Too Old for Dolls. Anthony M. Ludovici
of the depth of these two women's attachment to each other, and he bowed his head.
"Thank you, Cleo," Mrs. Delarayne replied after satisfying herself that there was not a trace of insincerity either in the voice or features of her daughter. "We'll see."
She rose, smoothed down the front of her frock with a few rapid gestures, and turned to the younger people.
"Come on!" she said. "You and I cannot afford to lose our beauty sleep, Cleo. Two hours before midnight—you know the time, and it's now half-past nine."
Evidently Mrs. Delarayne intended to be rude to Denis. Sir Joseph had told her something across the telephone, and she had expected a result which had not occurred.
The following morning after breakfast Mrs. Delarayne as usual retired to the bureau in the library where every day she devoted at least thirty minutes to her housekeeping duties.
Silently on this occasion Cleopatra followed in her wake, and pretending to be in search of a book, lingered in her mother's company longer than was her wont after the morning meal. Book after book was taken down from the shelves, perfunctorily examined and returned to its place. Once or twice the girl looked towards her mother, possibly in the hope that the elder woman would provide the opening to the subject that was uppermost in both their minds. At last Cleopatra spoke.
"Baby comes home to-day," she said, in a voice strained to appear cheerful.
Mrs. Delarayne looked up from a tradesman's book. "Yes," she sighed wearily. "One of Sir Joseph's cars is coming to fetch us at half-past two. The train reaches King's Cross at three. Will you come?"
"Of course—rather!" Cleopatra exclaimed, taking down another book and examining it cursorily.
There was silence again, and Cleopatra could be heard running quickly through the pages of the volume she held.
"What is Baby going to do?" she asked after a while.
"Don't ask me!" exclaimed the mother.
"Haven't you any plans?" the daughter enquired with studied indifference, her eyes wandering vacantly over the letter-press before them.
"Plans—what plans?" ejaculated the old lady. "I suppose the poor child will have to put up with us now. You don't suppose we can send her gadding about the Continent again?"
"I didn't dream of any such thing!" Cleopatra protested a little guiltily.
"No, I promised her that she should come home for good after the School of Domesticity, and she expects it. You saw what she said in her last letter."
"Naturally," Cleopatra added, closing her book and replacing it hurriedly on the shelves.
"We'll have to put up with it—that's all, my dear. I hope she won't be too trying. But you must really help me a little by taking her off my hands, particularly on my Bridge and 'Inner Light' days."
Cleopatra cast a glance full of meaning at her mother, and quietly left the room. She had heard all she wanted to hear.
Meanwhile, the subject of this conversation, ensconced comfortably in the corner of a first-class carriage, was speeding rapidly towards London.
Looking remarkably at her ease in a smart tailor-made frock of navy serge, silk stockings, suede shoes, and a perfect summer hat trimmed with bright cherries as red as her lips, she sat amid a farraginous medley of newspapers, small parcels, and shiny leather traps, and presented an attractive picture of a flourishing schoolgirl of seventeen—careless, mischievous, and keenly, though discreetly, interested in everything about her;—but, perhaps a little too healthy, and certainly too beautiful, to be quite typical either of the class or of the kind of school from which she hailed.
Her large dark eyes, veiled by unusually long lashes, looked sharply at you and then quickly turned away, with that air of mystery and secrecy, and love of secrets at all costs—even mock secrets—peculiar to the young virgin of all climes. Occasionally in glancing away they would half close in a thoughtful smile, which, to the uninitiated, unaware of the irrepressible spirits of their owner, was as unaccountable as it was provoking.
There was an air of childhood still clinging, as if from habit alone, to the outward insignia of maturity, in this mercurial, magnetic, and undaunted young person; and in her malicious elfish eyes could be read the solemn determination to force every possible claim that her double advantage, as child and adult, could, according to the occasion, uphold.
Her thick dark hair did not hang down her back in the rich spiral curl which is now becoming so common among schoolgirls; for that it was too plentiful, too troublesomely luxuriant. It hung like heavy bronze in a thick stiff plait—a badge both of her robust youth and the redundant richness of her blood—and at its extremity it was tied with a broad ribbon of black silk. Beneath her hat, bold festoons of hair reached down almost to her eyebrows, and to these portions of her coiffure she constantly applied her soft shapely sun-tanned fingers, as if to reassure herself that they were keeping their proper position.
The roguish expression of her face was partly due to pure health and partly to wanton spirits, and her features possessed that exceptional animation which, even in the simple process of eating a fondant, produced the impression of extreme mobility.
Having long previously examined her fellow-passengers and judged them uninteresting, she divided her attention between the fleeting landscape at her side, a box of fruit creams, which she was consuming with grave perseverance, and the contents of a pocket-portfolio, which she appeared to be slowly sorting and weeding out. To everything she did, however, to each one of her movements, she had the air of imparting so much mysteriousness, so much elaborate secrecy, that she soon found herself the object of the united attention of all her companions. And occasionally when her fresh full lips parted in a smile at the things she read, the old gentleman opposite her had to turn also to the fleeting landscape as a prophylactic against the infection of her high spirits.
She gave the impression of that aggressive vitality with which Nature seems deliberately to equip her more favoured female children at this age, as if to challenge the other sex to a definite attitude immediately. A quivering freshness—the "bloom" of the poets—gave a soft shimmer to her skin of which the powder of later years is such a palpably poor travesty; her limbs were nicely rounded and not too fragile; her teeth, like Cleopatra's, were perfect, and although she was a trifle smaller than her sister, she was broad across the shoulders, and well developed.
Leonetta, as we have already seen, knew that she was attractive; but she did not know this fact as surely and unmistakably as—say, a philosopher looking at her did. She probably knew that she was sunburnt, for instance; but she was not aware of the depth which the dark natural virginal pigmentation of her neck, eyes, and knuckles, lent to the warm tanning of her skin. She did not know how prone the philosopher is to associate the combination of these two rich colourings with the wicked, dusky denizens of a tropical jungle—those creatures whose blood he suspects of being something deeper than red, who really look as if they were made from the earth and were going back to it, and who have nothing of that translucent pallor suggestive of heaven-sent and heaven-destined attributes.
She probably knew her dark eyes were fine and that their lashes were long; but she would have been surprised and perhaps even a little hurt if she had been told that their most striking feature was that, to every man, modest and shrewd enough to divine all that they could exact, they were terrifying. She knew her teeth were faultless; but she did not even suspect the thrill of pained joy that went through the philosopher's frame when he saw the life-hunger they revealed, and, what was more, the full deep bite and fast hold they would take of Life's entrails. A young girl's canines are self-revelatory in this respect. Let them be big and prominent, as Leonetta's were, and the fastness of her hold on Life, once she has bitten, promises to break all records. The sensitive philosopher has little patience with your fair delicate misses with small mouse-like canines. There are too many of them to begin with, and they are so instinctively ladylike.
Perhaps the most amusing thing in this world is to watch the antics of a large-canined virgin de bonne famille who is trying to