Frances Hodgson Burnett

“ What girl—or woman—could resist the alluring demand of his drooping eyes, if he chose to allow warmth to fill them? Thinking of it, she almost gnashed her teeth. Did she not see how he would look, bending his high head and murmuring to a woman who shook with joy under his gaze? Had she not seen it in her own forlorn, hopeless dreams?
What did it matter if what the world calls disaster befell the girl? Fräulein Hirsch would not have called it disaster. Any woman would have been paid a thousand times over. ”

“ The brain which has worked through many years in unison with the soul to which it was apportioned has evolved a knowledge which has deep cognizance of the universal law. The brain of the old Duchess had so worked, keeping pace always with its guide, never visualizing the possibility of working alone, also never falling into the abyss of that human folly whose conviction is that all that one sees and gives a special name to is all that exists—or that the names accepted by the world justly and clearly describe qualities, yearnings, moods, as they are. ”

“ She was gone and Robin stood by the sofa thrilled with happiness and relief. How wonderful it was that, through mere lucky chance, she had gone to watch the children sailing their boats! And that Fräulein Hirsch had seen Lady Etynge! What good luck and how grateful she was! The thought which passed through her mind was like a little prayer of thanks. How strange it would be to be really intimate with a girl like herself—or rather like Hélène. It made her heart beat to think of it. How wonderful it would be if Hélène actually loved her, and she loved Hélène. ”

“ Being a clever Frenchwoman she felt drama and all its subtle accompaniments.
“Is that why——” she began.
“It is,” answered Dowson, stoutly. “A kiss isn’t an ordinary thing to her. It means something wonderful. She’s got into the way of loving me, bless her, and every now and then, it’s my opinion, she suddenly remembers her lonely days when she didn’t know what love was. And it just wells up in her little heart and she wants to kiss me. She always says it that way, ‘Dowie, I want to kiss you,’ as if it was something strange and, so to say, sacred. ”

“ The warmth about her heart made it beat a little faster. She opened the door of her wardrobe when she found herself in her bedroom. The dress hung modestly in its corner shrouded from the penetration of London fogs by clean sheeting. It was only white and as simple as she knew how to order it, but Mademoiselle had taken her to a young French person who knew exactly what she was doing in all cases, and because the girl had the supple lines of a wood nymph and the eyes of young antelope she had evolved that which expressed her as a petal expresses its rose. ”

“ No one had dreamed of the queer half abnormal secret she had always kept to herself as a child—as a little girl—as a bigger one when she would have died rather than divulge that in her loneliness there had been something she had remembered—something she had held on to—a memory which she had actually made a companion of, making pictures, telling herself stories in the dark, even inventing conversations which not for one moment had she thought would or could ever take place. ”

“ Sometimes, after she had been put to bed for the night and Andrews was safely entertained downstairs, Robin would be awakened from her first sleep by sounds in the room below and would creep out of bed and down to her special step and, crouching in a hectic joy, would see the Lady come out with sparkling things in her hair and round her lovely, very bare white neck and arms, all swathed in tints and draperies which made her seem a vision of colour and light. ”

“ Kathryn in exquisite wisps of silver-embroidered gauze looked fourteen instead of nearly twenty—aided by a dimple in her cheek and a small tilted nose. A girl in scarlet tulle was like a child out of a nursery ready to dance about a Christmas tree. Everyone seemed so young and so suggested supple dancing, perhaps because dancing was going on everywhere and all the world whether fashionable or unfashionable was driven by a passion for whirling, swooping and inventing new postures and fantastic steps. The young men had slim straight bodies and light movements. ”

“ He had not come running—he had not come laughing—he had not come with his plaid swinging and his feather standing high! There came a moment when her strained eyes no longer seemed to see clearly! Something like a big lump crawled up into her throat! Something of the same sort happened the day she had burst into a wail of loneliness and Andrews had pinched her. Panic seized her; she clutched the breast of her rose-coloured frock and panic-driven turned and fled into a thick clump of bushes where there was no path and where even Donal had never pierced. ”

“ She had known none of the absolute horrors of life which were possible in that underworld which was not likely to touch her own existence in any form.
“Why,” had argued Mademoiselle Vallé, “should one fill a white young mind with ugly images which would deface with dark marks and smears, and could only produce unhappiness and, perhaps, morbid broodings? One does not feel it is wise to give a girl an education in crime. One would not permit her to read the Newgate Calendar for choice. She will be protected by those who love her and what she must discover she will discover. That is Life.” ”

“ The Lady appeared at such rare intervals and remained poised upon the threshold like a tropic plumaged bird for moments so brief, that there never was time to do more than lose breath and gaze as at a sudden vision. Why she came—when she did come—Robin did not understand. She evidently did not belong to the small, dingy nurseries which grew shabbier every year as they grew steadily more grimy under the persistent London soot and fogs.
Feather always held up her draperies when she came. ”

“ In the moment’s silence which followed, his glance met Mademoiselle Vallé’s and fixed itself.
“I am not old enough—or young enough—to be enamoured of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless’ little daughter,” he said. “You need not be told that. But you have heard that there are those who amuse themselves by choosing to believe that I am.”
“A few light and not too clean-minded fools,” she admitted without flinching.
“No man can do worse for himself than to explain and deny,” he responded with a smile at once hard and fine. “Let them continue to believe it.” ”

