Barbara had wept. ‘Jamie, let’s go away . . . they hate us. Let’s go where nobody knows us. I’m twenty-one now, I can go where I like, they can’t stop me. Take me away from them, Jamie!’
Miserable, angry, and sorely bewildered, Jamie had put her arm round the girl. ‘Where can I take you, you poor little creature? You’re not strong, and I’m terribly poor, remember.’
But Barbara had continued to plead. ‘I’ll work, I’ll scrub floors, I’ll do anything, Jamie, only let’s get away where nobody knows us!’
So Jamie had turned to her music master in Inverness, and had begged him to help her. What could she do to earn her living? And because this man believed in her talent, he had helped her with advice and a small loan of money, urging her to go to Paris and study to complete her training in composition.
‘You’re really too good for me,’ he had told her; ‘and out there you could live considerably cheaper. For one thing the exchange would be in your favour. I’ll write to the head of the Conservatoire this evening.’
That had been shortly after the Armistice, and now here they were together in Paris.
As for Pat, she collected her moths and her beetles, and when fate was propitious an occasional woman. But fate was so seldom propitious to Pat—Arabella had put this down to the beetles. Poor Pat, having recently grown rather gloomy, had taken to quoting American history, speaking darkly of blood-tracks left on the snow by what she had christened: ‘The miserable army.’ Then too she seemed haunted by General Custer, that gallant and very unfortunate hero. ‘It’s Custer’s last ride, all the time,’ she would say. ‘No good talking, the whole darned world’s out to scalp us!’
As for Margaret Roland, she was never attracted to anyone young and whole-hearted and free—she was, in fact, a congenital poacher.
While as for Wanda, her loves were so varied that no rule could be discovered by which to judge them. She loved wildly, without either chart or compass. A rudderless bark it was, Wanda’s emotion, beaten now this way now that by the gale, veering first to the normal, then to the abnormal; a thing of torn sails and stricken masts, that never came within sight of a harbour.