Next morning when Di came back, I told her what was necessary to tell,
and not a bit more. I explained how I had met Captain Eagleston March,
and how we had spent the day and the heavenly evening. But first, I let
her open the invitation which had just come by hand from the American
Embassy (she opens all Father's letters, except those that have a
repulsively private look), and when she began, "I wonder how on
earth----," I was able to work my story in neatly, as an explanation.
Di listened to the end, without interrupting me once except by opening
her eyes very wide, and now and then raising her eyebrows, or giving
vent to expressive sighs. I saw that she was thinking hard as I went on,
and I knew what she was thinking: about the need of forgiving me because
of the new interest in life my naughtiness had brought her.
When I had finished up the tale with our dinner at the Savoy, and seeing
"Milestones," and then on top of all, having supper with Mrs. Jewitt and
Captain March at a terribly respectable but fascinating night club of
which he had been made a member, Diana didn't scold. She said that
Captain March being an officer and a flying man made all the difference,
but she hoped I would not have put myself into such a position with any
other sort of man, whether he mistook me for a child or not. Even as it
was, she wouldn't dare tell Father the history of my day: but, as they
had made several American acquaintances lately, she could easily account
for the Embassy invitation.
"We'll go, of course, won't we?" I catechized her, knowing that her word
with Father was pretty well law.
"Yes, we'll go," she answered. "I'll write an acceptance and send it by
hand."
I was so enchanted at this that I dashed up to my room and began
shortening the new dress. I had mentioned it vaguely to Di, but it was
the one part of my story in which she took no interest. I saw how the
keenness died out of her beautiful sea-blue eyes, and how her soul
retired comfortably behind them, to think of something else, just as you
see people walk away from windows through which they've been looking
out, leaving them emptily blank. As she didn't care what little Peggy
wore, little Peggy decided to give her a surprise at the last moment.
Nothing much was said about the Embassy ball by Father or Di before me,
on that day or the next, so I, too, kept my own counsel. I was afraid if
I gabbled as I longed to do, Father might take it into his head that the
child had better stop at home. All I heard was a little talk about the
time to start, and whether a taxi should be ordered or a coupé. I
thought there would be rather a squash in a coupé with Father, Diana,
and me folded together in a sort of living sandwich; but I was so small,
I could perhaps manage not to slide off the little flap seat with its
back to the horses.
It was a coupé they finally decided on, and it was ordered for a quarter
to ten. We had a short and early dinner, and as I did Diana's hair, it
seemed to me that I had never seen her look prettier. I wondered whether
Captain March would admire her very much, and I hoped for his own
sake--I almost believed it was for his own sake!--that he wouldn't fall
in love. As I thought this, I looked with a new kind of criticism at Di,
to judge whether he were likely to be one of her victims.
Heaps of men had fallen in love with Di since I began to be old enough
to notice such things. They had never been the right sort of men, from
her point of view, for none of the lot had had a penny to bless himself
with, or even a title worth the taking. But all of them had been worth
flirting with; and after they had been dropped with more or less of a
dull thud, I'm afraid some of them had suffered. I didn't wish Captain
March to suffer, yet I couldn't help thinking that if I were a man I
might be as silly as the rest and go down before Di.
She was then--and she is now--the most lovable looking thing that can be
imagined. She doesn't appear to be cool and calculating, but
warm-hearted and gentle and soft, far more so than most of the girls one
meets, especially in London, where I think they have the air of being
rather hard: ready to sacrifice everything and everybody for the sake of
what they want to get or do.
If you were going to paint a picture of Ireland, typified by a beautiful
girl, so that you might name your canvas "Dark Rosaleen," you would give
the world to get Di for your model. She is tall, as a Diana ought to be,
and slender though not thin. She gives the effect of fashionable
slimness, yet she is all lovely curves and roundnesses. She has a long
white throat with a charming upturned chin that has a deep cleft in the
middle. It's no exaggeration to say that her skin is as white as creamy
milk; and on each cheek, just beneath the shadow under her eyes, is a
faint pink stain, as if it had been tapped hard with a carnation, and a
little of the colour had come off. Perhaps, if her face has a fault, the
nose is too short and flat, but it gives her a sweetly young and
innocent look, added to her eyes being set far apart. And the eyes are
really glorious: very big and long, with deep shadows under them only
partly cast by her thick black lashes. A man once wrote a Valentine
verse to Di, in which he remarked that her eyes were "like sapphires
gleaming blue where they had fallen among dark grasses"; and it wasn't a
bad comparison. The man died of taking too much veronal a year after.
Nobody said he had done it on purpose. But I wondered. He was very
unhappy the day he said "Good-bye" to Ballyconal. I've never been able
to forget his look.
Di's mouth is large, and a tiny bit greedy, but all the more fascinating
for that, because it is so red and curved. Her forehead is rather high,
really, but she makes it seem only a white line above her level
eyebrows, because of the way she likes best to wear her crinkly dark
hair: parted in the middle, pushed forward and down, and banded in place
by a rope of hair from the back.
That night for the ball at the American Embassy she had it fastened with
big, very green jade hairpins. From her little pink ears hung long loops
of emeralds (heirlooms in our family, or they would have been sold long
ago), and the gown she chose was the same shade of green: some very
thin, soft stuff, with one of those new names dressmakers think of in
their dreams. It was simply made, and not very expensive; but in it Di
looked like a classic personification of Ireland at its loveliest, and I
was sure that not the best-dressed girl in the room would be as
exquisite as she. I told her this on an impulse, and she was pleased.
Yet she sighed. Of course she couldn't help knowing, said she, that she
wasn't bad looking. But Venus or Helen of Troy couldn't make a success,
handicapped as she was.
