“I’m not at all surprised,” said Gerard heartily. “I told her when I met her first that I was sure she would find some opening for her talents. She said she had none, but I knew better.”
“No talents! Yes, isn’t it absurd? That’s what she always says,” cried Lilian merrily. “A girl who can make eight hundred a year, without any previous teaching or training, simply by drawing designs.”
“Indeed!” said Gerard, admiring but almost incredulous at the simplicity of the means.
“Yes,” pursued Lilian confidently. “Of course she has to work very hard, and she has to go about just where the firm that employs her wants her to go. But she says she likes it, and certainly they treat her very well.”
Gerard was puzzled. That any firm should pay a designer eight hundred a year, and want her to travel about for them seemed strange, he thought. He had had a vague idea that a designer must go through a thorough course of training before his talents were of much practical value; and to learn that a girl who had had no experience of such work could, within a few months, make such a large income was a surprise to him.
“She must have to work very hard,” he said.
“Yes, but she finds time to go about and enjoy herself too. That is the wonderful part of it, and nobody could do it but Rachel,” babbled on the pretty childlike seventeen-year-old sister proudly. “Old Lady Jennings, whom she stays with, says she never sees her with a pencil in her hand when she’s at home. But she has a little studio somewhere off Regent Street—only she won’t tell us where, for fear we should go and disturb her at her work,” added the girl ingenuously, “and when she has anything important to do, she just shuts herself up there, and works away for hours. I do wish I were clever like that!” she added wistfully.
“I’ve no doubt you’re clever too, in some other way,” almost stammered Gerard, puzzled and confused by the strange account the simple-hearted schoolgirl had given him.
He was conscious, even as he talked to the pretty child, that her sister was watching them with anxiety. Was Rachel anxious that Lilian should not be so frank?
Old Lady Jennings, the distinguished-looking chaperon, seemed to be anxious to have him introduced to her. But Rachel prevented this, and contrived, without any appearance of incivility, to dismiss Gerard within a few moments of the conversation he had had with her sister.