Often, when I’ve imagined something was going to be so easy and delightful, it’s turned out to involve every kind of difficulty and unpleasantness. Like earning my own living in the City. And then other things, which I’ve foreseen as such odious and constant worries, have proved to be not nearly so bad after all; in fact, quite amusing—that’s like agreeing to be “friends—real chums” with my employer Mr. Waters.

He’s really quite—I don’t know how to put it—different.

I know he’s trying to be “decent” to me, and yet not trying hard enough to make me feel it’s my duty to “play up” and to be unnaturally sweet in return.

Instead, I am beginning to feel that I shall soon be able to like him genuinely, just as I like Blanche and Theo, though perhaps not quite as well as I like his mother, who seems more of a darling every day.

This morning after I came back from driving to the station with the Governor, she called me, and I went into the little tiny room off the drawing-room, which is furnished only with one deep chair and her writing-table, but of which each wall is simply covered with framed photographs of her children at every stage.

She was sitting at the writing-table, with a pile of letters to answer.

“Sit in the big chair, Nancy. I won’t keep you more than a minute,” she said, turning to me, “but I wanted to speak to you. It’s about our summer plans, dear.”

“Oh, yes,” I began. The fortnight which I’d arranged to spend at The Lawn—and which seems about three months now!—is up to-morrow. I was just going to remind her of this, when she said, “We all—not only Billy!—are so anxious that you shall stay on, Nancy. You will, won’t you, if you haven’t made other arrangements?”

“Oh! I’ve made none,” I said, hesitating both in my official and unofficial capacities. I didn’t mind staying on, now. Still—ought I to do it?

“We have only a week or so,” said Mrs. Waters, “before we go away to the sea. That is, the girls and I are off on Saturday week to Anglesey.”

“To Porth Cariad?” I said. “Isn’t that the place—he told me about?”

“Yes; Billy’s so fond of it! It’s just a tiny place with a station and a post-office and a handful of cottages. We take the two cottages nearest the sea, and let just the woman and her daughter ‘do’ for us. He likes that so much better than going to a ‘resort’ with hotels and esplanades and things.”

“Of course!”

Mrs. Waters gave me a pleased, girlish smile.

“Then, if you do too, you’ll come, won’t you? He didn’t seem sure whether”—she laughed a little—“whether it mightn’t bore you rather; but he made me promise to ask you. Will you come?”

“I should like it very much,” I said sincerely, for, since this revised version of my relations with Mr. Waters, there’s an end of any more complications for the present. It has been worth while sinking the small satisfactions of being “cattish” and making two-edged remarks to my employer. I seem, now, to have all the advantages of being engaged to a quite friendly and easy-to-get-on-with young man, without the horrible disadvantage of feeling it’s a permanency. Yes; I do like having the freedom of a man’s conversation and society without arriÈre pensÉe. And it seems to me that the only way to enjoy them is by being officially—that is, nominally, engaged to the man! In any other sort of acquaintanceship there looms the possibility of the “Real” engagement. All the time that the girl and the man are having what might be a jolly and unembarrassed conversation about really interesting things—not Love and nonsense—that possibility is being conjugated between them by some horrid form of Conscience or Self-consciousness. Something like this:

“I might fall in love.”

“Thou mightest fall in love.”

“She might think I was falling in love.”

“He might imagine I wanted him to fall in love.”

“We might both fall in love.”

“You might tease us about being in love.”

“They might say we were actually engaged!”

All this we—Mr. Waters and I—are spared. The feeling of it, which is there like a brick wall between almost every unattached young man and young woman, I know; I’ve felt it there between Sydney and myself, long, long before I knew he admired me.

And this same wall—well, it’s not so much that it’s never been built, or even that it’s been pulled down, as that it’s not between Mr. Waters and me, just because we’re sitting on the top of it and talking all the more comfortably for having climbed it together!

Consequently, I really was pleased to accept Mrs. Waters’ invitation. And when she said further, “Billy won’t be able to join us for a fortnight, I’m afraid. Will you go back, dear, to this friend of yours you live with in London, and come on later? Or—of course you know we should love it!—could you come with Blanche and Theo and me?” I said, “Do let me come with you and the girls.”

“That’s right,” said the Governor’s mother. “Then I shall write to Mrs. Roberts at the cottages, and tell her to have the extra bedroom in my cottage ready for you.”

