A Daughter of To-Day Part 6

said Mrs. Jordan darkly, "that's wot I do, an' I only 'ope I won't find 'er suicided on charcoal some mornin'

like that pore young poetiss in yesterday's paper."

Another knock, half an hour later, found Elfrida finis.h.i.+ng her coffee. Out-of-doors the world was gray, the little square windows were beaten with rain. Inside the dreariness was redeemed to the extent of a breath, a suggestion. An essence came out of the pictures and the trappings, and blended itself with the lingering fragrance of the joss-sticks and the roses and the cigarettes in a delightful manner. The room was almost warm with it. It seemed to centre in Elfrida; as she sat beside the writing-table, whose tumultuous papers had been pushed away to make room for the breakfast dishes, she was instinct with it.

Miss Bell glanced hurriedly around the room. It was unimpeachable--not so much as a strayed collar interfered with its character as an apartment where a young lady might receive. "Come in," she said. She knew the knock.

The door opened slowly to a hesitating push, and disclosed Mr. Golightly Ticke by degrees. Mr. Ticke was accustomed to boudoirs less rigid in their exclusiveness, and always handled Miss Bell's door with a certain amount of embarra.s.sment. If she wanted a chance to whisk anything out of the way he would give her that chance. Fully in view of the lady and the coffee-pot Mr. Ticke made a stage bow. "Here is my apology," he said, holding out a letter; "I found it in the box as I came in."

It was another long thick envelope, and in its upper left hand corner was printed, in early English lettering, _The St. George's Gazette_. Elfrida took it with the faintest perceptible change of countenance. It was another discomfiture, but it did not prevent her from opening her dark eyes with a remote effect of pathos entirely disconnected with its reception. "And you climbed all these flights to give it to me!" she said, with gravely smiling plaintiveness. "Thank you. Why should you have been so good? Please, please sit down."

Mr. Ticke looked at her expressively. "I don't know, Miss Bell, really. I don't usually take much trouble for people. I say it without shame. Most people are not worth it. You don't mind my saying that you're an exception, though. Besides, I'm afraid I had my eye on my reward."

"You're reward!" Elfrida repeated. Her smiling comprehension insisted that it did not understand.

"The pleasure of saying good-morning to you. But that is an inanity, Miss Bell, and unworthy of me. I should have left you to divine it."

"How could I divine an inanity in connection with you?"

she answered, and her eyes underlined her words. When he returned, "Oh, you always parry!" she felt a little thrill of pleasure with herself. "How did it go--last night?"

she asked.

"Altogether lovely. Standing room only, and the boxes taken for a week. I find myself quite adorable in my little part now. I _feel_ it, you know. I am James Jones, a solicitor's clerk, to my fingers' ends. My nature changes, my environment changes, the instant I go on.

But a little thing upsets me. Last night I had to smoke a cigar--the swell of the piece gives me a cigar--and he gave me a poor one. It wasn't in tone--the unities required that he should give me a good cigar. See? I felt quite confused for the moment."

Elfrida's eyes had strayed to the corner of her letter.

"If you want to read that," continued Mr. Ticke, "I know you won't mind me."

"Thanks," said Elfrida calmly. "I've read it already.

It's a rejected article."

"My play came back again yesterday for the thirteenth time. The fellow didn't even look at it. I know, because I stuck the second and third pages together as if by accident, and when it came back they were still stuck.

And yet these men pretend to be on the lookout for original work! It's a thrice beastly world, Miss Bell."

Elfrida widened her eyes again and smiled with a vague impersonal winningness. "I suppose one ought not to care,"

said she, "but there is the vulgar necessity of living."

"Yes," agreed Mr. Ticke; and then sardonically: "Waterloo Bridge at ebb tide is such a nasty alternative. I could never get over the idea of the drainage."

"Oh, I know a better way than that." She chose her words deliberately. "A much better way. I keep it here," holding up the bent little finger of her left hand. It had a clumsy silver ring on it, square and thick in the middle, bearing deep-cut Sanskrit letters. "It is a dear little alternative," she went on, "like a bit of brown sugar.

