Christina came on to us for a few days after staying with her mother-in-law, and brought her sewing-machine, The Little Wanzer, and taught Ariadne and me to manage that wretched tension of which one hears so much. She nearly lockstitched one of my ears to the table, as I was learning with all my might, but it was worth it, and to Ariadne it was an advent.
Up to now, she has always thought she looked very nice in her bags with holes in them for the arms, and her twenty necklaces on at once, and her undescribable colours. Beautiful colours never seem to look quite clean, do you know? It is all very well for George, he is an author and not young, but young men like you to look fresh, and well-groomed, and above all to have a waist. Now a waist is not even allowed to be mentioned in our house. Mother left off hers, and her ear-rings too, at George’s request, when she married him, and as she never goes anywhere, she does not feel the want of them, but even when Ariadne was seventeen, Elizabeth Cawthorne said that it was time that she began to see about making herself a waist, and although George laughed Ariadne to death about it when she told him what the cook had said, yet it sank in, and I used to wake up in the grey winter mornings and find Ariadne sitting up in bed like a new sort of Penelope taking tucks in her stays, which Mother made her take out again in the daytime, knowing how George would disapprove of it.
Ariadne managed to “sneak” a waist, and George never noticed. That is the odd part of it; we all think that that inch more or less makes such a difference, and we may be panting with uncomfortableness all the time, and to the outward eye look as thick as ever!
Ariadne’s figure is not her best point. Her hair is. It is well to find out one’s best points early in life and stick to them, as they say of friends. Ariadne trains hers day and night in the way it should go, but doesn’t want. I wonder it stands it, and doesn’t come out in self-defence! It is what they call Burne-Jones hair, like cocoanut fibre, I think, but Papa’s friends admire it, and she gets the reputation of being a beauty on it in our set.
But in Lady Scilly’s set, that is Simon’s set more or less, they think her a pretty girl, badly turned out!
“Ah, you are your father’s daughter, I see!” Christina said at once to her, when she caught her sewing a black boot-button on to her nightgown, because she couldn’t find a white one. I did not mention that I myself had begun to sew one of Ariadne’s iron pills on to my shoe, and only stopped because it didn’t seem to have any shank. But I was saying, we have all the trouble in the world to tidy up Ariadne before she goes down to the drawing-room to receive Simon when he calls. Ariadne comes out of her room half-dressed, and somebody catches her on the landing and buttons her frock, and perhaps the housemaid on the next floor points out to her that she hasn’t got on any waistband, and another in the hall sticks a pin in somewhere, that shines in the sun, when she gets into the drawing-room, and Simon puts his head on one side and looks at it fixedly.
“Dégagée, as usual!” he says in his bad French accent, and yet he was two years at a crammer’s to get him into the Foreign Office, and one in Germany to get polish, all before we knew him. He has got something better than polish, I think, and that is breeding. He is not the least shop-walkerish, and yet they have the best manners in the world. Simon says the most awful things, rude things, natural things, but how can one be angry with him, when he says them with his head on one side? Not Ariadne, certainly, and yet she can’t stand chaff as a general thing. Peter Ball could make her cry by crooking his little finger at her.
Simon has curly hair—not at all neat—which he can neither help nor disguise, though he forces Truefitt to shingle it like a convict’s so as to get rid of the curly ends, which are his greatest beauty, in mine and Ariadne’s estimation. “Can’t help it. Couldn’t bear to look like one of those chaps.”
He means the short-cuffed, long-haired, weepy-eyed men he meets here sometimes; not so often as before though, for George is revising his visiting-list. Ariadne hates them too, she hates everything artistic now. She can’t bear our ridiculous house, all entrances and vestibules, and no bedrooms and boudoirs to speak of. She laughs at the people who come to describe it and photograph it for the Art papers, and wonders if they have any idea how uncomfortable it is inside, and how different from Highsam that Simon is always telling her about. As for Simon, he seems to think it rather a disgraceful thing to get into the papers at all, as bad as getting summoned in the police court. His father won’t let Highsam be done for Rural Life, or lend Mary Queen of Scots’ cradle to the New Gallery. Mr. Frederick Cook offered to put Almeria’s portrait in The Bittern with her prize bull-dog, Caspar, but Almeria wrote him such a letter, almost rude, giving him her mind about interviewing. She has a mind on most subjects and never drifts. Simon has the greatest respect for her views. On stable matters certainly, I grant her that, but what can a country mouse, however high-toned, know of the troubles of town? Her father trusts her to go to Wrexham and buy the carriage horses, for he is no judge of the “festive gee” now, he says. Almeria likes art, too, and buys up all the Christmas numbers, and frames the pictures out of them and hangs them on the walls of Highsam Hall. Simon has borrowed her opinions on art, and dress too, and they aren’t the same as Ariadne’s.
“Great Scott!” he said to Ariadne, when she came down to see him one afternoon when he called, wearing her best new Medicean dress that George had specially designed for her. “If Almeria saw you in that frock, with your sleeves tied up with bootlaces! I do hope you won’t wear that absurd sort of fakement at my Aunt Meg’s on the twenty-fourth! If you do, I swear I won’t dance with you in it!”