“And I will write to Cicely Harradine—that’s the girl I live with,” said I. “And I ought to go up one day this week to the flat, and see her and collect a few things.”

“Go up on Saturday, dear,” suggested the Governor’s mother. “Then Billy could motor you up; he would like that so much.”

She has so many plans of this kind for me, fostered by this delusion that her son is always on the look-out for a chance to be alone with me.

Of course it’s not quite the same kind of delusion now that it was a week ago.

The Governor’s “Good!” when he heard that I was going to spend the summer holidays with them at that curiously-named place in Anglesey was quite as sincere in its way, I do believe, as Theo’s “Joy! Oh, it will be twice as lovely as usual with Nancy there to show everything to!” He wasn’t the least bored, either, when Mrs. Waters put forward the plan of his motoring me up to town.

“Rather! A good idea,” he said briskly. “What about starting earlier after lunch, and doing a matinÉe this afternoon? You’ve never been to the theatre with me yet, Nancy, and—we talked about that one day.”

“So we did,” said I demurely, remembering that grisly occasion at the Carlton.

“Well, would you care about it?”

“I should! Why! I haven’t been to the theatre for ages. I haven’t seen anything; not even Milestones!”

“Care for that?”

“Anything, so long as it’s a play!”

“Then I’ll ’phone up now for seats.”

And as he spoke through the telephone that is fixed up in the den, I had almost a start at what seemed to me the strangeness of my employer’s voice. Yet that curt, metallic “Hullo!” used to be familiar enough to me—the only tone of his voice, indeed, that I’d ever heard!

Passing the long waiting queue at the gallery entrance to the Royalty this afternoon, I glanced idly towards all those people who had stood for over an hour, probably, to get a shilling seat; the playgoers to whom I myself belonged a couple of months ago. Yet I never felt I’d belonged to them.... I suppose no woman, from a factory-hand to a viscountess, feels that she really “belongs” to any but the life of luxury. I don’t believe men feel that as strongly—and yet it’s they who are supposed to be the more finished and civilized sex. I must ask Mr. Waters, now that I know him well enough, what he thinks about this?

I was just wondering, when, out of that mosaic of black and coloured pattern formed by the crowd, there turned with one movement three dabs of colour, three cheap, effective little hats; and three girlish faces, alight with amusement and recognition, were lifted towards us.

They nodded and smiled; and I, leaning forward out of the car, was just in time to wave my hand to them.

“Friends of yours?” said my employer, glancing back as he raised his hat!

“Why, yes! Didn’t you know them?”

“No! Why should I?”

“Because you see them every day,” I laughed. “They were Miss Robinson, Miss Holt and Miss Smith from your office.”

“No? By Jove,” said Mr. Waters, rather blankly. Which surprised me rather, as I remembered his care that “the other typists should know for a fact” with whom I was going out, that first time of all.

I was conscious, though I couldn’t see where they sat in the gallery, that their three pairs of eyes must be glued to us in our front-row stalls. Nothing could have been more conventional than our appearance—we were absolutely the model of a prosperous young engaged couple up from the suburbs; I, prettily dressed, with the inevitable box of chocolates on my lap; he, good tempered and easy of manner, paying me all the customary attentions of programme, helping me off with my coat, seeing that I had opera-glasses, the best seat, and so on, and yet—apart from the “official engagement” side of it, how really unconventional was our relation!

So much more satisfactory under the circumstances than a real engagement! Or that pie-bald thing, an understanding! Or that other form of platonic friendship which either the girl or the man is always hoping, or fearing, may turn into something else!

The curtain went up to the soft strains of a tune which I, who have had to play accompaniments to so many songs, didn’t know.... But beside us and behind us there were old ladies who murmured, “Ah! ‘She wore a Wreath of Roses.’”

The play began, and I forgot everything else for a time.

In the first interval we amused ourselves by looking at the audience. They were nearly all elderly ladies! As the Governor remarked, “Nancy! Yours and mine are the only heads for three rows of seats that aren’t grey-haired or covered with bonnets!”

“They’ve come to catch echoes of their past,” I murmured flippantly as those tunes from the Mikado sent the curtain up on Act II.

That finished my flippancy for me.

