The Messalina of the Suburbs. E. M. Delafield
what am I to do? I can't ever go anywhere, or have any amusement, without mother and Geraldine wanting to know all about it, and if I've been behaving myself, and 'cetera and 'cetera."
"Who is it this time. Elsie?"
"Only this fellow who's leaving to-morrow, the one that's been P.G. with us such a time, you know."
"Oh, Roberts?"
"'M. Well, so long, dear. Thanks awfully and all that. Ta-ta. Don't forget."
"Ta-ta," repeated Irene. "You'll have to tell me all about it on Sunday, mind."
"Awight."
Elsie turned and hurried homeward again, shrugging her shoulders up to her ears as the wind whistled shrilly down the street.
It was September, and cold.
When she was indoors again, she pulled off her tam-o'-shanter and stuffed it once more into the pocket of her serge skirt. Then she went upstairs to the room at the top of the house that she shared with Geraldine.
"I wish you'd knock."
"Whatever for? It's my room as much as yours, isn't it?" Elsie said without acrimony.
"Have you been washing up all this time?"
"Nellie went off early."
"The slut! Whatever for? Did you tell mother?"
"No. It wouldn't be a bit of good. She won't say anything to Nellie just now, whatever she does, with these new people just coming in."
"Oh, my head!" groaned Geraldine, not attending.
She lay on her bed, her white blouse crumpled, and a machine-made knitted coat, of shrimp-pink wool, drawn untidily over her shoulders. Her black Oxford shoes lay on the mat between the two beds, and her black stockings showed long darns and a hole in either heel.
Elsie began to arrange her hair before the looking-glass in a painted deal frame that stood on the deal chest-of-drawers. Presently she pulled a little paper bag from one of the drawers and began to suck sweets.
"No good offering you any, I suppose?"
"Don't talk of such a thing. Elsie, I can't come down to supper to-night. Do be a dear and bring me up a cup of tea—nice and strong. I've got a sort of craving for hot tea when I'm like this, really I have."
"You don't want much, do you, asking me to carry tea up four flights of stairs? I'll see what I can do." Elsie began to hum, in a small, rather tuneful little voice. She let her skirt fall round her feet as she sang and pulled off her blouse, revealing beautifully modelled breasts and shoulders. Her arms were a little too short, but the line from breastbone to knee was unusually good, the legs plump and shapely, with slender ankles and the instep well arched. She wore serge knickerbockers and a flimsy under-bodice of yellow cotton voile over a thick cotton chemise.
"Are you going out again?" asked Geraldine in a vexed, feeble voice.
"I may go round and sit with Ireen for a bit, after supper. I think she wants to go to the pictures, or something."
"How's Mr. Tidmarsh?"
"Going to die, I should think, by all accounts," glibly replied Elsie, although as a matter of fact she had forgotten to make any enquiry for Irene's father, who had for months past been dying from some obscure and painful internal growth.
"Why doesn't he go to a hospital?"
"Don't ask me. Ireen's always begging him to, but he won't."
"Old people are awfully selfish, I think," said Geraldine thoughtfully.
"Yes, aren't they? Look, I'm going to put this collar on my Sunday serge. That ought to smarten it up a bit."
She pinned the cheap lace round the low-cut V at the neck of an old navy-blue dress, and fastened it with a blue-stoned brooch in the shape of a circle. Her throat rose up, fresh and warm and youthful, from the new adornment.
"Isn't it time I put my hair up, don't you think?"
"No. You're only a kid. I didn't put mine up till I was eighteen. Mother wouldn't let me."
Elsie dragged a thick grey pilot cloth coat from behind the curtain of faded red rep that hung across a row of pegs and constituted the sisters' wardrobe, caught up the black tam-o'-shanter again and ran downstairs.
All the time that she was laying the table in the dining-room, which was next to the kitchen on the ground floor, Elsie hummed to herself.
The table-cloth was stained in several places, and she arranged the Britannia-metal forks and spoons, the coarse, heavy plates and the red glass water-jug so as to cover the spots as much as possible. In the middle of the table stood a thick fluted green glass with paper chrysanthemums in it.
Elsie added the cruet, two half-loaves of bread on a wooden platter with " Bread " carved upon it in raised letters, and put a small red glass beside each plate. Finally she quickly pleated half a dozen coloured squares of Japanese paper, and stuck one into each glass.
"Mother!" she called.
"What?" said Mrs. Palmer from the kitchen.
"It's ready laid."
"What are you in such a hurry for? Miss M. and Mr. Williams haven't turned up yet."
"Mr. Roberts wants his supper early, I know."
"You've no business to know, then. Well, put the ham on the table and the cold sweets, and he can go in when he pleases. This is Liberty Hall, as I call it."
Elsie carried in the ham. placing the dish on the table beside the carving-knife and fork that were raised upon a " rest " of electro plate. The glass dishes containing a flabby pink decoction of cornflour, and the apple tart, with several slices of pastry gone from the crust, she laid at the other end of the table.
"Supper's in, Mr. Roberts," she cried through the open door of the drawing-room, but this time she did not go in, and flew back to the kitchen before Mr. Roberts appeared!
"Geraldine's asking for tea, mother."
"There's a kettle on. She can come and fetch it."
"I'll take it up," Elsie volunteered.
"You're very obliging, all of a sudden. I'm sure I only wish you and your sister were more like sisters, the way Aunt Ada and Aunt Gertie and Mother were. There wasn't any of this bickering between us girls that I hear between you and Geraldine."
"You've made up for it later, then," said Elsie pertly. "The aunts never come here but they find fault with things, and Aunt Ada cries, and I'm sure you and Aunt Gertie go at it hammer and tongs."
"Don't you dare to speak to me like that, Elsie Palmer," said her mother abstractedly. (" Give me a spoon, there's a good gurl.") " What you gurls are coming to, talking so to your own mother, is more than I can say. What's at the bottom of all this talk about carrying tea to Geraldine? What are you going to do about your own supper?"
"Have it in here. I don't want much, anyway. I'm not hungry. Tea and bread and jam'll do."
"Please yourself," said Mrs. Palmer.
She was a large, shapeless woman, slatternly and without method, chronically aggrieved because she was a widow with two daughters, obliged to support herself and them by receiving boarders, whom she always spoke of as guests.
"Where are these what-you-may-call-'ems—these Williamses—coming from?" Elsie asked, while she was jerking tea from the bottom of a cocoa-tin into a broken earthenware tea-pot.
"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," said her mother.
She had no slightest reason to conceal the little she knew of the new people who were coming, but it was her habit to reply more or less in this fashion, semi-snubbing, semi-facetious, whenever either of her daughters asked a question.
"I'm sure I don't want to know," said Elsie, also from habit.
She