[II]
FANNY CLOSE
Since the second year of the war Fanny Close had been portress at Hortons. It had demanded very much resolution on the part of Mr. Nix to search for a portress. Since time immemorial the halls of Hortons had known only porters. George, the present fine specimen, had been magnificently in service there for the last ten years. However, Mr. Nix was a patriot; he sent his son aged nineteen to the war (his son was only too delighted to go), himself joined the London Air Defences, and then packed off every man and boy in the place.
The magnificent James was the last to go. He had, he said, an ancient mother dependent upon him. Mr. Nix was disappointed in him. He did not live up to his chest measurement. "You're very nearly a shirker," he said to him indignantly. Nevertheless he promised to keep his place open for him....
He had to go out into the highways and by-ways and find women. The right ones were not easily found, and often enough they were disappointing. Mr. Nix was a tremendous disciplinarian, that was why Hortons were the best service flats in the whole of the West End. But he discovered, as many a man had discovered before him, that the discipline that does for a man will not do nine times out of ten for a woman. Woman has a way of wriggling out of the net of discipline with subtleties unknown to man.
So Mr. Nix discovered.... Only with Fanny Close Mr. Nix had no trouble at all. She became at the end of the first week a "jewel," and a jewel to the end of her time she remained.
I don't wish, in these days of stern and unrelenting realism, to draw Dickensian pictures of youth and purity, but the plain truth is that Fanny Close was as good a girl as ever was made. She was good for two reasons, one because she was plain, the other because she had a tiresome sister. The first of these reasons made her humble, the other made her enjoy everything from which her sister was absent twice as much as anyone else would have enjoyed it.
She was twenty-five years of age; the mother had died of pleurisy when the children were babies, and the father, who was something very unimportant in a post office, had struggled for twenty years to keep them all alive, and then caught a cold and died. The only brother had married, and Aggie and Fanny had remained to keep house together. Aggie had always been the beauty of the family, but it had been a beauty without "charm," so that many young men had advanced with beating hearts, gazed with eager eyes, and then walked away, relieved that for some reason or another they had been saved from "putting the question." She had had proposals, of course, but they had never been good enough. At twenty-six she was a disappointed virgin.
Fanny had always been so ready to consider herself the plainer and stupider of the two that it had not been altogether Aggie's fault that she, Aggie, should take, so naturally, the first place. Many a relation had told Fanny that she was too "submissive" and didn't stand up for herself enough, but Fanny shook her head and said that she couldn't be other than she was. The true fact was that deep down in her heart she not only admired her sister, she also hated her. How astonished Aggie would have been had she known this—and how astonished, to be truly platitudinous for a moment, we should all be if we really knew what our nearest and dearest relatives thought of us!