"Oh, dear!" cried Patricia to herself, suddenly desperate and at war with her lot, as other debutantes have been. "It's too bad. It's too bad!"
And then, fortunately, some little recollection from the multitude of recollections which would presently disengage themselves, made her smile. A soft little sound, such as a baby might have made, came from her throat, the lips being once again closed. Her hands were bunched at her breast. It was the reaction caused by the bed's cosiness and her sweet exhaustion. An instant later she was fast asleep, and in her sleep she smiled as she dreamed of a party of beautiful gaiety, in which she was supreme and unchallenged, ... the admired and the adored of all ... Patricia!
ii
In the morning she awoke to ambitious determination. At first waking she knew it was late, and sighed, very drowsy and comfortable. Happy thoughts began to float into her consciousness, and she smiled again to herself like a little girl. But when Lucy, the maid of the house, tramped up to her door and knocked there with knuckles of iron, Patricia no longer lay in reverie. She instantly arose, took her primitive bath, and was in her sitting-room long before the breakfast arrived.
There were no letters. There were never any letters for Patricia. Letters never come, she believed, to the truly deserving. She had a hunger for letters. She longed intensely to be like those young men in demodé books who opened uncountable bills and billets doux at the breakfast-table and stuck all their cards of invitation round the edges of the mirror upon the mantelpiece. The mirror was there; but no cards adorned it. The mirror had a gilded frame, and was no longer very fresh. It was flanked by vases intended to represent perfectly incredible marble. In the fireplace was a gas-fire, alight. The floor was covered with green and red oilcloth, and a woolly rug of yellow and magenta lay before the hearth. There was a sofa against the opposite wall, and at the window stood a sturdy table bearing a typewriter. In the middle of the room was another table upon which the first signs of breakfast were laid. Here, too, was Patricia's own little bowl of flowers. That bowl, the flowers, and the typewriter, were here her sole possessions. The rest belonged to the landlady who lived somewhere far below stairs, and it received daily a severe banging from Lucy, whose speed and energy exceeded her competence by about as much as the salary of a competent staff would have exceeded Lucy's wages.
Patricia went to the flowers and raised the bowl so that she could still detect the ghost of their waning fragrance. In her morning dress of blue serge, the collar high and the shape quite simple, she seemed perhaps taller and slimmer than she had been on the previous night. But she was quite as pretty, and the fresh pink of her rounded cheeks betokened good health. Her hair, which was not long, was arranged to-day as it had been arranged at Monty's party. She was the same girl, but she was graver, because this morning her thoughts were more active and she was therefore more sad.
She remembered old Dalrymple, whom she had met through the agency of Amy, asking her to go to the party with him, and calling for her; she remembered their journey, her entry of the mysteriously charming house, of the studio, her first sight of Monty and instinctive interest in that dark and impenetrable face. And then the noise and brilliance, and Amy, and all the gay talk, and Mr. Mayne.... For a long time she was shy of permitting any thought of Harry, as one sometimes leaves the finest peach to the last; and it was delicious to be always almost returning and arriving at Harry, to feel him perpetually there, summonable at impulse, and wilfully to hold thought of him in reserve. Yet in reality it was most often of Harry that she was aware in every wayward turn of memory.
iii
Breakfast was another blow for Patricia. There were bacon and eggs, and both were depressingly cold. The tea was strong and cold. Not so would breakfast be, she decided, in any home truly her own; though if, as she had long ago assumed, her future home were to be one in which servants played a leading part, she had no notion of the way in which cold breakfasts were to be avoided. Were there not such things as spirit lamps? Patricia had not stayed often enough in large houses to know that cold breakfasts are inevitable there unless the meal is eaten in the kitchen. She merely felt sure that Monty had hot breakfasts. But she did not associate her confident belief with the fact that he was an autocrat with a man-servant. It is the woman's lot to be ill-served wherever she goes. One has only to lunch at a woman's club in London to have this truth emphasised.
So breakfast this morning was a disappointment. Only good digestion—which she fortunately possessed—could have dealt with it effectively. And with breakfast finished, and the dish with solid streaks of grease upon it mercifully concealed by the cracked dish-cover, Patricia wondered what she would do next. She was at leisure, which meant that she was not in a situation; and her ambition exceeded her powers of performance. Her father and mother had both died long ago, and Patricia had lived the greater part of her life with Uncle Roly until his death a year since. He had been a casual man, subsisting from week to week upon a large salary which his habits converted into a small one. What he had done, except to go to an office every day, Patricia had never known; but while she had been with him there had always been plenty to eat, idleness and chocolates for herself, and drinks for Uncle Roly; and a holiday each year at the seaside or in the country. And then he had died, to Patricia's great but quite short-lived grief, and with his death ended the salary from which nothing had been saved. Patricia had exactly two hundred pounds, and the world to face. No relatives barred her path with offers of homes or advice. There followed a situation as typist at a time when even young girls were able to find remunerative situations. Dancing, suburban gaiety, restlessness, and boredom lasted as long as the situation. That too had ended; and Patricia, with only one hundred pounds of inheritance and savings left (for she had not been thrifty, any more than her fellow-workers and -players had been), was confronted with a new problem.