“Bring her too,” said Eileen. “There’s work for all.”
Brand was startled by this, and a sudden light leapt into his eyes.
“By Jove!... But I’m afraid not. That’s impossible.”
So it was only a week we had with Eileen, but in that time we had some good meetings and merry adventures. Brand and I rowed her on the lake in Kensington Gardens, and she told us Irish fairy-tales as she sat in the stern, with her hat in her lap, and the wind playing in her brown hair. We took her to the Russian Ballet and she wept a little at the beauty of it.
“After four years of war,” she said, “beauty is like water to a parched soul. It is so exquisite it hurts.”
She took us one day into the Carmelite church at Kensington, and Brand and I knelt each side of her, feeling sinners with a saint between us. And then, less like a saint, she sang ribald little songs on the way to her mother’s house in Holland Street, and said, “Drat the thing!” when she couldn’t find her key to unlock the door.
“Sorry, Biddy my dear,” she said to the little maidservant who opened the door. “I shall forget my head one day.”
“Sure, Miss Eileen,” said the girl, “but never the dear heart of you, at all, at all.”
Eileen’s mother was a buxom, cheery, smiling Irishwoman who did not worry, I fancy, about anything in the world, and was sure of Heaven. Her drawing-room was littered with papers and novels, some of which she swept off the sofa with a careless hand.
“Won’t you take a seat then?”