“Well, then, don’t look prettier than that square Joan, and don’t let the wave in your hair show.”
The Alderney calf eyes brimmed anew with tears. Dulcie drooped her pin of a head. Like that defunct noodle, her mother, she lived solely for clothes and poetry and the admiration of the uncorseted sex. She had come into the world a little late. She conformed to the best Victorian ideals, but there are men still lurking in secluded rural districts if one could but find them, to whom her cheap appeal might be irresistible. I had hopes she might secure a husband if she took a country engagement. I proceeded with my discourse. It spread over Jimmy as well. I did not bid her pure eyes look into depths of depravity but I did make her understand that Mrs. Cross was becoming rather stout and middle-aged, and that if Mr. Cross blew soap bubbles in the schoolroom too frequently, she, Dulcie, might find that her French accent was not good enough for her young charges.
Dulcie has not the faintest gleam of humour, but she is docility itself.
She appeared next day staid, flat-figured, almost unpretty, her wonderful hair smoothed closely over her small ears.
I blessed her, and said as a parting word:
“Take an interest in astrology.”
And then the gardener wheeled her luggage on the barrow to the Manor, and Dulcie crept timidly behind it to her first situation.
In order that this tragic story, for it is a tragedy, should not expand into a novel, I will say at once that she was a complete success. That was because she did exactly as I told her. As a rule, very silly people never will do what they are told. But in that one point Dulcie was no fool.
She was lamentably weak with the children. She had no art of teaching. She did not encourage Joan to preserve a burnished mind, but she took to astrology like a duck to water. From the first she was deeply interested in it, and believed in it with flawless credulity.