Too Old for Dolls. Anthony M. Ludovici
for dolls.
[1] First published in The New Age, December 4th, 1919.
Too Old for Dolls
CHAPTER I
On a vast Chesterfield, every unoccupied square inch of which seemed to bulge with indignant pride, Mrs. Delarayne reclined in picturesque repose. Her small feet, looking if possible more dainty than usual in their spruce patent leather shoes, were resting on a rich silk cushion whose glistening gold tassels lay heavily amid all the crushed splendour of the couch. Other cushions, equally purse-proud and brazen, supported the more important portions of the lady's frame, and a deep floorward curve in the line of the Chesterfield conveyed the impression that, however tenderly Mrs. Delarayne might wish to be embraced by her furniture and its wedges of down, she was at all events a creature of substantial proportions and construction.
The picture presented was one of careless and secure opulence.
The contents of the room in which Mrs. Delarayne rested had obviously been designed and produced by human effort of the most conscientious and loving kind. All the objects about her were treasures either of art or antiquity, or both, and stood there as evidence of the power which their present owner, or her ancestors, must have been able to exercise over hundreds of gifted painters, cabinet-makers, needlewomen, potters, braziers, carvers, metal-workers, and craftsmen of all kinds for generations.
It was late in June in the ninth year of King Edward VII's reign—that halcyon period when nobody who was anybody felt particularly happy, because no such person had actually experienced what unhappiness was. Certainly Mrs. Delarayne had not, unless she had shown really exceptional fortitude and self-control over her husband's death.
A sound in the room suddenly made her turn her head, and she dropped her book gently into the folds of her dress.
"My dear child," she exclaimed, addressing her elder daughter, "are you still there? I thought you had gone long ago! I must have been asleep."
"You did sleep, Edith dear," her daughter replied, "because I heard you snoring. You only picked up your book a moment ago."
Mrs. Delarayne examined her own blue-veined knotty hands with the expression of one who is contemplating a phenomenon that is threatening to become a nuisance, and then dropping them quickly out of sight again, she glanced eagerly round the room as if she wished to forget all about them. She did not relish her daughter's allusion to her snoring—another sign of the same depressing kind as her blue-veined knotty hands—and her next remark was made with what seemed unnecessary anger.
"Instead of wasting your time here, Cleo," she observed, picking up her book again, "why don't you go upstairs and pull some of those nasty black hairs off your upper lip? You know who's coming to-day, and you also know that young men, in this country at any rate, strongly object to any signs of temperament in a girl. They think it incompatible with their ideal of the angel, or the fairy, or some other nonsense."
Cleopatra rose, jerked her shoulders impatiently, and snorted.
"I should have thought it better to be natural," she blurted out. "If it's natural for me to have dark hairs on my upper lip, then surely I should not remove them."
Again Mrs. Delarayne dropped her book and glanced round very angrily. "Don't be stupid, Cleo!" she cried. "What do you suppose 'natural' means nowadays? Has it any meaning at all? Is it natural for you to blow your nose in a lace handkerchief? Is it natural for you to do your hair up? Is it natural for you to eat marrons glacés as you do at the rate of a pound and a half a week—yes, a pound and a half a week; I buy them so I ought to know, unless the servants get at them—when you ought to be living in a cave, dressed in bearskins and gnawing at the roots of trees? Don't talk to me about 'natural.' Nothing is natural nowadays, except perhaps the inexhaustible stupidity of people who choke over a little process of beautification and yet swallow the whole complicated artificiality of modern life."
As Mrs. Delarayne turned her refined and still very beautiful face to the light, it became clear that she at any rate did not choke over any "little process of beautification"; for she was at least fifty-five years of age, and at a distance of two or three yards, looked thirty.
Cleopatra moved mutinously towards the door.
"That's right, my dear," said her mother in more conciliatory tones. "I don't mind your upper lip; I like it. But then I understand. Denis does not understand, and I'm convinced that he doesn't like it."
Flushing slightly, Cleopatra turned to face her mother. "Edith dear, how can you talk such nonsense!" she exclaimed. "What do I care whether Denis likes it or not?"
Mrs. Delarayne smiled. "Well, I do, my dear. When you are my age you'll be as anxious as I am to get your daughters married."
The younger woman turned her head. "Married!" she cried. "Oh when shall I hear the end of that litany! I suppose you want me to marry anybody, it doesn't matter whom, so long as I——"
"H'm," grunted the parent. "I don't think the discussion of that particular point would prove profitable."
Cleopatra sailed haughtily out of the room, and there was just the suggestion of an angry slam in the way she closed the door after her.
She was now twenty-five years of age. "Much too old," was the mother's comment. "It must be this year or never." She was a good-looking girl, dark, with large intelligent eyes, a pretty, straight nose, and full well-shaped lips. About five foot six in height, she was also well developed. Certainly her colouring was not quite all that it might have been; but she was naturally a little anæmic, as all decent girls should be who, at twenty-five years of age, are still unmarried. "It seems absurd," thought her mother, "that such a creature should have had to wait so long." And then with an effort she turned her thoughts to less depressing matters.
Mrs. Delarayne was a widow. Her late husband, a wealthy, retired Canadian lawyer, had been dead four years, having left her in her fifty-first year very comfortably off with two attractive daughters. She had inherited everything he possessed, including two handsome establishments, the one in Kensington and the other at Brineweald, Kent—and in his will there had not been even a small special provision for either of his children. Economically, therefore, Cleopatra and Leonetta Delarayne were bound hand and foot to their mother. But although Mrs. Delarayne was by no means averse to power, she wielded it so delicately in her relations with her offspring, that after their father's death neither of her daughters ever learnt to doubt that what was "Edith's" was theirs also. In regard to one question alone did Mrs. Delarayne ever lay her hands significantly upon her gold bags—and that was marriage. She never concealed from them that she would be liberal to the point of recklessness if they married, but that she would draw in her purse-strings very tightly, indeed, if they remained spinsters. In fact it was understood that when she died each of her daughters, if wed, would inherit half her wealth, but if they remained old maids, the bulk of it would most certainly go to some promising though impecunious young man in her circle.
She professed to loathe the sight, so common alas! in England, of the affluent spinster, "growing pointlessly rotund on rich food at one of the smug hotels or boarding-houses for parasitic nonentities, which are distributed so plentifully all over the land," while thousands of promising young men had to wait too long before they were able to take their bride to the altar. It was her view that this feature of social life in England was truly the white man's burden, and she vowed that no money of hers would ever help to produce so nauseating a spectacle. Behind Mrs. Delarayne's laudable views on this subject, however, there were doubtless other and less patriotic considerations, which may or may not be revealed in the course of this story.
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