“You brought it on yourself, my Gwen, you’re setting out on a wrong tack. Let yourself go, child, be natural and strive after—nothing. All good will come to you by Divine right.”
A sudden chill ran down Mrs. Fellowes’ back, and a horrid little song began to croon in her ears, “Through much tribulation” were the words of it, and it kept on by fits all that evening.
“Turn round again and let me look at you, dear. Ah, I feel as if it were the coming-out night of my own child!”
There was a quick short catch in her voice. “Kiss me, Gwen, and, darling, don’t think of victory, there’s blood in the very thought! The head and front of a woman’s life is love, God’s, and mother’s, and man’s!”
“You’ve forgotten your audience,” said Gwen sarcastically, “I know nothing of the two first, the third will come, I suppose, in time—by all accounts, it comes always to the beautiful—but I shall not know what on earth to do with it when it arrives, and oh! I don’t want it! I want to ‘live at full pitch’, I couldn’t manage that with my feet clogged with honey!”
“You want to be loved, my dear, to be loved, loved, loved, and when you are, you’ll find out what an arrant little goose you are making of yourself.”
The girl turned suddenly upon her and gave her one of her most volcanic hugs. When Mrs. Fellowes got out of it, panting, she set to putting Gwen’s dress in order with sundry soft touches to neck and arms.
“I do love nice soft girlish flesh,” she said, with a little laugh. “Oh, how I do wish to goodness that John wasn’t a parson this night of all others! I want dreadfully to see you there, but he can’t come, it’s impossible, you know Sam Tidd is dying and even for you I couldn’t go without him!”
“Mrs. Fellowes!” she cried sweeping round, “are you not coming? This is, oh, this is awful! I never looked at your dress, I was so taken up with my own. Oh, to go alone with Lady Mary, and to my first ball!”
Her face was furious, and Mrs. Fellowes could have cried. “I did not tell you at first, I was so astonished at your brilliant completeness, I am sorry.”