Rather a nice taste, I believe,--and no pain. When I am quite tired of it all I shall use this, I think. My idea is that it's weak to wait until you can't help it. Besides, I could never bear to become--less attractive than I am now."

"Poison!" said Mr. Golightly Ticke, with an involuntarily horrified face. Elfrida's hand was hanging over the edge of the table, and he made as if he would examine the ring without the formality of asking leave.

She drew her fingers away instantly. "In the vernacular,"

she answered coolly. "You may not touch it."

"I beg your pardon. But how awfully chic!"

"It _is_ chic, isn't it? Not so very old, you know."

Elfrida raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips a little.

"It came from Persia. They still do things like that in those delightful countries. And I've had it tested.

There's enough to--satisfy--three people. When you are quite sure you want it I don't mind sharing with you. If you are going out, Mr. Ticke, will you post this for me?

It's a thing about American social ideals, and I'm trying the _Consul_ with it."

"Delighted. But if I know the editor of the _Consul_, it won't get two minutes' consideration."

"No?"

"Being the work of a lady, no. Doesn't matter how good it is. The thing to know about the _Consul_ man is this.

He's very nice to ladies--can't resist ladies; consequence is, the paper's half full of ladies' copy every week. I know, because a cousin of mine writes for him, and most unsympathetic stuff it is. Yet it always goes in, and she gets her three guineas a week as regularly as the day comes. But her pull is that she knows him personally, and she's a d.a.m.ned pretty woman."

Elfrida followed him with interest. "Is she as pretty as I am?" she asked, purely for information.

"Lord, no!" Mr. Ticke responded warmly. "Besides, you've got style, and distinction, and ideas. Any editor would appreciate your points, once you saw him. But you've got to see him first. My candid advice is _take_ this to the _Consul_ office."

Elfrida looked at him in a way which baffled him to understand. "I don't think I can do that," she said slowly; and then added, "I don't know."

"Well," he said, "I'll enter my protest against the foolishness of doing it this way by refusing to post the letter." Mr. Ticke was tremendously in earnest, and threw it dramatically upon the table. "You may be a George Eliot or a--an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but in these days you want every advantage, Miss Bell, and women who succeed understand that."

Elfrida's face was still enigmatic, so enigmatic that Mr. Ticke felt reluctantly constrained to stop. "I must pursue the even tenor of my way," he said airily, looking at his watch. "I've an engagement to lunch at one. _Don't_ ask me to post that article, Miss Bell. And by the way,"

as he turned to go, "I haven't a smoke about me. Could you give me a cigarette?"

"Oh yes," said Elfrida, without looking at him, "as many as you like," and she pushed an open box toward him; but she had an absent, considering air that did not imply any idea of what she was doing.

"Thanks, only one. Or perhaps two--there now, two! How good these little Hafiz fellows are! Thanks awfully.

Good-bye!"

"Good-bye," said Elfrida, with her eyes on the packet addressed to the editor of the _Consul_; and Mr. Golightly Ticke tripped downstairs. She had not looked at him again.

She sat thinking, thinking. She applied herself first to stimulate the revolt that rose within her against Golightly Ticke's advice--his intolerably, no, his forgetfully presumptuous advice. She would be just to him: he talked so often to women with whom such words would carry weight, for an instant he might fail to recognize that she was not one of those. It was absurd to be angry, and not at all in accordance with any theory of life that operated in Paris. Instinctively, at the thought of a moral indignation upon such slender grounds in Paris she gave herself the benefit of a thoroughly expressive Parisian shrug. And how they understood, success in Paris! Beasts!

And yet it was all in the game. It was a matter of skill, of superiority, of puppet-playing. One need not soil one's hands--in private one could always laugh. She remembered how Nadie had laughed when three bunches of roses from three different art critics had come in together--how inextinguishably Nadie had laughed. It was in itself a, success of a kind. Nadie had no scruples, except about her work. She went straight to her end, believing it to be an end worth arriving at by any means.

