“Oh, I think he’s charming,” said her mother. “So much tact, and most interesting, I should think, when one gets to know him. Ring the bell, Dicky dear, and when she comes to clear away tell her I shall be in my sitting-room if she wants me.”
“What are we going to do with ourselves every day in this place, Chips?” Teresa asked her sister when they were alone.
“Oh, what we have done before, I suppose,” Evangeline answered carelessly. She was reading the paper that had come too late to save Captain Hatton’s temper. The Labour Party, she read, were determined to do something which she did not understand, but which foreboded discomfort to everybody including their own supporters. They seemed to do it on purpose, like schoolmistresses, for some end which no reasonable young person desires, even if it could be achieved. Who exactly were the Labour party she wondered? The paper showed their photographs; clumsy figures in impossible hats, with impossible wives whose barren heads contrasted grotesquely with the hairiness of their men’s faces. She looked over the page. An officer, recently demobilised, had committed suicide owing to the difficulty of maintaining a blue-eyed child, whose portrait was inset below his own. The “night life” of a great city was said to be “glittering with unprecedented extravagance!” A millionaire had made a unique will at a place she had never heard of, providing for the purchase of fifty elephants, which were to be presented to the Corporation, and supported by public funds for the employment of superannuated keepers.
“But you forget that I haven’t done anything except go to classes,” pursued Teresa. “I am supposed to be ‘out’ now.”
“Jolly lucky for you,” remarked her sister. “There was no coming out in my time.”
“I don’t see much difference,” said Teresa, “except that you brought your own food to parties and didn’t wear such low necks. But anyhow, what I meant was that the war is over, and we’re in a new place and we’ve got some maids, and what is the next?”
“I don’t know,” Evangeline answered slowly. “There are days when I want to burst—you know—with a pop, in the sun on a still day—like that, (she waved her hands) and then I should become something quite different. I should be full of ideas. I don’t know what they would be but that is the exciting part.”
“This is a very dirty town,” Teresa said, as she stood at the window. “I haven’t seen any people yet who looked as if they liked what they were doing.”
Evangeline’s eager interest had faded. “Haven’t you?” she said.
“No, and I don’t know what Mother will do with herself, either. I suppose there must be some ordinary ones. She’s a social success, isn’t she?”