What must it feel like to be the daughter of a marquis? A crude and silly inner self put the question. A daughter of a marquis is just like anybody else’s daughter—the answer came pat, but somehow at that moment the third class passenger was unable to accept it. A gulf yawned between herself and the girl opposite. They were of an age; their heights and their proportions were nearly identical; at a first glance they might almost have passed for sisters except that Miss Gray Eyes was quite sure in her heart that she was the prettier; all the same there was a world of difference in the way they looked at life and a whole cosmos in the way life looked at them.
The little lady sighed at her thoughts—they were hard thoughts—and opened her pilgrim basket. She took from it a notebook and pencil and a dog-eared copy of The Patrician, the famous novel of Mr. John Galsworthy, which bore the imprint of the Laxton Cube Library. For two years past she had prescribed for herself a course of the best modern English fiction. She was reading it diligently, less for relaxation and human enjoyment than for purposes of self improvement. Her social opportunities had been few and narrow, although her parents had rather ambitiously given her an education excellent of its kind at the Laxton High School for Young Ladies, which she had been able to supplement by passing the Oxford Preliminary Examination.
For the second time in her life of twenty years Miss Cass—she was known to her friends as Girlie Cass—had taken a situation as a nursery governess. She had had one brief experience which had been terminated by her mother’s illness and death. Since then she had been three months a government clerk, but she was not quick at figures and she couldn’t write shorthand. Life as a nursery governess was not going to be a bed of roses for one as shy and sensitive as herself, but she was genuinely fond of young children and somehow such a career with all its thorns seemed more suited to one of her disposition than a stand-up fight in the peace that was coming with terribly efficient competitors, who, if they happened to want your particular piece of cake, would have no scruples about knocking you down and trampling upon your prostrate body in order to get it.
If Miss Cass had any taint of vanity it was centered in the fact that she was by way of being a high-brow. She was not a high-brow of the breed that looks and dresses and acts and thinks the part. In her case it was more a secret sin than anything and it took the form of competing week by week in the literary competition of the Saturday Sentinel, under the “nom de plume” of Vera.
The subject this week was the “Influence of Mr. John Galsworthy upon the English Novel.” It was, perhaps, a little advanced for the Laxton Cube Library, but Vera was ambitious. She had not yet won a prize, truth to tell she had not even been in sight of one, but three weeks ago her essay on Jane Eyre had been commended as showing insight. She had not yet got over her excitement at receiving a compliment which in her heart she felt she fully merited. If she plumed herself upon anything it was upon her insight. One day when she had learned a little more about life—her trouble was that she had so little invention—she might even try to write a novel herself. But in her case it would have to be based on first-hand experience. She would not be able, like the Brontë Sisters, to weave a romance out of her inner consciousness.
“The Influence of Mr. John Galsworthy upon the English Novel.” Miss Cass had the bad habit of sucking her pencil, but it was not easy to marshal or to set down one’s thoughts with the train converging upon Reading at forty miles an hour. However, she was able to write the heading quite legibly. But then her difficulties began. What exactly was the influence of Mr. John Galsworthy upon the English novel?
“Pikey.” It was almost the nicest voice Miss Gray Eyes had ever heard, yet curiously low and penetrating in quality. “Do you recognize that?” Miss Fur Coat folded back a page of her paper to display a photograph of a famous beauty. “Rather flattering, don’t you think?”
Pikey lowered The Queen, which she had been studying with a kind of latent ferocity, and exchanged periodicals without comment. She was evidently a creature of very few words, and to judge by a certain morose dignity it seemed to argue considerable hardihood on the part of anyone to address her at all familiarly.
Miss Cass could not help wondering what the status was of this duenna who seemed a cross between a lady’s maid and a werewolf. But the chain of her reflections was interrupted by the stopping of the train at a station of which she could not see the name. Here the two gentlemen got out, after one of them had lowered the window and had called to an official to unlock the door. And in the order of their going the student of The Patrician noticed that while neither of them showed any particular concern for the green ulster, both were very careful not to tread upon the fur coat.