And now Nadie would presently be _tres en vue--tres en vue!_ After all, it was a much finer thing to be scrupulous about one's work--that was the real morality, the real life. Elfrida closed her eyes and felt a little shudder of consciousness of how real it was. When she opened them again she was putting down her protest with a strong hand, crus.h.i.+ng her rebellious instincts unmercifully.

She did not allow herself a moment's self-deception. She did not insult her intelligence by the argument that it was a perfectly harmless and proper thing to offer a piece of work to an editor in person--that everybody did it--that she might thereby obtain some idea of what would suit his paper if her article did not. She was perfectly straightforward in confronting Golightly Ticke's idea, and she even disrobed it, to her own consciousness, of any garment of custom and conventionality it might have had to his. Another woman might have taken it up and followed it without an instant's hesitation, as a matter concerning which there could be no doubt, a matter of ordinary expediency--of course a man would be nicer to a woman than to another man; they always were; it was natural. But Elfrida, with her merciless insight, had to harden her heart and ply her self-respect with a.s.surances that it was all in the game, and it was a superb thing to be playing the game. Deliberately she chose the things she looked best in, and went out.

CHAPTER IX.

The weather had cleared to a compromise. The dome of St.

Paul's swelled dimly out of the fog as Elfrida turned into Fleet Street, and the railway bridge that hangs over the heads of the people at the bottom of Ludgate Hill seemed a curiously solid structure connecting s.p.a.ce with s.p.a.ce. Fleet Street, wet and brown, and standing in all unremembered fas.h.i.+ons, lifted its antiquated head and waited for more rain; the pavements glistened briefly, till the tracking heels of the crowd gave them back their squalor; and there was everywhere that newness of turmoil that seems to burst even in the turbulent streets of the City when it stops raining. The girl made her way toward Charing Cross with the westward-going crowd. It went with a steady, respectable jog-trot, very careful of its skirts and umbrellas and the bottoms of its trousers; she took pleasure in hastening past it with her light gait. She would walk to the _Consul_ office, which was in the vicinity of the Haymarket; indeed, she must, for the sake of economy. "I ought really to be _very_ careful," thought Elfrida. "I've only eight sovereigns left, and I can't --oh, I _can't_ ask them for any more at home." So she went swiftly on, pausing once before a picture-dealer's in the Strand to make a mocking mouth at the particularly British quality of the art which formed the day's exhibit, and once to glance at a news-stand where two women of the street, one still young and pretty, the other old and foul, were buying the _Police Gazette_ from a stolid-faced boy. "What a subject for Nadie," she said to herself, smiling, and hurried on. Twenty yards further a carter's horse lay dying with its head upon the pavement.

She made an impulsive detour of nearly half a mile to avoid pa.s.sing the place, and her thoughts recurred painfully to the animal half a dozen times. The rain came down again before she reached the _Consul_ office; a policeman misinformed her, she had a difficulty in finding it. She arrived at last, with damp skirts and muddy boots. It had been a long walk, and the article upon American social ideals was limp and spotted. A door confronted her, flush with the street. She opened it.

and found herself at the bottom of a flight of stairs, steep, dark, and silent. She hesitated a moment, and then went up. At the top another closed door met her, with _The Consul_ painted in black letters on the part of it that consisted of ground gla.s.s somewhat the worse for pencil-points and finger-nails. Elfrida lifted her hand to knock, then changed her mind and opened the door.

It was a small room lined on two sides with deal compartments bulging with dusty papers. There were two or three shelves of uninteresting-looking books, and a desk which extended into a counter. The upper panes of the window were ragged with cobwebs, and the air of the place was redolent of stale publications. A thick-set little man in spectacles sat at the desk. It was not Mr.

Curtis.

The thick-set man rose as Elfrida entered, and came forward a dubious step or two. His expression was not encouraging.