It's a perfectly priceless possession, sometimes I'm quite sorry to go
to sleep and forget what has happened and what is going to happen. I
suppose I am childish.
Cheneston makes everything so smooth and easy and charming. I never
realised the enchanted atmosphere that money and good breeding creates.
You feel as if you were continually being feted. All the women in the
set in which I live now are treated the same way. I cannot understand
why they ever grow old or have to have their wrinkles massaged and their
hair hennaed; none of the sort of things that make a woman grow old are
allowed to come near them.
All the things, and the sights, and the feelings that are stale to Grace
Gilpin and her chic friends are new to me--I sort of rush at them and
mop them up. I can't help being thrilled and happy.
"You'll wear yourself out," Grace Gilpin says.
Yet the men seem to like my enthusiasm. I couldn't be blase if I tried.
I love, love, love every bit of every single day--that's the honest
truth.
I don't think it's rained once since the night Cheneston and I met in
the glare of the searchlights. I suppose that seems a frightfully little
thing, but it isn't--it's an awfully big thing.
And the battery is nearly due to leave for France.
Cheneston is so sweet and gentle with me, just like an elder brother to
his little sister.
I never knew a man could understand in the way he does. I always
thought a man had a totally different type of brain.
We went up to Town to the opera last week, and we dined at the Carlton
and I wore a rather clever dress mother selected for me--brown and amber
tulle the colour of my hair, with just a huge bunch of tea-roses at my
breast.
A man Cheneston used to be at Oxford with, and his sister, and
Cheneston's aunt and uncle, made up the party; and I seemed to make them
laugh an awful lot, and I heard the aunt tell Cheneston I was the most
original child she had ever met.
Oh! but the music!
I didn't know I could feel as I did. It seemed to pluck at my heart
with little red-hot fingers. One minute it picked me up and swung me
into a state of dizzy gladness, and the next I seemed to see nothing but
Grace Gilpin and Cheneston, and the battery leaving for France! One
minute I felt good--so good that I could have got up and walked straight
into a convent for the rest of my life. And the next I wanted to fight
Grace Gilpin for Cheneston and start that very minute; me, the funny
little thing with the snub nose who made people laugh!
Why did Heaven make me a funny little thing with a snub nose? It wasn't
sporting; and I do think it handicaps one. One doesn't somehow expect a
snub nose to be a Joan of Arc, or Florence Nightingale, or Mrs.
Pankhurst, or anything thrilling and earnest and vital and glowing.
I think it's rotten to be born a quaint little thing that nobody takes
seriously.
It was awfully weird the way Cheneston looked at me, and the boy who was
at Oxford, and the uncle, and the father--just as though I was something
they had never really seen properly before.
Cheneston sat behind me, and I could feel him trying to read things in
my brain through the back of my neck--it made me all tingly.
He is a strange man--you could wonder what he was really like for hours.
"Did you like it?" he said when it was all over and he helped me on with
my coat.