"He has begun it. He's written ten chapters of a novel."
"What's it about?" asked Mary, with an irritating little sniff that she used on occasions.
"It's about the Eighteenth Century," said Millie, "and a house in a wood——"
"People want something more real nowadays," said Mary.
"He hasn't got to think of what people want," answered Millie hotly. "He's got to write what he feels."
"He's got to make his bread and butter," said Miss Cass grimly.
Nevertheless it may be suspected that she liked Henry more than she allowed; only her fingers itched to be at him, at his collar and his socks and his boots and his tie. But she believed about this, as she did about everything else, that her day would come.
On the morning that Millie was to go to Miss Platt's for the first time she dressed with the greatest care. She put on a plain black dress and designed to wear with it a little round red hat. She also wore a necklace of small pearls that her father had once given her in a sudden swiftly vanishing moment of emotion at her surprising beauty. When she came into the little sitting-room to breakfast she was compelled to confess to herself that she was feeling extremely nervous, and this amazed her because she so seldom felt nervous about anything. But it would be too awful if this Platt affair went wrong! To begin all over again with those advertisements, those absurd letters, that sudden contact with a world that seemed to be entirely incapacitated and desperately to need help without in the least being willing to pay for it!
That was the real point about Miss Platt, that she was willing to pay. The brief interview had shown Millicent a middle-aged, rather stout woman, with a face like a strawberry that is afraid that at any moment it may be eaten, over-dressed, nervous and in some as yet undefined way, a little touching. She had taken, it seemed, to Millicent at once, calling her "my dear" and wanting to pay her anything in reason. "I'm so tired," she said, "and I've seen so many women. They are all so pale. I want some one bright about the house."
Upon this foundation the bargain had been struck, and Millicent, looking back at it, was compelled to admit that it was all rather slender. She had intended to talk to Mary Cass about it at breakfast, to drive her into reassuring her, but discovered, as so many of us have discovered before now, that our nearest and dearest have, and especially at breakfast, their own lives to lead and their own problems to encounter. Mary's brain was intent upon the dissection of a frog, and although her heart belonged to Millie, medical science had for the moment closed it. Millie therefore left the house in a mood of despondency, very rare indeed with her. She travelled on the top of a succession of omnibuses to Cromwell Road. She had time to spare and it was a lovely spring morning; she liked beyond all things to look down over the side of the omnibus and see all the scattered fragmentary life that went on beneath her. This morning every one was clothed in sun, the buildings shone and all the people seemed to be dressed in bright colours. London could look on such a morning so easy and comfortable and happy-go-lucky, like a little provincial town, in the way that butchers stout and rubicund stood in front of their shops, and the furniture shops flung sofas and chairs, coal-scuttles and bookcases right out into the pavement with a casual, homely air, and flower-shops seemed to invite you to smell their flowers without paying for it, and women walked shopping with their hand-bags carefully clutched, and boys dashed about on bicycles with a free, unrestrained ecstasy, as though they were doing it simply for their amusement. Other cities had surely acquired by now a more official air, but London would be casual, untidy and good-natured to the last trump, thank God!