Of paying there could be no question. Peter, true to the traditions of her caste, never settled her debts till actually threatened by the law; when she would hastily sell her silver hair-brushes, or borrow from her aunt, or pledge the half-of-her-next-year-but-one income; diminutive amount at best, inherited from her dead mother. She also had what she called her “submerged” periods, when by dint of forswearing the world for an entire fortnight, and working hard eight hours a day at colouring art postcards, she scraped together a sufficient sum to extricate her for a short while from the perpetual webs with which finance encumbered her pathway. Never yet had she been altogether free from pecuniary embarrassments; would indeed have missed the background of their mutterings, as those who have dwelt long by the sea cannot bear to be deprived of its eternal swish.
Mark St. Quentin, striving to mingle in equal proportions formality with infatuation, begged leave to visit her at Thatch Lane the following Sunday. Peter dimpled mischievously; she would wear a white dress, and playfully beg him to help lay the knives and forks for supper: “We have only one servant, you see; and treat you as quite one of the family”—and she dimpled again at the thought of Stuart’s disgust on anyone treating him as one of any family, anywhere.
Stuart ... a slight contraction of her bare toes, as she remembered how the said gentleman had incurred her displeasure. She wondered what his attitude was likely to be. Then opened Merle’s letter—and found out.
Peter raised her head; gazed straight through the window, across garden and hedge and field, to where the Weald hunched its back against the sky. But her eyes missed the tender greens and misty blues of the landscape; could not share in the joy of the house on discovering it at last owned, after five gloomy months, a clear black shadow to lay upon the dew-wet grass.
For she was wondering how not to be jealous.
It was not the incident itself which rankled; but recognition of a fact that long ago had carried its conviction, though only now its results: Merle was allowed, by the unseen code, to be the more feminine of the twain. She, Peter, thrust willy-nilly into the bolder, more challenging position. Was it that she was born with a tilt to her soul, as well as to her nose and chin? She could not tell. But Stuart, gravitating to her for all stimulation, had nevertheless gone to Merle for comfort. And Peter wondered furthermore why she played up so persistently to the Laughing-Cavalier qualities, with which from the very first he had chosen to endow her. And, wondering, knew yet that she must continue boyish and defiant; though she, even as Merle, wanted how much to be tender to him in his present attire of sackcloth and ashes.
The getting-up gong sounded, and Peter returned to bed.
The breakfast-gong, half an hour later, led her to the bathroom; and another quite irrelevant gong saw her wrestling with stockings. Only when the gongs finally ceased from troubling, did she descend to the dining-room, there to find Aunt Esther deeply immersed in the “Daily Camera.”
“Peter, just look at these!”