But it was not until the girls finally came home from school, that they felt the full weight of Granny’s dear old hand on their lives. Lucille was now nearly twenty-one, and Yvette nineteen. They had been to a good girls’ school, and had had a finishing year in Lausanne, and were quite the usual thing, tall young creatures with fresh, sensitive faces and bobbed hair and young-manly, deuce-take-it manners.

“What’s so awfully BORING about Papplewick,” said Yvette, as they stood on the Channel boat watching the grey, grey cliffs of Dover draw near, “is that there are no MEN about. Why doesn’t Daddy have some good old sports for friends? As for Uncle Fred, he’s the limit!”

“Oh, you never know what will turn up,” said Lucille, more philosophic.

“You jolly well know what to expect,” said Yvette. “Choir on Sundays, and I hate mixed choirs. Boys’ voices are LOVELY, when there are no women. And Sunday School and Girls’ Friendly, and socials, all the dear old souls that enquire after Granny! Not a decent young fellow for miles.”

“Oh I don’t know!” said Lucille. “There’s always the Framleys. And you know Gerry Somercotes ADORES you.”

“Oh but I HATE fellows who adore me!” cried Yvette, turning up her sensitive nose. “They BORE me. They hang on like lead.”

“Well what DO you want, if you can’t stand being adored? I think it’s perfectly all right to be adored. You know you’ll never marry them, so why not let them go on adoring, if it amuses them.”

“Oh but I WANT to get married,” cried Yvette.

“Well in that case, let them go on adoring you till you find one that you can POSSIBLY marry.”

“I never should, that way. Nothing puts me off like an adoring fellow. They BORE me so! They make me feel beastly.”

“Oh, so they do me, if they get pressing. But at a distance, I think they’re rather nice.”

“I should like to fall VIOLENTLY in love.”

“Oh, very likely! I shouldn’t! I should hate it. Probably so would you, if it actually happened. After all, we’ve got to settle down a bit, before we know what we want.”

“But don’t you HATE going back to Papplewick?” cried Yvette, turning up her young sensitive nose.

“No, not particularly. I suppose we shall be rather bored. I wish Daddy would get a car. I suppose we shall have to drag the old bikes out. Wouldn’t you like to get up to Tansy Moor?”

“Oh, LOVE it! Though it’s an awful strain, shoving an old push-bike up those hills.”

The ship was nearing the grey cliffs. It was summer, but a grey day. The two girls wore their coats with fur collars turned up, and little chic hats pulled down over their ears. Tall, slender, fresh-faced, na?ve, yet confident, too confident, in their school-girlish arrogance, they were so terribly English. They seemed so free, and were as a matter of fact so tangled and tied up, inside themselves. They seemed so dashing and unconventional, and were really so conventional, so, as it were, shut up indoors inside themselves. They looked like bold, tall young sloops, just slipping from the harbour, into the wide seas of life. And they were, as a matter of fact, two poor young rudderless lives, moving from one chain anchorage to another.

分享到：