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Page 45
"Then I've had all the trouble of coming out here for nothing."
"But wouldn't you prefer coming out and finding me well than
coming out and finding me ill?" asked Scrap, smiling?
Even Mrs. Fisher was caught by the smile.
"Well, you're a pretty creature," she said forgivingly. "It's a
pity you weren't born fifty years ago. My friends would have liked
looking at you."
"I'm very glad I wasn't," said Scrap. "I dislike being looked
at."
"Absurd," said Mrs. Fisher, growing stern again. "That's what
you are made for, young women like you. For what else, pray? And I
assure you that if my friends had looked at you, you would have been
looked at by some very great people."
"I dislike very great people," said Scrap, frowning. There had
been an incident quite recently--really potentates. . .
"What I dislike," said Mrs. Fisher, now as cold as that stone she
had got up from, "is the pose of the modern young woman. It seems to
me pitiful, positively pitiful, in its silliness."
And, her stick crunching the pebbles, she walked away.
"That's all right," Scrap said to herself, dropping back into her
comfortable position with her head in the cushion and her feet on the
parapet; if only people would go away she didn't in the least mind why
they went.
"Don't you think darling Scrap is growing a little, just a
little, peculiar?" her mother had asked her father a short time before
that latest peculiarity of the flight to San Salvatore, uncomfortably
struck by the very odd things Scrap said and the way she had taken to
slinking out of reach whenever she could and avoiding everybody except
--such a sign of age--quite young men, almost boys.
"Eh? What? Peculiar? Well, let her be peculiar if she likes. A
woman with her looks can be any damned thing she pleases," was the
infatuated answer.
"I do let her," said her mother meekly; and indeed if she did
not, what difference would it make?
Mrs. Fisher was sorry she had bothered about Lady Caroline. She
went along the hall towards her private sitting-room, and her stick as
she went struck the stone floor with a vigour in harmony with her
feelings. Sheer silliness, these poses. She had no patience with
them. Unable to be or do anything of themselves, the young of the
present generation tried to achieve a reputation for cleverness by
decrying all that was obviously great and obviously good and by
praising everything, however obviously bad, that was different. Apes,
thought Mrs. Fisher, roused. Apes. Apes. And in her sitting-room
she found more apes, or what seemed to her in her present mood more,
for there was Mr. Arbuthnot placidly drinking coffee, while at the
writing-table, the writing-table she already looked upon as sacred,
using her pen, her own pen brought for her hand alone from Prince of
Wales Terrace, sat Mrs. Wilkins writing; at the table; in her room;
with her pen.
"Isn't this a delightful place?" said Mrs. Arbuthnot cordially.
"We have just discovered it."
"I'm writing to Mellersh," said Mrs. Wilkins, turning her head
and also cordially--as though, Mrs. Fisher thought, she cared a straw
who she was writing to and anyhow knew who the person she called
Mellersh was. "He'll want to know," said Mrs. Wilkins, optimism
induced by her surroundings, "that I've got here safely."
Chapter 11
The sweet smells that were everywhere in San Salvatore were alone
enough to produce concord. They came into the sitting-room from the
flowers on the battlements, and met the ones from the flowers inside
the room, and almost, thought Mrs. Wilkins, could be seen greeting each
other with a holy kiss. Who could be angry in the middle of such
gentlenesses? Who could be acquisitive, selfish, in the old rasped
London way, in the presence of this bounteous beauty?
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