The Van Roon

by J. C. Snaith

June didn’t reply. But in a surge of feeling she went up to her attic, and with rage in her heart flung herself full length on the bed.

The blow was fully expected, yet that hardly made the weight of it less. Soon or late this miser was bound to turn her out of doors; yet coming at such a time “the sack” was in the nature of a calamity.

Well, she must face it! Domestic service was the only thing to which she could turn her hand, and that, she foresaw, was likely to prove a form of slavery. A future, hard, confined and miserable, lay in front of her.

Bitterly she regretted now that she had not been able to fit herself for some other way of life. She had had a reasonably good education, as far as it went, in her native town of Blackhampton, where her father at one time had been in a moderately good position. But he had died when she was fourteen. And her mother, with health completely broken several years before her death had been left so badly off that June, perforce, had to give up all thoughts of a wider field. Stifling vague ambitions, she had bravely submitted to the yoke but, in spite of a sense of duty honestly, even nobly done, the sequel was a grim distaste of household drudgery. And this had not been made less by a month under the roof of S. Gedge Antiques.

With a gnawing sense of misery that was like a toothache, June slid off the bed and looked at herself in the cracked mirror which adorned the crazy dressing-table. Her only assets were comprised in her personal appearance. Instinctively she took stock of them. Alas, as she beheld them now, they were pretty much a “washout.”

First to strike her was the tell-tale redness of her eyelids, and that disgusted her to begin with. But, apart from that, she felt in her own mind that her personality was not really attractive. Her education was small, her life had been restricted and narrow; and now there seemed no way out.

Honestly she was not pretty, she was not clever, and she knew next to nothing of the world. Even at Blackhampton, where the supply of smart girls was strictly limited, she had never passed for anything out of the common. She had felt sometimes that her nature was too serious. In a girl a serious nature was a handicap, she had once heard Mr. Boultby, the druggist at the corner of Curzon Street, remark. One “asset,” however, she certainly had. The mop of golden-brown hair had always been her stand-by, and Mr. Boultby, that man of the world, had paid her compliments upon it. An artist would revel in it, he had said. Certainly there was a lot of it, and the colour having aroused comment even in her early days at the High School among her form-mates, it was no doubt rather striking. She was also inclined to be tall and long in the leg, she knew that her shoulders and chest were good, she prided herself upon the neatness of her ankles, yet at the back of her shrewd mind lurked the fear that the general effect must be plainness, not beauty. She had heard Mr. Boultby, always a friend, describe her as “unusual,” but she had felt that it was his polite way of saying she was not so good-looking as she might be.

No, wherever her fortune might lie, it was not in her face. Once or twice, in her romantic Blackhampton phases, which at best were very brief and few, she had thought of the stage. But one month of London had convinced her that it was not her line. Considering her inexperience of life her fund of horse sense was rather remarkable. She was a great believer in the doctrine of “looking facts in the face.” And the fact she had to meet now was that she was not in any way pretty or talented. Unless you were one or the other, and London teemed with girls who were both, the doors of the theatre were locked and barred.

Back on the edge of the bed, she began to consider the question of learning shorthand and typing, so that she might become a clerk in an office. But her means were so scant that the plan was hardly feasible. Really it seemed that no career was open to her, other than the one she loathed. And then the thought of William came. At once, by a strange magic, it eased the pressure. Heart, brain and will were merged in an immediate task; she must stand between this child of nature and the avarice of his master.

The sudden thought of William brought courage, tenacity, fighting power. She knew that at this moment he was the other side the wall. An impelling need urged her to go to him. Forgetful of red and swollen lids she got up at once and went and knocked on the studio door.