Читать книгу The Three Lovers - Frank Swinnerton - Страница 19

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In the morning she awoke to ambitious determination. At first waking she knew it was late, and sighed, very drowsy and comfortable. Happy thoughts began to float into her consciousness, and she smiled again to herself like a little girl. But when Lucy, the maid of the house, tramped up to her door and knocked there with knuckles of iron, Patricia no longer lay in reverie. She instantly arose, took her primitive bath, and was in her sitting-room long before the breakfast arrived.

There were no letters. There were never any letters for Patricia. Letters never come, she believed, to the truly deserving. She had a hunger for letters. She longed intensely to be like those young men in demodé books who opened uncountable bills and billets doux at the breakfast-table and stuck all their cards of invitation round the edges of the mirror upon the mantelpiece. The mirror was there; but no cards adorned it. The mirror had a gilded frame, and was no longer very fresh. It was flanked by vases intended to represent perfectly incredible marble. In the fireplace was a gas-fire, alight. The floor was covered with green and red oilcloth, and a woolly rug of yellow and magenta lay before the hearth. There was a sofa against the opposite wall, and at the window stood a sturdy table bearing a typewriter. In the middle of the room was another table upon which the first signs of breakfast were laid. Here, too, was Patricia's own little bowl of flowers. That bowl, the flowers, and the typewriter, were here her sole possessions. The rest belonged to the landlady who lived somewhere far below stairs, and it received daily a severe banging from Lucy, whose speed and energy exceeded her competence by about as much as the salary of a competent staff would have exceeded Lucy's wages.

Patricia went to the flowers and raised the bowl so that she could still detect the ghost of their waning fragrance. In her morning dress of blue serge, the collar high and the shape quite simple, she seemed perhaps taller and slimmer than she had been on the previous night. But she was quite as pretty, and the fresh pink of her rounded cheeks betokened good health. Her hair, which was not long, was arranged to-day as it had been arranged at Monty's party. She was the same girl, but she was graver, because this morning her thoughts were more active and she was therefore more sad.

She remembered old Dalrymple, whom she had met through the agency of Amy, asking her to go to the party with him, and calling for her; she remembered their journey, her entry of the mysteriously charming house, of the studio, her first sight of Monty and instinctive interest in that dark and impenetrable face. And then the noise and brilliance, and Amy, and all the gay talk, and Mr. Mayne.... For a long time she was shy of permitting any thought of Harry, as one sometimes leaves the finest peach to the last; and it was delicious to be always almost returning and arriving at Harry, to feel him perpetually there, summonable at impulse, and wilfully to hold thought of him in reserve. Yet in reality it was most often of Harry that she was aware in every wayward turn of memory.