Part 45 (1/2)
She was perfectly right. If Rita had been in society or on the stage she probably would have married a peer--not a Duke though, that was Ethel's inexperience. There are so few dukes that they have not the same liberty of action as other n.o.blemen. The Beauty Market is badly organised--curious fact in an age when to purvey cats' meat is a specialised industry. But the fact remains. The prettiest girls in England don't have their pictures in the papers and advertise no dentrifice or musical comedy on the one hand, nor St. Peter and St.
George, their fas.h.i.+onable West End temples, on the other. Buyers of Beauty have but a limited choice, and on the whole it is a salutary thing, though doubtless hard upon loveliness that perforce throws itself away upon men without rank or fortune for want of proper opportunity!
”How do I look, Wog dear?” Rita asked.
”Splendid, darling,” Ethel answered eagerly--a pretty junior typist in Ethel's office, who had been snubbed, had once sent her homely senior a golliwog doll, and since then the good-humoured Ethel was ”Wog” to her friends.
”I'm so glad. I want to look my best to-night.”
”Well, then, you do,” Ethel replied, and with an heroic effort forbore further questioning.
She always kept loyally to the compact of silence and non-interference with what went on outside the flat.
Rita chuckled and darted one of her naughty, provocative glances.
”Wog! You're dying to know where I'm going!”
Some girls would have affected indifference immediately. Not so the simple Wog.
”Of course I am, Cupid,” she said.
”I'm going to dine with Gilbert.”
”Gilbert?”
”Gilbert Lothian I mean, of course. We are absolute friends, Wog dear--he and I. I haven't told you before, but I will now. You remember that night I was home so late, nearly a month ago? Yes?--well I had been motoring to Brighton with Gilbert. I met him for the first time at the Amberleys'--but that you know. Since then we have become friends--such a strange and wonderful friends.h.i.+p it is, Ethel! It's made things so different for me.”
”But how friends? Have you seen him often, then? But you can't have?”
Rita shook her head, impatiently for a moment, and then she smiled gently. How could poor old Wog know or understand!
”No!” she cried, with a little tap of her shoe upon the carpet. ”But there are such things as letters aren't there?”
”Has he been writing to you, then?”
”Writing! I have had four of the most beautiful letters that a poet ever wrote. It took him days to write each one. He chose every word, over and over again. Every sentence is music, every word a note in a chord!”
Ethel went up to her friend and kissed her. ”Dear old Cupid,” she said, ”I'm so glad, so very glad. I don't understand his poems myself, but Father simply loves them. I am sure you will be very happy. Only I do hope he is a good man--really worthy of my dear! And so”--she continued, with a struggle to get down to commonplace brightness of manner--”And so he's coming for you to-night! Now I know why you look so beautiful and are so happy.”
Two tears gathered in the kind green eyes, tears of joy at her dear girl's happiness, but with a tincture of sadness too. With a somewhat unaccustomed flash of imagination, she looked into the future and saw herself lonely in the flat, or with another girl who could never be to her what Rita was.
She looked up at Rita again, trying to smile through her tears.
What she saw astounded her.
Rita's face was flushed. A knot of wrinkles had sprung between her eyebrows. Her mouth was mutinous, her brown eyes lit with an angry and puzzled light.
”I don't understand you, Ethel,” she said in a voice which was so cold and unusual that the other girl was dumb.--”What on earth do you mean?”
”Mean, dear,” Ethel faltered. ”I don't quite understand. I thought you meant--I thought ...”