“It’s some one knocking from underneath. It must be the Hermit, that bachelor creature who lives just below. He wants you to stop.”
“What cheek!” cried Hope. She was, as a rule, discreet and punctilious in her language, but there are points upon which the meekest among us are keenly sensitive, and when it came to interference with her practising, propriety flew to the winds. “What hateful cheek! What right has he to interfere! Has he hired the whole building? Does he think we are going to consult him about what we do? What next, indeed? I’ll try chromatics now, and see how he will like them. Cheek! Abominable cheek?”
She went to work more vigorously than ever, and Philippa thought it prudent to refrain from interference, but contented herself with hurrying preparations for tea; and for the time being there was no more knocking. Presumably the chromatics had reduced the listener to a condition of helpless despair.
On the third evening Theo made her appearance wearing her best fichu, and with a face wreathed in smiles. “I’ve got it!” she announced; and there was no need to ask to what she referred. The tension was over for the time being, and the young author worked up her subject with the usual enjoyment. When the story was finished the girls begged for a private reading; a request against which, as a rule, the author steadily set her face, so that, as usual, the first response was a refusal.
“I can’t. It is too cold-blooded. The members of one’s own family are too painfully critical. I’d rather face a dozen editors than you three girls.”
“Very unkind of you, then; that’s all I have to say,” said Philippa severely. “You know how interested we are; and if we are critical, surely it’s better to discuss faults with us than to let them go uncorrected. This is a special story, and in consideration of our anxiety—”
“Oh, well!” said Theo unwillingly, “I’ll read it if you like. Get your sewing, and don’t stare at me all the time. It’s quite short. You won’t like it, I expect. Let me sit near the lamp.”
She was evidently nervous, and her voice was decidedly shaky for the first few pages; but after that she forgot herself, and read with expression and power. If one of the girls moved, she looked up with a frown; and when Madge groaned and clasped her hands over her heart at a particularly touching part of the love-story, she stopped short and fixed her with a basilisk glare. It was a story of a truly modern type, which, so to speak, began at the end and worked slowly but surely back to the beginning. It was by no means certain, too, what the heroine did, or why she did it; and if one had been sceptically minded, one would have doubted whether the author knew herself. Hope was puzzled, Madge engrossed and curious; Philippa was frankly bored. Her own nature was straightforward and outspoken, and she had no patience with what seemed to be wilful obtuseness. Her attention waned as a Martha-like anxiety seized her in its grip; her eyes wandered to the clock, and her brow grew furrowed. Alas for the trials of the author in the household! At the very moment when Theo was preparing to deliver the crucial sentence on which hung the whole construction of the plot—in that thrilling moment wherein she paused and drew breath, the better to deliver it with due emphasis and dramatic effect—an anxious voice claimed precedence and cried loudly:
“Hope! It’s after five. Did you remember to order the fish?”
It was too much for flesh and blood to endure. Up bounced Theo; down dashed the MS on the table; bang went the door after her departing figure as she fled to her bedroom for refuge, while the two younger sisters stared across the room with eyes large with reproach.