In what seemed like hours afterwards I heard Mr. Waters’ voice, cool and detached, saying something about good acting and soothing syrup and the most sentimental public in the world, then breaking off suddenly, anxiously to exclaim, “What is it, Nancy? Aren’t you well?”

“Of c-course I am! I’m only enjoying myself!” I sobbed quietly; tears dripping down on to the pleated frill of my afternoon blouse. “I think it’s p-perfectly lovely!” And I dabbed my face with the powder-puff swathed in my handkerchief.

“Rum idea of enjoyment,” said the Governor doubtfully.

“Not a bit rum,” I argued, having steadied myself again. “You don’t know much about girls—they’re mostly like that—ask any of them—ask any of the other typists in your office!”

“I suppose I’ve never looked upon those as ‘girls,’” said he. “They’re—machines! machines that eat cherries all day long and chuck the stones all over the floor. Such inefficient ones, too; they——Why d’you laugh, Nancy! I say, you know quite well I don’t mean——”

“Ssh!” came indignantly from under the bonnet—trimmed with squashed heliotropes and doddering jet beads—on the other side of him, as the band struck up the rollicking two-step that heralds the twentieth-century act.

I didn’t cry any more, though.

I believe I was actually less taken up with what was on the stage than with the oddness of my having been behind two sets of scenes myself; with those girls who “couldn’t possibly look upon Still Waters as ‘a man,’ exactly” and then with this man who never really considered typists as “girls.” When had he left off considering me as just a typist? How soon before that evening when we became friends?

Once more I felt grateful to that evening’s compact, as I followed the tall figure with that slight dip from the broad shoulders in to the waist—that line so painfully cultivated by Major Montresor!—and let it make a path for me out of the theatre and to the waiting car.

I believe I’ve always really hated going about London alone, or with just another girl!

“Now, then! Rumpelmayer’s, or the Piccadilly, or where, for tea, Nancy, before I take you on to your friend’s?”

“I meant to have tea with her,” I explained. “I was going on in the bus, and getting down to Sevenoaks afterwards by the dinner-train; saying good-bye to you here.”

“Oh, were you! Why not take me along too?” he suggested, looking down at me.

Well! Why shouldn’t he realize in what sort of places these machines called working-girls live? He’d heard about the lawns and gardens, and so forth, of my old home. Let him see the change I’d had before—well, before that first interview in his office. Then there was Cicely. Yes, when I left her she was still rather “difficult” about my engagement—rather given to unspoken hopes that I wasn’t doing it for the money. Let her see that my (official) fiancÉ was quite a human sort of young man—the sort that some girls really might get engaged to without a thought of his income!

“My chum is a very pretty girl,” said I; “she’s worth looking at——”

“Fair?”

“No, glorious red hair.”

“Well, take me along and let me look at it!” he urged boyishly; and presently we were speeding along down the Embankment towards Marconi Mansions.

I had my latch-key in my vanity-bag. I opened the door at the top of the many stone steps and led the way into the passage, which seemed about as light and wide as a good-sized drainpipe after that airy, tiled vestibule at The Lawn. Meaning to take Cicely by surprise, I quietly walked into our small front sitting-room.

But it was Cicely who took me by surprise.

She had, already, a visitor for tea.

Thick cigarette-smoke made a blue haze above the jumble of odd bits of furniture which we’d picked up second-hand in the Old King’s Road, above the tea-table with its Persian Rose pottery, its plate of Chelsea buns and its green dish of cherries—I hoped there weren’t many stones on the floor!—a haze that half obscured Cicely’s bright head and the figure that reclined, opposite to her, in our comfiest basket-chair. I saw by the unusual garments of it that it must be—yes! Sydney Vandeleur!

Really, I don’t know which of the four of us was least pleased to see the others, while I introduced Mr. Waters to Cicely and said gaily to the men, “I think you’ve met before” ... and forced myself to dissipate the odious pause that followed the insincerely civil greetings by plunging into some sort of conversation.

It was worst for me, I think. I was so utterly taken aback—first, by finding Sydney there at all, and then by wondering what on earth the Governor would think of his being there—and in those clothes!

