“Shall I have evening work, too?” she inquired blankly, and Miss Rhodes laughed with brutal enjoyment.
“Rather! French compositions on the attributes of a true woman, or, ‘How did you spend your summer holiday?’ with all the tenses wrong, and the idioms translated word for word. And every essay a practical repetition of the one before. It’s not once in a blue moon that one comes across a girl with any originality of thought. Oh, yes! that’s the way we shall spend five evenings a week. You will sit at that side of the table, I will sit at this, and we’ll correct and yawn, and yawn and correct, and drink a cup of cocoa and go to bed at ten. Lively, isn’t it?”
“Awful! I never thought of homework. But if Saturday is a whole holiday there will still be one night off. I shall make a point of doing something exciting every Saturday evening.”
“Exciting things cost money, and, as a rule, when you have paid up the various extras, there’s no money to spare. I stay in bed till ten o’clock on Saturday, and then get up and wash blouses, and do my mending, and have a nap after lunch, and if it’s summer, go and sit on a penny chair in the park, or take a walk over Hampstead Heath. In the evening I read a novel and have a hot bath. Once in a blue moon I have an extravagant bout, and lunch in a restaurant, and go to an entertainment—but I’m sorry afterwards when I count the cost. On Sunday I go to church, and wish some one would ask me to tea. They don’t, you know. They may do once or twice, when you first come up, but you can never ask them back, and your clothes get shabby, and you know nothing about their interests, so they think you a bore, and quietly let you drop.”
A smothered exclamation burst from Claire’s lips; with a sudden, swirling movement she leapt up, and fell on her knees before Miss Rhodes’s chair, her hands clasping its arms, her flushed face upturned with a desperate eagerness.
“Miss Rhodes! we are going to live together here, we are going to share the same room, and the same meals. Would you—if any one offered you a million pounds, would you agree to poison me slowly, day by day, dropping little drops of poison into everything I ate and everything I drank, while you sat by and watched me grow weaker and weaker till I died?”
“Good heavens, girl—are you mad! What in the world are you raving about?”
Miss Rhodes had grown quite red. She was indignant; she was also more than a little scared. The girl’s sudden change of mood was startling in itself, and she looked so tense, so overwhelmingly in earnest. What could she mean? Was it possible that she was a little—touched?
“I suppose you don’t realise it, but it’s insulting even to put such a question.”
“But you are doing it! It’s just exactly what you are beginning already. Ever since I arrived you’ve been poisoning me drop by drop. Poisoning my mind! I am at the beginning of my work, and you’ve been discouraging me, frightening me, painting it all black. Every word that you’ve said has been a drop of poison to kill hope and courage and confidence—and oh, don’t do it! don’t go on! I may be young and foolish, and full of ridiculous ideas, but let me keep them as long as I can! If all that you say is true, they will be knocked out of me soon enough, and I—I’ve never had to work before, or been alone, and—and it’s only two days since my mother left me to go to India—all that long way—and left me behind! It’s hard enough to go on being alone, and believing it’s all going to be couleur de rose, but it will be fifty times harder if I don’t. Please—please don’t make it any worse!”