“Very inconsiderate!”
“Very inconvenient for the poor man! Only thirty-five, and a baby in arms. How will it help him if its hair curls? He puts the elder children to bed himself after his day’s work. Quite pathetic to hear of! Wouldn’t he have been happier with one?”
“Possibly—for the present. Later on the five will help him, and he will be glad and proud.”
“Children dragged up by strangers are not always a credit and pride. I hope these may be, but—If you’d heard my friend’s tales! They live in a flat. Quite a cheap block in some unfashionable neighbourhood. No society. He has one small maid and a housekeeper to look after the children. Most inefficient, Adela says. Holes in their stockings, and shrieks the moment their father is out of the building!”
“What was he like?”
“He? Who? Oh, the poor father! Handsome, she said, but haggard. The Templar nose. Poor, helpless man!”
A horrible feeling surged over me. I felt it rise, swell, crash over my head like a flood of water—a conviction that I was listening to no tale, but to a call—that Providence had heard my cry for work, and had answered it in the person of Wenham Thorold—handsome and haggard—in the person of little Thorold girls with holes in their stockings, of little Thorold boys who shrieked, and a Thorold baby with problematic hair that might, or might not, curl.
I cowered at the prospect. All very well to talk of my own way, and my own niche, all very well to dream of fairy wands, and of the soothing, self-ingratiating rôle of transforming other people’s grey into gold, while the said people sat agape, transfixed with gratitude and admiration, but—how extraordinarily prosaic and unromantic the process became when worked out in sober black and white. To mend stockings, to stifle shrieks, to be snubbed by a cross housekeeper; probably, in addition, to be sent to Coventry by the handsome and haggard one, under suspicion of manoeuvring for his affections. Yes, at the slightest interference he would certainly put me down as a designing female, with designs on his hand. At this last thought I sniggered, and Aunt Eliza looked severe.
“No subject for mirth, Evelyn. I’m surprised! You who are always talking of wanting to help—”
“But could I help him? I will, if I can. I have money and time, and am longing for work. Could I banish the housekeeper, and introduce a variation by paying to take her place?”