For Sydney’s latest idea for not being slavishly got-up like every other miserably conventional tailor’s dummy was, apparently, to have his “things” more or less a copy, but an Édition de luxe, of a French fisher-boy’s vareuse-blouse and skirt-like trousers; those brown corduroys were of corduroy-velvet at goodness knows what a yard, cut by some master-hand in Savile Row; the very bagginess at the ankles, above the leaf-brown silk socks, had been carefully studied. And the Governor!—who’d once said:

“After all, what’s unusual in dress is wrong, nine times out of ten. Eight times, it’s also hideous.”

He must be positively flabbergasted at this spectacle! I’m more accustomed to those ideas; but even I found it a relief to turn my eyes upon his stereotyped grey suit after that fell and deadly “effectiveness” of Sydney’s....

Posing in his dress like that! Posing, even more shamelessly, in his manner!

For wouldn’t you have thought that anyone who’d been refused by a girl and who then came unexpectedly face to face with that girl and the person for whom he imagines she’s jilted him—wouldn’t you suppose that he would at least behave like a man? Take it without flinching, even if it were fairly unpleasant, and carry it off as if nothing particular had happened? I shall never think the same of Sydney again for not doing that.

Perhaps it served me right for the rather spiteful note I wrote to him just before I went off to The Lawn, but—Need he have committed the solecism of calling me, when I’ve never been anything but “Monica” to him, “Miss Trant” in italics? It was trying! So was the pathetic look which he saw fit to call up into his spanielly brown eyes as he glanced from me to Mr. Waters. (Mask well down there, so I couldn’t guess what he made of this velvet-and-Vandyke apparition.) And the worm-in-the-bud expression which Sydney let steal over the whole of his dreamy, Cavalier’s face as he turned it, in a way that all but said “Ah! You understand what I suffer!” to Cicely——

Cicely, too! Cicely, who’s shared ups and downs with me for the last two years! Even she must needs forsake me, making matters worse by creating a general atmosphere of blight even while she was bringing in two more leadless-glaze cups and plates, and making fresh tea, and by giving an accurate though unspoken impression of what she “understood.”

“Yes! I am the looker-on at this game. I see it all! The sensitive, artistic soul—”

(This is what she thinks of Sydney.)

—“torn by the sight of this hopelessly stodgy, commonplace young man—”

(I know that this is how she sums up my friend Mr. Waters.)

—“being preferred to himself! Ah, Love is blind!”

(Meaning me.)

“And people never seem to recognize the right man until it’s too late.”

(Deluded little donkey!)

We had tea. What a meal!

“You do take sugar in it, don’t you, Tots?” plaintively from Cicely, with a side-effect of, “She’s so deplorably altered in everything else, I don’t know what any of her tastes may be now!”

“Does Mr. Waters take it?” (To me!)

“Not any, thanks,” from the Governor. “Only milk.”

Cicely’s glance commented silently, “Ah! Incompatibility latent here! An unhappy marriage!”

Why, why hadn’t I said I’d like to go to Rumpelmayer’s, or Lyons’—or Lockhart’s? Anything rather than this funereal feast, with Sydney Vandeleur as the skeleton thereat! Even if he’d remained a voiceless skeleton! But, cheered by all the subtle encouragement and moral support from his pretty hostess—I must say Cicely was looking prettier than ever!—Sydney began to recover a little, relaxed his first pose of open broken-heartedness, and proceeded to talk.

Nobody else did. Mr. Waters looked as if nothing was going to force his lips asunder again. I didn’t want to say anything. Cicely was quite happy to listen. And Sydney held forth.

He began with—“Have you been to—” and “Haven’t you seen—” various picture-galleries and pieces of an “advanced” type.

“What! Not seen ‘The Keening of Deidre,’ even? But why not?” he protested to me, lolling back in that chair as if he didn’t possess a spine. “Oh, it’s such a wonderful thing; so subtle and so brutal at the same time. And one’s sure of seeing everyone one wants to see, in the pit; a positive At Home of them. Better than the dear old palmy days of the Sicilians. I have been three times. The whole effect is so—so sculptured! You would love it! Oh, you must take her”—this to my official fiancÉ, who sat silent and non-committal and very bolt-upright. “You really must not miss it. It is coming off next week.”

“I’m going away next week,” said I.

“Oh, yes? To the country?”

“To Wales.”

