Mrs Simons might have added that adventures are to the adventurous. Olive’s father was Jack Agar, of the Agars of Lyme, and he married his cousin. If Mrs Simons had known all that must be implied in this statement she might have held forth at some length on the subject of heredity, and have traced the girl’s dislike of boiled potatoes to her great-great-uncle’s friendship with Lord Byron, and her longing for sunshine to a still more remote ancestress, lady-in-waiting to a princess at the court of Le Roi Soleil.
Adventures to the adventurous! The Agars were always aware of the magnificent possibilities of life and love, and inclined to ignore the unpleasant actualities of existence and the married state; hence some remarkable histories, and, in the end, ruin. Olive was the last of the old name. Jack Agar had died at thirty, leaving his wife and child totally unprovided for but for the little annuity that had sufficed for dress in the far-off salad days, and that now must be made to maintain them. Olive was sent to a cheap boarding-school, where she proved herself a fool at arithmetic; history, very good; conduct, fair; according to her reports. She was not happy there. She hated muddy walks and ink-stained desks and plain dumpling, and all these things seemed to be an essential part of life at Miss Blake’s.
She left at eighteen, and thereafter she and her mother lived together in lodgings at various seaside resorts within their means, practising a strict economy, improving their minds at the free library, doing their own dressmaking, and keeping body and soul together on potted meats, cocoa and patent cereals. Mary Agar rebelled sometimes in secret, regretting the lack of “opportunities,” i.e., of possible husbands. She would have been glad to see her daughter settled. The Agars never used commonsense in affairs of the heart. Her own marriage had been very foolish from a worldly point of view, and her sister Alice had run away with her music-master.
“In those days girls had a governess at home and finished with masters, and young Signor Menotti came twice a week to our house in Russell Square to teach Alice the guitar and mandoline. We shared singing and French lessons, but she had him to herself. He was very good-looking, dark, and rather haggard, and just shabby enough to make one sorry for him. When Alice said she would marry him mamma was furious, but she was just of age, and she had a little money of her own, an annuity as I have, and she went her own way. They were married at a registry office, I think, and soon afterwards they went to his home in Italy. Mamma never forgave, but Alice and I used to write to each other, and her eldest child was called after me. I don’t know how it turned out. She never said she was unhappy, but she died after eight years, leaving her three little girls to be brought up by their father’s sister.”
Olive knew little more than this of her aunt. Further questioning elicited the fact that Signor Menotti’s name was Ernesto.
“The girls are your cousins, Olive dear, and you have no other relations. I should like to see them.”
“So should I.”
Olive knew all about the annuity, but she had not realised until her mother died quite suddenly, of heart failure after influenza, what it means to have no money at all. She was dazed with grief at first, and Mrs Simons was as kind as could be expected and did not thrust the weekly bill upon her on the morning after the funeral, though it was due on that day. But lodgers are not supposed to give much trouble, and though death is not quite so heinous as infectious disease or ink spilt on the carpet it is still distinctly not a thing to be encouraged by too great a display of sympathy, and Olive was soon made to understand that it behoved her to seek some means of livelihood, some way out into the world.
No proverb is too hackneyed to be comforting at times, and the girl reminded herself that blood is thicker than water as she looked among her mother’s papers for the Menotti address. They were her cousins, birds of a feather. She wrote them a queer, shy, charming letter in strange Italian, laboriously learnt out of a grammar, and then—since some days must elapse before she could get any answer—she conscientiously studied the advertisement columns of the papers. She might be a nursery governess if only she could be sure of herself at long division, or—horrid alternative—a useful help. Mrs Simons suggested a shop.
“You have a nice appearance, miss. Perhaps you would do as one of the young ladies in the drapery department, beginning with the tapes and thread and ribbon counter, you know, and working your way up to the showroom.”