“Pooh! We don’t change much. What was in her came out. She seizes joy when it passes her way. No exception at all. I see you don’t talk much with the other V.A.D.s. Silly—that! Take my tip, and study people at first-hand. I do. I want to understand everybody. Of course, as we’re pals, I dissemble a wee bit with your mother. Perhaps if she understood me I should be out of bounds to you.”
Acting upon this advice, Cicely became more friendly with the farmers’ and tradesmen’s daughters now working at Wilverley Court. Most of them called her “Shandy.” She had accepted this cheerfully, because such familiarity would end, she reflected, with the war. Now, she was beginning to wonder whether social distinctions were of paramount importance. Freedom of intercourse, according to Tiddy, begetting a truer sympathy, a kindlier understanding, might be a greater thing than respectful salutations. In the Midlands, children neither curtsied nor touched caps. Lamentable . . .! She was glad that she didn’t live there.
The V.A.D.s responded to Cicely’s advances. She found in them what she had found in Agatha: pluck, fortitude and an invincible optimism in regard to big things. They whined and wailed over trifles. They lacked restraint, refinement, and lied magnificently to achieve their ends. Tiddy talked to all and sundry, particularly the sundry. She didn’t invite confidence timidly, like Cicely. She exacted and extracted it, waving it triumphantly, as a dentist will hold aloft a big molar. With the august Mrs. Roden Tiddy shared the conviction that women were coming into their promised land. Agatha agreed with Miss Tiddle. Often Cicely found herself in a minority of one when social questions were debated at meal-time.
“Is nothing sacred to you?” she asked Tiddy.
“Oh, yes, but not tin gods. This war will scrap them for ever and ever. Speed up.”
“Pace kills, Tiddy.”
“Tosh! Pace kills those who won’t get out of the way. Tin gods sat in a row, graven images, obstructing progress. We shall knock ’em down like ninepins. It’s a case of knock or be knocked. You’ve come on a lot. I wonder what your mother thinks of you.”
Whereupon Cicely confessed that she too dissembled with Lady Selina. At this Tiddy shrugged disdainful shoulders.
“I should have thought you were sick of whitewash in your village.”
“Whitewash? Mr. Grimshaw called it that.”