“Ah, Wales! It used to be so wild and charming and remote—almost as good as those perfectly untrodden tracts we still get in the West of Ireland. But it’s frightfully overdone now,” complained Sydney. “One doesn’t know if it’s the fault of Lloyd George, or the picture postcards, or that appalling little railway up Snowdon, but Wales has become so obvious. When I’m going over to Ballycool, do you know, I have to read all the way in the train between Chester and Holyhead, in terror lest I should inadvertently catch sight of any of the ‘scenery.’ I assure you”—to Cicely—“that when you get that Snowdon Range, cut out in purple cardboard jig-saws against what the dear tourists call ‘a glorious sunset’ it’s almost exactly like a landscape in the Academy!”

“How perfectly dreadful!” sympathized Cicely—little humbug! who, only last year, used to mark her favourite pictures in the Academy Catalogue. I do hate a girl’s tastes to be mere echoes of the man she’s with!

“And those ruined castles; they’re really almost too priceless to be true,” enlarged Sydney. “Turrets like this”—he zig-zagged with a finger in the air, while a gold curb bracelet chinked at his slim wrist—“reflected, wherever possible, in water. Terrible! I mean, you simply have to laugh! You feel the landscape transforming itself into wings and a drop-scene before your eyes! And the ‘Elephant Mountain’ that they insist on pointing out to you, because it really is so like an elephant’s back! (Such an attraction!). And then those meaty pink clouds that they always contrive to get so symmetrically posed just behind the summit of Snowdon! Snowdon itself is so hopelessly banal that it only just falls short of perfection. Excruciating! Cader Idris, now, is a little better,” he went on kindly. “It is still possible to introduce Cader to one’s friends. Cader, with that quaint lake they have there, remains quite an attractive mountain, I think”—turning to Mr. Waters, who still looked as if he couldn’t think of anything to say to this person who patted the Welsh mountains, so to speak, on the head.

“We aren’t going to be among the mountains,” he announced briefly. “My people generally settle for six weeks or so in Anglesey.”

“Not really? How amusing—I mean, it’s really possible to ‘settle’ there?” said Sydney Vandeleur, lifting his dark Vandyke beard from his tie—heavens, what a tie! I’d only just noticed that. “One had always looked upon Anglesey as a sort of straight line leading to the North Wall.”

“H’m,” said the Governor, who, having checked a “Can-such-things-be?” start, was obviously trying to keep his eyes off that tie of Sydney’s: a bunch of amber silk, patterned with blatant little splashes of scarlet, black, magenta, emerald-green.... Futurist, I presume. How could I ever, ever have dreamt that life, even in Ballycool Castle, could have been tolerable with a man who wore ties like that? I should have left him in a week. No! I’m sure I should never have been there to leave him. I couldn’t....

Sydney lighted another cigarette, and the conversation languished. Nobody spoke.

In the middle of this sickening sag to the talk I had an inspiration!

I thought, since both these young men sing and one of them composes, that it would be at this juncture a bright thought to introduce the subject of music.

Why did I do it?

It was distinctly what Jack calls “a wash-out.” For Sydney Vandeleur at once switched off on to Eleventh Century folk-songs. And Mr. Waters, asked if he didn’t think they were too delicious, was “afraid the Eleventh Century was out of his groove.”

And then Sydney hummed several only slightly more modern Celtic dirges—one about “The Sweet Flowers, all gone to Decay!”

And Mr. Waters said he preferred his flowers fresh; adding bluntly that he loathed all those miserable minor wails himself, and quite agreed with that law which Queen Elizabeth passed for the Irish bards of her time, sentencing them to death if they composed songs on any subject whatsoever except in praise of the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty.

That brought back some of Sydney’s first pose. With a pained little smile he turned to me, then, putting on just the expression of the bereaved collie in Landseer’s “Shepherd’s Chief Mourner,” he asked me if I happened to have kept the MS. of that little thing he’d written for me to that sonnet—“Kissing her Hair, I sat against her Feet.”

I felt myself flushing up to the roots of my own wretched hair that he’d always so praised ... there was something about kissing of hair which he knew nothing of, and that I was only too thankful to let die a natural death.... Rather shortly, I answered, “Oh, that song—yes; it’s tucked away in some drawer or other here, I believe.”

