VII
The excitement of Muriel's début at the Club was not repeated. She certainly went often enough, and once or twice Godfrey Neale spoke to her. She did not, however, play with him again, but sat for most afternoons on the steps of the Pavilion until asked to join a Ladies' Double with Nancy Cartwright and Sybil Mason and poor Rosie Harpur, who had also just left school, and who could play tennis no better than she danced. Then the tennis season closed, and Connie returned to school, and Muriel learnt how to order joints from the butcher's and stores from the grocer's, and passed cakes at her mother's tea-parties, and helped her with the accounts for the Mother's Union and the G.F.S., and wondered when her real Life was going to begin.
Then came November and the Lord Mayor's dance, and Muriel woke up next morning to remember that she had come out.
It would all have been wonderful, if only her hair had kept tidy. Next morning she sat before her looking-glass and wrestled with aching arms to cure her hair of its irresistible tendency to fall in heavy locks upon her shoulders. It had spoilt everything, the band, the supper, the confused medley of names upon her programme. From her first ball, Muriel brought home only the memory of a scrambling rush to the cloak-room, and of her mother's worried face bending above hers in the long mirror.
She rested her chin on her hands and gazed at her thin, solemn face in the glass, wondering whether she was really very plain, or whether she would improve with time, as Mrs. Cartwright said that Adelaide had done.
She was so much absorbed by these reflections that she did not at first hear Annie, the housemaid, who knocked and came straight in with the ostentatious familiarity of the old servant.
"Miss Muriel, a telegram for you."
"For me?" People were not in the habit of sending telegrams to Muriel. She was not that kind of person.
"It's addressed to Muriel Hammond," remarked Annie stolidly. She, too, found something unbecoming in the sending of telegrams to Miss Muriel.
Muriel took the envelope and fingered it. "Where's Mother?" she asked slowly.