"It might be different in some other country," she went on, more to
herself than to me. "A country like America, where titles are more of a
novelty, and everybody one meets doesn't remember all about one's poor
mother."
"Now I must run and get ready, myself," said I, when I had established
connection between Diana's most intricate hooks and eyes.
"Get ready? For what, dear?"
"Why, for the ball, of course!" The first chill of suspicion that I had
been cast for the part of Cinderella crept through me, like a
caterpillar walking inside my spine.
"But, my _child_!" Di exclaimed. "You couldn't have thought you were
going? Officially you are a little girl. You don't exist, and if you
did, you haven't a dress----"
"I have a dress. The one I bought with the money from the lace. I didn't
say much, because I thought it would be fun to surprise you."
"Well, I'm awfully sorry, dear, that you've been counting on it. I never
dreamed--you ought to have told me----"
"You said you'd accept for '_us_.'"
"I meant Father and me. It never crossed my mind that you----Too bad!
But anyhow, it's too late now. Father would never consent."
I might have retorted that she was the one person in the world who could
make him consent to anything she wanted, but then, the truth was that
she didn't want this thing. Diana had--and has--the manners of an angel;
and strangers would think she was as easy to melt as sugar in the sun.
But I, who have lived with her all the years of my life, know that the
sugar is only on the surface. And I have learned what is underneath.
Even then, I realized that Di had understood perfectly well from the
first that I expected to go to the ball, and she had kept quiet in order
to have no more than one short, sharp fuss at the end. While it was
being borne in upon me that I was to stop at home, instead of going on
arguing and "fishwifing" I shut up like a clam. I suppose it was a kind
of obstinate pride, the sort of pride that makes condemned people not
scream or throw themselves about on the way to execution. But when
Father and Di had gone, I cried--oh, how I cried! There was a kind of
wild pleasure in letting the sobs come, and feeling the hot tears spout
out of my eyes. In any clash between us, Di always won, because she was
"grown up," and I was a "little girl"; but the trick she had played on
me this time roused my sense of its injustice, and with all my body and
mind and soul I resolved to strengthen my soul against her. "Some day,"
I said to myself, letting the tears dry on my cheeks as I listened to a
spirit of prophecy, "some day there'll be a battle for life or death
between our characters, Di's and mine, and I'll save myself up to win
_then_."
It seemed weak, as if I were a whipped child, to creep off to bed, yet I
couldn't force myself to read, or do anything to turn my thoughts from
the great injustice. At ten minutes to eleven I was making up my mind
that, after all, sleep would be the best consolation, when our
lodging-house landlady knocked.
We had the "drawing-room floor," up one flight of stairs from the
street. Luckily I was still in the draw-dining-room--a fantastic
apartment crowded with nouveau-art furniture all out of drawing, like
daddy longlegs--when the woman tapped and peeped in. If I had gone
upstairs to my own top-floor room, I'm sure, being a prim person, she
would have considered it improper to summon me down, and I should have
missed a heavenly half hour.
"A gentleman has called, Miss, and could he come up for five minutes?
The name is Captain March."
It was true! It was he! And he hadn't even met Diana yet. She had been
dancing. But the hostess had introduced him to Father, and Captain March
had worked round to the subject of me. When he heard that I was "too
young for balls," he just slipped out, took a taxi, and made a dash to
Chapel Street to tell me he was sorry. I was so grateful, I could have
cried more than ever. It seemed to me one of the very nicest things a
man ever did. He was in full-dress uniform, because an American officer
is on his native heath when he's at his own Embassy; and I thought that
he looked adorable in uniform.
He stayed half an hour instead of five minutes, and then said he must go
back, and "do the right thing." The right thing, which he didn't
particularly want to do, was to dance with the girls who weren't booked
up to the eyes, and--to meet my sister. It was my first triumph to have
a man--and such a man--put me in front of Diana. I was thrilled by it,
though I ought to have had sense enough to know what would happen.
Eagle March (he told me that night to call him Eagle) did go back to the
ball, and did meet Diana. I heard about it next morning when I took in
her breakfast: how he had asked Father if he might be introduced, and Di
had liked him so much that she found a dance to give him, although
everything was engaged by the time he arrived; how an American girl who
knew him at home said that he had a rich aunt who might leave him "a
whole heap of money" some day (the aunt of the lace, I said to myself);
and how Father had consented to take Diana and me to Hendon, to see
Captain March's monoplane in its hangar.
"I managed that for you, dear, to make up for your disappointment last
night, and because you're really a good, useful little flap of a
flapper," Di finished. "Once we're at Hendon, I'm sure Father can be
coaxed to let us go up for just a short flight, though he thinks now
that nothing could induce him to. Captain March has promised that I
shall be his first woman passenger. Never has he taken a woman with him
yet."
I only gasped inaudibly, and bit a little piece off my heart. Of course
I guessed then what must have happened; and when Eagle came that
afternoon, I _knew_. I was for him a nice child still--a "good, useful
little flapper," as Di said, and he was my friend as before; but Diana
had lit up the world for him. He could hardly take his eyes off her.
When she spoke, even at a distance, he heard every word, and nothing
that any one else said.
"Why didn't you tell me your sister was such a wonderful beauty?" he
mumbled as he was saying good-bye.
Old people, and even middle-aged people over twenty-five, must have
forgotten how it can hurt when you are sixteen to be in love with some
one who loves somebody else; for neither in books nor in real life do
these worn-out persons ever take such a thing seriously. But I shall
never cease to remember how it feels: like having to keep smiling while
a bullet is probed for in your heart, not probed for only once, and
finished for good, but prodded and poked at every minute of every hour,
day after day, week after week, month after month. How can you tell
whether or no it's going to be year after year as well, till all the red
blood of your youth and hope has slowly been drained away?