“If it wouldn’t be troubling you too much, Miss Trant, to lend it to me again? It was my only copy,” suggested Sydney softly (con molto espressione).

“Of course,” said I. “I’ll find it for you now. Cicely, you might come into my room and help me to hunt.”

Cicely followed me, leaving those two men to entertain each other. How they proceeded to do so I suppose I shall never know!

“Well, Cis, how are you getting on?” I asked her, when the door was closed between us and them. “Foot’s all right, I see, and you said you’d gone back to work?”

“Yes, but not at ChÉrisette’s, you know; I’m working opposite in Bond Street; Madame Lamaire’s. Mr. Vandeleur got me an introduction from his married sister, who knows her; and I’m getting a better salary, and such a much better time, there. He has been so awfully kind, Tots!”

“Has he? Have you—been seeing a good deal of him, then?”

“He’s been here several times, but”—reproachfully—“only to talk about you!”

“Good of him,” I said.

Cicely looked more reproach. “Well, he says you’ve taken all the colour out of his life and left ‘gold tarnished and the grey above the green.’”

“Drat him! And his colours!” I quoted Mrs. Skinner vulgarly and vindictively. “He’d plenty of them left in his tie, anyhow.”

“I am afraid,” said Cecily aloofly and with a pointed comparison in her face, “that you’ve scarcely realized Mr. Vandeleur.”

“Haven’t I? Well, the sort of man who, when he’s turned down by one girl, must needs rush and pour it all out into the shell-like ear of the next——” But I broke off here.

What I suddenly did realize was that, for next to no reason, I was on the brink of squabbling ridiculously with my chum.

So I hastily changed the subject to rent-money and the length of time I should probably be away, caught up Sydney’s ever-to-be-hated song, reassured Cicely that I was not going to be married until after the summer—long after! and told her I was glad she was getting on so well.

“Get Mr. Vandeleur, if he wants cheering up, to take you to ‘The Keening of Deidre,’” said I. “Good-bye!”

It threatened to be a silent motor-drive back to Sevenoaks.

Again I felt that I should have to be the one to take the plunge into conversation.

“Well?” I said. “Didn’t you think Miss Harradine a very pretty girl?”

“Beautiful hair,” said Mr. Waters, “hasn’t she?”

“Oh, lovely.”

Silence.

I saw that Mr. Waters hadn’t realized what I suspected: namely, that Sydney was beginning to find my chum quite sufficiently “lovely” as a girl, not merely as a confidante for his sorrows about “another,” who was, as he imagined, “another’s.” But I was longing to hear some comment on Sydney.

I should have been left longing, I suppose, if I hadn’t said straight out, “What did you think of Mr. Vandeleur?”

“Oh, come! What a question! How can one tell, after seeing a man for half an hour? He seemed—clever, and all that,” fenced my companion. “Of course he’s not the sort of man I get thrown much with in that sordid, detestable City of mine, as you call it. What does he do?”

“He doesn’t have to ‘do’ anything.”

“Rather lucky for him,” remarked Mr. Waters, in a tone I didn’t fathom.

I said, “But he does draw and design—and he writes dramatic criticisms—and he composes.”

“Gifted sort of chap,” said Mr. Waters smoothly. “I suppose——”

And then stopped.

“You suppose what?” I urged. “No, do tell me,” as he looked obstinately ahead and shut his lips into that line. “You must, Billy!” Then I found myself laughing and colouring a little with surprise. For the first time I’d used that absurd name in speaking directly to him.

He turned to me, smiling once more in quite a friendly way. But it was not to answer my question. It was to ask another.

“Nancy, you know I shall expect you to write to me? When you’re at Porth Cariad with my mother and the girls, I mean.... It’ll look funny if you don’t.”

“Oh, of course. For the look of the thing,” said I, “I’ll write.”

“Sorry to trouble you. You can put a blank sheet into the envelope, you know, if you like.”

“I hadn’t thought of that!” I laughed, glad to be once again on comfortable terms of chatty friendship. “But—so I can.”

“Well, as long as you don’t forget to send something,” said Billy Waters.

He reminded me of this once again, on Euston platform. For we—his mother, his sisters, his official fiancÉe and the little dog—left London at eleven o’clock on the following Saturday morning.

That evening we were all among the sand-slopes and the gorse and the soft calling of the waves at Porth Cariad.