She did not cavil at her fate. No one ever heard Azalea complain—of poverty, obscurity, dullness or villenage. She accepted her destiny with a fine stoicism, which reflected itself in well-feigned indifference and enabled her to proceed along the same monotonous route at the same monotonous speed, with the same monotonous companions month after month, and year after year, without developing gangrene of the soul or breaking into open revolt.
“Oh, God,” she prayed each morning, before descending to the agitated atmosphere of the breakfast table, “keep me from being difficult to live with!”
And Heaven heard her prayer.
No one really knew Azalea—least of all, her family. Perhaps, no one ever really knows anyone else, a phase of ignorance which, personally, I am not inclined to deplore. Souls should be clad no less than bodies. They should be gowned with decency, and in so far as possible, loveliness; and if, now and again, the garment slips or wears thin, then should the beholder turn his eyes away, nor seek to pry into anything that may be so terrible or so sublime.
Outwardly, as Lady Denby had said, Azalea was a plain little person. She should have been dainty of form, but through some irreparable miscalculation, the Creator had dowered her with the large features, hands and feet designed for some much more ample person. Therefore, she gave no pleasure to the sensitive, artistic eye, and this was an acute grievance to her who possessed a deep and pagan love for Beauty. She was a toneless girl, with thin, straight, dun-coloured hair which she could not afford to keep marcelled. Her eyes were unarresting, as a rule; too sharp to be appealing and not lustrous enough to sparkle. Her skin had a sandy cast and usually shone. Even when rouge and the ubiquitous lip-stick assumed the respectability of universal usage, Azalea’s appearance was scarcely improved, for the former would not blend, and lay like a definite glaze upon her cheeks, while the latter only accentuated the flatness of her too-ample mouth, and made one wish that she had not tampered with it at all.
Her wardrobe was an appalling miscellany of discarded grandeur. Ladies whose clothes were too passé for their own adornment, bestowed them upon Azalea with the remark,
“You can see, my dear, that these are scarcely worn, and anyway, they are not the sort of things one could give the servants!”
She had learned to smother the hot rebellion that flared up in her heart, to thank them prettily, and to convey huge, unwieldy bundles through the streets and hold her tongue when her family commented upon the generosity of Lady This or Mrs. That. But she often wondered that her father never divined that Lady Elton’s cloth-of-gold dinner gown remodelled by her impatient and unskilled fingers, caused abrasions upon her spirit deeper than sackcloth could have produced, and blithely would she have consigned every stitch that she owned to the flames, for the joy of buying the most ordinary, commonplace, inexpensive frock at a bargain sale.
The future of the Deanes stretched behind them. The best of the family lay underground. Mr. Grenville Harrison Deane was the sole male survivor of an illustrious line that could be traced (so he declared) with an occasional hiatus, back to Alfred the Great! It was never clear to the upstarts whose genealogical tree took root in England about the time of the Conquest, or thereafter, how he arrived at his conclusion, but if antiquity of ideas was anything of a proof, then they were forced to admit that there was justification in his contention, for his views of life antedated those of Britain’s noble King.
Aloofness from fatiguing toil had rewarded him with an erectness that was impressive, and a complexion that a flapper might have envied. A Dundreary of silver gossamer caressed his cheeks, and his clear, lustrous eyes looked out from an unfurrowed setting. His chief characteristics were piety and an Eumenidean temper. The former, which should have been broad, was constricted to the dimensions of a number ten needle, and the latter, which should have been narrow, expanded to encompass impartially every one who held views divergent from his own. Particularly, was it directed against the blistering injustice of the Civil Service.