“Mother is pinching a bit—no cream! She says it’s fattening. Most of our neighbours are pinching for patriotic reasons, but some of them like it. This hateful war shows us all up. Mrs. Roden (Arthur’s sister) is a scream! You will love pulling her leg. It’s rather against Arthur that he can’t see how funny she is——”
A postscript was added:
“Mr. Grimshaw has dark, disconcerting eyes. I’m afraid he’s very poor.”
To this artless epistle Miss Tiddle replied by return of post.
“I wish I were at Wilverley,” she wrote, “because your letter is a dead give-away. You’re working up a ‘pash’ for this young man with the disconcerting eyes!!! And I’ll bet my string of pearls against a boot-lace that he’s a better chap than your Arthur, who doesn’t appeal to me at all. I see by the peerage that he’s nearly forty, and probably getting bald. Why does he talk to you? Why not write to me as a pal should? Before you get this, he may have proposed, without a word of warning from me. And likely as not you’ll blush and say ‘yes,’ because, obviously, the whole thing has been a put-up job. My tip is: flirt sweetly with both of them, and don’t commit yourself! I have three affairs on—no end of a rag! If necessary, I’ll have a go at your Arthur. Try him out! I expect he’s too fat, mentally and physically, for my taste. But I’d sacrifice myself for you. I shall look forward to meeting Mr. Grimshaw. If he’s poor and clever, he’ll reach up and help himself to the needful, with you dangling at the end of the pole as a prize.
“My lady-mother is pinching too. We no longer dine the people we don’t like. But we shall freeze on to our footmen till public opinion wrenches them from us. . . .”
This letter constrained Cicely to collate her virginal thoughts with Miss Tiddle’s vulgar words. Vulgar, be it noted, is used as “vernacular.” Shakespeare might have described Miss Tiddle’s prose as “naked as the vulgar air.” Lady Selina might have used the adjective in its commoner acceptation. It would have shocked her inexpressibly had she been told that her child was “working up a pash” for anybody, even if he were a young duke with all the gifts of the gods. Cicely, however, knew her “Tiddy,” and took no offence. But . . . was she thinking too much of this man with the disconcerting eyes? Did he stand, square to the four winds of heaven, between herself and Arthur? She asked herself the question when she was engaged in preparing a pailful of disinfectant. One would prefer to envisage the nymph in a fragrant rose-garden, plucking the dewy blossoms, inhaling with them the sweet freshness of morning. . . . Cicely had just finished scrubbing the floor of the dispensary; the pungent odour of carbolic assailed her pretty nose. And it served well enough, better perhaps than any rose, to kill the parasitic sentimental growths which so often clog and obscure a maiden’s true understanding of herself.
What was Grimshaw to her?
Being still a child in many ways, she applied the nursery test. If she were in a boat with the two men, and the boat upset, and it were possible for her to save one of the two, which one would be saved?
Her lively imagination, unduly stimulated by Tiddy’s prose, beheld the two appealing faces mutely beseeching her for life and love. She hesitated. The heads sank, to bob up again. She positively shivered with indecision. Then she laughed. The prescient Tiddy had hit the mark. Arthur was . . . well, not thin. He suggested floating. If he turned on his broad back and stopped struggling, he would float. But Grimshaw would sink . . .!