Deb knelt in front of the squat sturdy oil-stove with “Cora” gold-lettered across its front, and began carefully to trickle a supply of kerosene into the tank. Cora was essential to the evening’s enjoyment of her three votaries; their friendship grouped itself round her personality, and Aunt Stella, whose wit ran fatally in the direction of punning, had even dared to nickname their union the Chorus.
Deb knelt, perplexed, musing, a vestal before the altar....
Cora was six weeks old, and was just losing her first fragrance when Deb bought her.... “Does anyone want an oil-stove cheap?” she demanded, rushing like tragedy upon the assembled company in the lounge of Montagu Hall Hotel. “With saucepan, feeder, gallon-can, and all my illusions, complete for five-and-tenpence?”
“My dear child!” cried Stella, “Cora has been yours for exactly half a day.”
Deb sank down despairingly on the fender-seat. “Five-and-eightpence,” she amended. Then, darkly: “To be bested by a rotten little piece of ironmongery one foot by two——!”
“Does she smell?” Jenny Carew exclaimed impulsively; “oh, then something must be wrong with her.” (They commented afterwards how queer it was that never for an instant had Cora been “it” to any of them; always “her.”) “Do let me take her to pieces for you, and put her together again. Do let me, Miss Marcus. I haven’t had a thrill for ages. And if I fail I’ll buy the fragments for Bobby to play with. Dolph, who did we last lend our screw-driver to?”
Her husband, morose and bearded, was not interested in Cora. “Somebody who hasn’t given it back.”
“All right, Mrs Carew; and you can have the bits for Bobby anyway, when you’ve thrilled long enough. I don’t want the little brute, whole or in pieces; I would have thrown her out of the window, but just at that moment she threw me out at the door. She certainly has character, and a perfumed soul, and—and I was so happy, carrying her home in my arms this morning.”
Someone spoke indolently from the deepest armchair at the best corner of the fire. “Miss Marcus, I’ll buy your disillusion for five-and-eightpence.”
“Will you? Will you really? Do you want her?” Deb looked across at him shyly. The soldier had not been long at Montagu Hall; rarely spoke, except, lately, to Jenny; and generally did not give an impression that he could be stimulated from a state of sunken lethargy for anybody on earth.