She was very tired, Guy said, and ought to lie down before dinner. Would I show her to her room with Zillah, her maid? Then for the first time I noticed a dark-haired girl who had alighted from the carriage and stood holding Daisy's traveling bag and wraps.
"Her waiting maid, whom we found in Boston," Guy explained when we were alone. "She is so young and helpless, and wanted one so badly, that I concluded to humor her for a time, especially as I had not the most remote idea how to pin on those wonderful fixings which she wears. It is astonishing how many things it takes to make up the tout ensemble of a fashionable woman," Guy said, and I thought he glanced a little curiously at my plain cambric wrapper and smooth hair.
Indeed he has taken it upon himself to criticise me somewhat! thinks I am too slim, as he expresses it, and that my head might be improved if it had a more snarly appearance. Daisy, of course, stands for his model, and her hair does not look as if it had been combed in a month, and yet Zillah spends hours over it. She—that is, Daisy—was pleased with her boudoir, and gave vent to sundry exclamations of delight when she entered it and skipped around like the child she is, and said she was so glad it was blue instead of that indescribable drab, and that room is almost the only thing she has expressed an opinion about since she has been here. She does not talk much except to Zillah, and then in French, which I do not understand. If I were to write just what I think I should say that she had expected a great deal more grandeur than she finds. At all events, she takes the things which I think very nice and even elegant as a matter of course, and if we were to set up a style of living equal to that of the Queen's household I do believe she would act as if she had been accustomed to it all her life; or, at least, that it was what she had a right to expect. I know she imagines Guy a great deal richer than he is; and that reminds me of something which troubles me.
Guy has given his name to Dick Trevylian for one hundred thousand dollars. To be sure, it is only for three months, and Dick is worth three times that amount, and an old friend and every way reliable and honest. And still I did not want Guy to sign. I wonder why it is that women will always jump at a conclusion without any apparent reason. Of course, I could not explain it, but when Guy told me what he was going to do, I felt in an instant as if he would have it all to pay and told him so, but he only laughed at me and called me nervous and fidgety, and said a friend was good for nothing if he could not lend a helping hand occasionally. Perhaps that is true, but I was uneasy, and shall be glad when the time is up and the paper canceled.
Our expenses since Daisy came are double what they were before, and if we were to lose one hundred thousand dollars now we should be badly off. Daisy is a luxury Guy has to pay for, but he pays willingly and seems to grow more and more infatuated every day. "She is such a sweet-tempered, affectionate little puss," he says; and I admit to myself that she is sweet-tempered, and that nothing ruffles her, but about the affectionate part I am not so certain. Guy would pet her and caress her all the time if she would let him, but she won't.
"Oh, please don't touch me. It is too warm, and you muss my dress," I have heard her say more than once when he came in and tried to put his arm about her or take her in his lap.
Indeed, her dress seems to be uppermost in her mind, and I have known her to try on half a dozen different ones before she could decide in which she looked the best. No matter what Guy is doing, or how deeply he is absorbed in his studies, she makes him stop and inspect her from all points and give his opinion, and Guy submits in a way perfectly wonderful to me who never dared to disturb him when shut up with his books.
Another thing, too, he submits to which astonishes me more than anything else. It used to annoy him terribly to wait for anything or anybody. He was always ready, and expected others to be, but Daisy is just the reverse. Such dawdling habits I never saw in any person. With Zillah to help her dress she is never ready for breakfast, never ready for dinner, never ready for church, never ready for anything, and that, in a household accustomed to order and regularity, does put things back so and make so much trouble.
"Don't wait breakfast for me, please," she says, when she has been called for the third or fourth time, and if she can get us to sit down without her she seems to think it all right, and that she can dawdle as much as she likes.
I wonder that it never occurs to her that to keep the breakfast table round, as we must, makes the girls cross and upsets the kitchen generally. I hinted as much to her once when the table stood till ten o'clock, and she only opened her great blue eyes wonderingly, and said mamma had spoiled her, but she would try and do better, and she bade Zillah call her at five the next morning, and Zillah called her, and then she was a half-hour late. Guy doesn't like that, and he looked daggers on the night of the reception, when the guests began to arrive before she was dressed! And she commenced her toilet, too, at three o'clock! But she was wondrously beautiful in her bridal robes, and took all hearts by storm. She is perfectly at home in society, and knows just what to do and say so long as the conversation keeps in the fashionable round of chit-chat, but when it drifts into deeper channels she is silent at once, or only answers in monosyllables. I believe she is a good French scholar, and she plays and sings tolerably well, and reads the novels as they come out, but of books and literature, in general, she is wholly ignorant, and if Guy thought to find in her any sympathy with his favorite studies and authors he is terribly mistaken.