Fenella's popularity not only survived this shameful exposure, but followed her into the Christmas holidays. The most delightful of all missives began to lie, three and four at a time, on the breakfast table by her plate, "begging the pleasure." Mrs. Barbour, who did a considerable amount of good by stealth, had arrested a thirsty genius on a downward course from the Bond Street ateliers to Marylebone Workhouse, and, with this strange being, who wore a palpable transformation, smelt of brandy, and called her "Modder-moselle," Nelly spent many a fruitful morning, pinning, fitting, and cutting, while the machine whirred and bumped on a table near by. She tasted for the first time the delights of the waxed floor, the heavy golden air, the cadenced wind—all the witchery of dance-land. Sleek "freshers" with lacquered heads, "down for the short—" pink, alert subalterns on Christmas furlough from Chatham and Aldershot, with funny cropped moustaches like a toothbrush—delightful middies in uniform, with cracking voices, wrote her name stiffly and illegibly on their programmes or, if they were very smart, on an immaculate shirt cuff. She danced with the verve of one exercising a fine natural gift, but hated "sitting out," and acquired a distracting habit of wandering on her partner's arm, along corridors and up stairs, through palms and around screens, in search of friends similarly coupled. She called this the "visiting figure," but, oh! the despair of inflammable youth, its head full of incoherent adoration, to which darkness and solitude would have given such burning words. This little unchaperoned girl, with her perilously attractive beauty, discovered endless address and resource in keeping male fervor at a distance. The following conversation is on record, heard from palm-filled obscurity:
"Look here, Bobby! I'm sitting with you in the dark, 'cos you said the light hurt your bad eye; but if you paw you'll have two bad eyes to look after 'stead of one."
Toward the end of her third year at Sharland College Lady Anne received a letter from Miss Garrett, of which the following was part:
"... About Fenella Barbour. No. I haven't forgotten the promise I made you to let you know if the girl showed marked ability in any one direction. Strangely enough, Madame de Rudder, of Hanover Street, our dancing and calisthenic mistress, called upon me about her only yesterday. She tells me the child shows a talent for bodily movement (she calls it 'genius': poor abused word!) such as she never marked in a girl before. She is revising some old dances, Pavanes and Corantos, for private house parties, and wants Fenella to join a quartette she is making up. Remembering what you told me, I mentioned (guardedly) the expense of dresses, etc., but she would not hear of the girl's incurring any outlay. Not only this. She says that if Fenella could come, even two days a week, as assistant at Hanover Street, she could have her tuition free and, in time, be employed regularly, at very good pay: much better than we can afford our own under-mistresses, who are all graduates, as you know.
"It seems to me, dear Anne, that a métier offers here: not a very exalted one, it is true, but in the only line for which the girl has shown any talent at all. Will you, if you think fit, speak to the mother before I do anything further and ascertain her views. I have met Mrs. Barbour. She is a puzzling and, I should say, rather foolish woman, who evidently married far above her class.
"The idea, if followed out, will of course abridge Fenella's school career, or even terminate it; but, to tell you the truth, dear Anne, although I am fond of the child, I am only half sorry for this. Don't misunderstand me. The girl is as good as gold, and I know (who should judge better) has a soul like crystal. But her influence among us has been an unsettling one.
"... I picked out the much beloved 'Collywobble' in the Country-house Supplement from among the Sea grave, with dear Lady Anne 'up.' What a pretty beast it is!"
Fenella was seventeen when she left school. She thought life a great joke, she had not said a prayer for two years, and the saddest sight she had seen was a fallen sparrow (counted, but number unrecorded) on the path in Holland Walk.
X
THE WAY OF A MAID