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PART ONE
Chapter
OneWWhen
Miss Fox-Seton descended from the twopenny bus as it drew up, she
gathered her trim tailor-made skirt about her with neatness and
decorum, being well used to getting in and out of twopenny buses and
to making her way across muddy London streets. A woman whose
tailor-made suit must last two or three years soon learns how to
protect it from splashes, and how to aid it to retain the freshness
of its folds. During her trudging about this morning in the wet,
Emily Fox-Seton had been very careful, and, in fact, was returning to
Mortimer Street as unspotted as she had left it. She had been
thinking a good deal about her dress—this particular faithful one
which she had already worn through a twelvemonth. Skirts had made one
of their appalling changes, and as she walked down Regent Street and
Bond Street she had stopped at the windows of more than one shop
bearing the sign "Ladies' Tailor and Habit-Maker," and had
looked at the tautly attired, preternaturally slim models, her large,
honest hazel eyes wearing an anxious expression. She was trying to
discover where
seams were to be placed and how gathers were to be hung; or if there
were to be gathers at all; or if one had to be bereft of every seam
in a style so unrelenting as to forbid the possibility of the honest
and semi-penniless struggling with the problem of remodelling last
season's skirt at all. "As it is only quite an ordinary brown,"
she had murmured to herself, "I might be able to buy a yard or
so to match it, and I
might be able to
join the gore near the pleats at the back so that it would not be
seen."She
quite beamed as she reached the happy conclusion. She was such a
simple, normal-minded creature that it took but little to brighten
the aspect of life for her and to cause her to break into her
good-natured, childlike smile. A little kindness from any one, a
little pleasure or a little comfort, made her glow with nice-tempered
enjoyment. As she got out of the bus, and picked up her rough brown
skirt, prepared to tramp bravely through the mud of Mortimer Street
to her lodgings, she was positively radiant. It was not only her
smile which was childlike, her face itself was childlike for a woman
of her age and size. She was thirty-four and a well-set-up creature,
with fine square shoulders and a long small waist and good hips. She
was a big woman, but carried herself well, and having solved the
problem of obtaining, through marvels of energy and management, one
good dress a year, wore it so well, and changed her old ones so
dexterously, that she always looked rather smartly dressed. She had
nice, round, fresh cheeks and nice, big, honest eyes, plenty of
mouse-brown hair and a short, straight nose. She was striking and
well-bred-looking, and her plenitude of good-natured interest in
everybody, and her pleasure in everything out of which pleasure could
be wrested, gave her big eyes a fresh look which made her seem rather
like a nice overgrown girl than a mature woman whose life was a
continuous struggle with the narrowest of mean fortunes.
