s a man you’d get to like a good deal after you were married to him.”