“I would rather not. I can get on so much better by myself.”
“Are you writing to India—to your mother?”
“N–no, not just now.”
“Then really, dear, you must come downstairs! This won’t do! Your mother wished you to have a fire in your room, so that you might be able to sit here when you wanted to be alone, but she never meant you to make it a habit, or to spend all your spare time alone. It isn’t healthy to use a room night and day, and to burn so much gas, and it isn’t sociable, Peggy dear. Mellicent has just been complaining that you are hardly ever with them nowadays. Come along, like a good girl; put the writing away and amuse yourself downstairs. You have done enough work for one day. You don’t do me credit with those white cheeks.”
Peggy stood with her eyes fixed on the carpet without uttering a word. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say, “Oh, do let me stay upstairs as much as I like for a day or two longer. I have a piece of work on hand which I am anxious to finish. It is a secret, but I hope to tell you all about it soon, and I am sure you will be pleased.” If she had done so, she knew perfectly well how hearty and pleasant would have been Mrs Asplin’s consent; but there are some states of mind in which it is a positive pleasure to be a martyr, and to feel oneself misunderstood, and this was just the mood in which Peggy found herself at present. She heard Mrs Asplin sigh, as if with anxiety and disappointment, as she left the room, and shrugged her shoulders in wilful indifference.
“She thinks I like sitting shivering here! I slave, and slave, from morning till night, and then people think I am sulky! I am not working for myself. I don’t want the wretched old ten pounds; I could have ten pounds to-morrow if I needed it. Mother said I could. I am working to help Rob, and now I shall have to sit up later, and get up earlier than ever, as I mayn’t work during the day. Mellicent said I was never with them, did she! I don’t see that it matters whether I am there or not! They don’t want me; nobody wants me, now that Rosalind has come! I hate Rosalind—nasty, smirking, conceited thing!” and Peggy jerked the towel off the writing-table and flicked it violently to and fro in the air, just as a little relief to her overcharged feelings.
She was crossing the hall with unwilling steps when the postman’s knock sounded at the door, and three letters in long, narrow envelopes fell to the ground. Each envelope was of a pale pink tint, with a crest and monogram in white relief; one was addressed to the Misses Asplin, another to Oswald Elliston, and a third to Miss Mariquita Saville.
“Invitations!” cried Peggy, with a caper of delight. “Invitations! How scrumptious!” Her face clouded for a moment as the sight of the letters “R.D.” suggested the sender of the letters; but the natural girlish delight in an unexpected festivity was stronger even than her prejudices, and it was the old, bright Peggy who bounced into the schoolroom holding up the three letters, and crying gleefully, “Quis, Quis, something nice for somebody! An invitation!”
“Ego, Ego!” came the eager replies, and the envelopes were seized and torn open in breathless haste.
“From Rosalind! Oh, how funny! ‘Requests the pleasure—company—to a pink luncheon.’ What in the world is a ‘pink luncheon’?—‘on Tuesday next, the 20th inst.’”