“ Robin went to Dowie’s room the next evening and stood a moment in silence watching her sewing before she spoke. She looked anxious and even pale.
“Her grace is going to give a party to some young people, Dowie,” she said. “She wishes me to be present. I—I don’t know what to do.”
“What you must do, my dear, is to put on your best evening frock and go downstairs and enjoy yourself as the other young people will. Her grace wants you to see someone your own age,” was Dowie’s answer.
“But I am not like the others. I am only a girl earning her living as a companion. ”

“ One of these, heard not infrequently, was to the effect that—in London—one might live under an umbrella if one lived under it in the right neighbourhood and on the right side of the street, which axiom is the reason that a certain child through the first six years of her life sat on certain days staring out of a window in a small, dingy room on the top floor of a slice of a house on a narrow but highly fashionable London street and looked on at the passing of motors, carriages and people in the dull afternoon grayness. ”

“ Mademoiselle Vallé bowed.
“The fact,” she said, “that she seriously thinks that perhaps beauty may be an advantage to a young person who applies for work in the office of a man of business because it may seem bright and cheerful to him when he is tired and out of spirits—that gives one furiously to think. Yes, to me she said it, milord—with the eyes of a little dove brooding over her young. I could see her—lifting them like an angel to some elderly vaurien, who would merely think her a born cocotte.”
Here Coombe’s rigid face showed thought indeed. ”

“ A girl who looks like that,” pointing her finger at the glass, “need not think she can earn her own living. I loathe it,” in fierce resentment at some bitter injustice. “It is like being a person under a curse!”
At this Dowie broke down openly and let her tears run fast. “No, no! You mustn’t say it or think it, my dearie!” she wept. “It might call down a blight on it. You a young thing like a garden flower! And someone—somewhere—God bless him—that some day’ll glory in it—and you’ll glory too. Somewhere he is—somewhere!”
“Let none of them look at me!” cried Robin. “I loathe them, too. ”

“ No small sense of humour existed in her brain to save her from her pathetic idiocy. Romantic humility and touching sacrifice to the worshipped one were the ideals she had read of in verse and song all her life. Only through such servitude and sacrifice could woman gain man’s love—and even then only if she had beauty and the gifts worthy of her idol’s acceptance.
It was really his unmitigated arrogance she worshipped and crawled upon her poor, large-jointed knees to adore. Her education, her very religion itself had taught that it was the sign of his nobility and martial high breeding. ”

“ A big boy in Highland kilts and bonnet and sporan was standing by her, and she found herself staring into a pair of handsome deep blue eyes, blue like the waters of a hillside tarn. They were wide, glowing, friendly eyes and none like them had ever looked into hers before. He seemed to her to be a very big boy indeed, and in fact, he was unusually tall and broad for his age, but he was only eight years old and a simple enough child pagan. Robin’s heart began to beat as it did when she watched the Lady Downstairs, but there was something different in the beating. ”

“ The music was swinging through the air performing its everlasting miracle of swinging young souls and pulses with it, the warmed flowers breathed more perceptible scent, sweet chatter and laughter, swaying colour and glowing eyes concentrated in making magic. This beautiful young man’s pulses only beat with the rest—as one with the pulse of the Universe. Lady Lothwell acting for the Duchess was very kind to him finding him another partner as soon as a new dance began—this time her own daughter, Lady Kathryn. ”

“ Coombe’s eye-glasses had been slowly swaying from the ribbon in his fingers. He let them continue to sway a moment and then closed them with a snap.
“He is a great fool,” he said. “But we,—oh, my friend—and by ‘we’ I mean the rest of the Map of Europe—we are much greater fools. A mad dog loose among us and we sit—and smile.”
And this was in the days before the house with the cream-coloured front had put forth its first geraniums and lobelias in Feather’s window boxes. Robin was not born. ”

“ She might have more potently resented her isolations if she had ever known any other condition than that of a child in whom no one was in the least interested and in whom “being good” could only mean being passive under neglect and calling no one’s attention to the fact that she wanted anything from anybody. As a bird born in captivity lives in its cage and perhaps believes it to be the world, Robin lived in her nursery and knew every square inch of it with a deadly if unconscious sense of distaste and fatigue. ”

“ What awful woe of sudden unprotectedness when life exists only through protection—what piteous panic in the midst of black unmercifulness, inarticulate sound howsoever wildly shrill can neither explain nor express.
Robin knew only Louisa, warmth, food, sleep and waking. Or if she knew more she was not yet aware that she did. She had reached the age when she generally slept through the night. She might not have disturbed her mother until daylight but Louisa had with forethought given her an infant sleeping potion. ”

“ Lady Lothwell listened to as much of the history of Robin as her mother chose to tell her and plainly felt an amiable interest in it. She knew much more detail and gossip concerning Mrs. Gareth-Lawless than the Duchess herself did. She had heard of the child who was kept out of sight, and she had been somewhat disgusted by a vague story of Lord Coombe’s abnormal interest in it and the ugly hint that he had an object in view. It was too unpleasantly morbid to be true of a man her mother had known for years. ”

“ The pretty and smart women and agreeable more or less good looking men who had chattered and laughed and made love in her drawing-rooms were chattering, laughing and making love in other houses at this very moment—or they were at the theatre applauding some fashionable actor-manager. At this very moment—while she lay on the carpet in the dark and every little room in the house had horror shut inside its closed doors—particularly Robert’s room which was so hideously close to her own, and where there seemed still to lie moveless on the bed, the stiff hard figure. ”