Lady Darlington blushed with self-reproach. That she should have to question what had become of Tattie! She sat, after the duchess had departed, remembering days when she and Tattie had been bosom friends. They had shared hopes and lodgings; they had told each other their peccadilloes, and even their salaries. And now she didn't know where Tattie was? Could St. James' Square have made her heartless? How had their correspondence died? ... Ah yes, in Tattie's last letter ages ago she had asked for the sum of five pounds "just for a fortnight." But how monstrous of Tattie to feel constrained because she hadn't sent it back! Who had expected it?
On the seventeenth day of December, when Darlington, looking a ridiculous object, had boomed away in a new car, of which he was inordinately proud, Rosalind stole guiltily into a news-agent's. She would not meet her lord again for a month. Her beautiful eyes sparkled, and her cheeks were flushed. She tendered two pennies to a vulgar man, smoking a clay pipe behind the counter, and asked for the Stage. To the happily constituted there can seem nothing calculated to kindle the emotions in the act of buying a twopenny paper in a squalid shop, but Rosalind had a temperament, and temperaments play queer tricks. (See Conrad's.) The tender grace of a day that was dead hallowed the damp copy of a journal in which she had formerly advertised that she was "Resting;" the touch of vanished hands sent little thrills to her heart as her gaze embraced familiar names.
She went back to the drawing-room fire, and read them diligently. Dusk and a footman crept in before she discovered Miss Tattie Lascelles, but that artist's announcement leapt to her with the electric light. Miss Tattie Lascelles informed the kingdom that she was specially engaged to create the part of "Delicia Potts" in the maritime musical farce entitled Little Miss Kiss-And-Tell, on Blithepoint Pier. The date chosen for this perfectly unimportant production was Monday, December 22nd. Then Rosalind, who was to go to the Marrables in Leicestershire for Christmas, wrote Lady Marrable a note of grieved excuse, and scribbled a letter to Tattie, which began, "Take two bedrooms in Blithepoint, and don't breathe a word to a soul till you see me."
And though the happily constituted may be sceptical again, she felt more joyous than she had done for five illustrious years.
Blithepoint is about thirty-three miles by rail from Sweetbay. It is a grey, bleak place, with the plainest female population in England. On three hundred days of the year the wind is due east, but on the other sixty-five it is southeast, and then the residents go about saying what "lovely weather they're having." Blithepoint is much larger than Sweetbay, and more fashionable. It is also nearly as dull. Nobody is aware how much can be spent on being deadly dull until he has stayed in a Blithepoint hotel. Rosalind was a shade uneasy in the thought that someone among the visitors might recognise her; she knew that at Christmas eccentric Londoners occasionally went down there, and wished afterwards they had been economical and gone to Egypt. But she didn't falter.
She ran away on Sunday the 21st. She had put on her simplest costume, and her portmanteau told no tales. To make-believe to the fullest extent, she travelled in a third-class compartment. Already she was greatly excited. As the train crawled out of Victoria she could have clapped her hands.
When she arrived it was eight o'clock, and a bitter evening. The scramble for luggage kept her shivering on the platform for ten minutes, and then a fly bumped her through the shuttered town. It was the hour of local dissipation; on one side of the favourite thoroughfare the blades of Blithepoint paraded jauntily, crying "Pip, pip" to stolid-faced young women on the other, who took no notice of them. Lady Darlington, reckless for sensations, envied these "roysterers" who could feel devilish gay so innocently.
The cab shaved a corner, and rattled into a neighbourhood of obscure apartment-houses. Her mutinous heart warmed with sentiment, and she forgot how cold her pretty feet were. The cab stopped. She saw the blind of the ground-floor window dragged aside; an impetuous figure appeared, and vanished. The street-door was pulled wide, and a girl with a cloud of hair, and a string of barbaric beads dangling to the waist, flew down the steps and hugged her.
"You trump! You've really come!"
"You duck! How jolly to see you!"