"Yes, Fantail! I mean no, of course not! If Masterman refuses to take a bath, of course you are obliged to punish him. Yes, yes, I know. Wear something? What? What's that? Like you? But he's a man. Very well, we'll get him a pair of trousers. No, I won't forget. Yes, like mine, long ones like mine. It'll be all right. Take care with that cup. I think mother must be wanting you. Press the bell hard. Well, use your thumb then. That's it—harder. There, you see, mother does want you. Harriet says so."
Harriet, discreet almost to dumbness though she was, was capable of receiving a hint conveyed by her master's expressive eyebrows. And Fan passed on, leaving Heath alone with his piano. He played what he had played to Mrs. Mansfield to reassure himself. But he was not wholly reassured. And he knew that desire for a big verdict which often tortures the unknown creator. This was a new and, he thought, ugly phase in his life. Was he going to be like the others? Was he going to crave for notoriety? Why had the words of a mere girl, of no unusual cleverness or perception, had such an effect upon him? How thin she had looked that day when she emerged from her furs. That was before she started for Africa. The journey had surely made a great difference in her. She had come back more of a personage, more resolute. He felt the will in her as he had not felt it before. Till she came back he had only felt the strong soul in her mother. That was like an unwavering flame. How Mrs. Mansfield's husband must have loved her.
And Heath's hands slipped from the piano, and he dreamed over women.
He was conscious of solitude.
Susan Fleet was now in town. After the trip to Algiers she had been to Folkestone to visit her mother and dear old Mrs. Simpkins. She had also combined business with pleasure and been fitted for a new coat and skirt. A long telegram from Adelaide Shiffney called her back to London to under-take secretarial and other duties. As the season approached Mrs. Shiffney's life became increasingly agitated. Miss Fleet was an excellent hand at subduing, or, if that were impossible, at getting neatness into agitation. She knew well how to help fashionable women to be absurd with method. She made their silliness almost business-like, and assisted them to arrange their various fads in apple-pie order. Amid their often hysterical lives she moved with a coolness that was refreshing even to them. She never criticized their actions except sometimes by tacitly declining to join in them. And they seldom really wanted her to do that. Her value to them would have been diminished, if not destroyed, had she been quite as they were.
For the moment she was in Grosvenor Square.
Charmian envied Adelaide Shiffney. But she was resolved to see more of Miss Fleet at whatever cost. Recently she had been conscious of a tiny something, not much more than a thread, dividing her from her mother. Since her mother knew that she had made up her face on Claude Heath's account, she had often felt self-conscious at home. Knowing that, her mother, of course, knew more. If Charmian had told the truth she would not have minded the fact that it was known. But she did mind very much its being known when she had not told it. Sometimes she said to herself that she was being absurd, that Mrs. Mansfield knew, even suspected, nothing. But unfortunately she was a woman and, therefore, obliged to be horribly intelligent in certain directions. Her painted cheeks and delicately-darkened eyelashes had spoken what her lips had never said. It was vain to pretend the contrary. And she sedulously pretended it.
Her sense of separation from her mother made Charmian the more desirous of further intercourse with Susan Fleet. She felt as if only Miss Fleet could help her, though how she did not know. After repeated attempts on her part a meeting was at last arranged, and one afternoon the Theosophist made her appearance in Berkeley Square and was shown upstairs to Charmian's little sitting-room.
Charmian was playing a Polonaise of Chopin's on a cottage piano. She played fairly well, but not remarkably. She had been trained by a competent master and had a good deal of execution. But her playing lacked that grip and definite intention which are the blood and bone of a performance. Several people thought nevertheless that it was full of charm.
"Oh, Susan!"—she stopped abruptly on a diminished seventh. "Come and sit here! May I?"