The Boy with Wings
even voice as she plaited her hair.
"By the way, did the Dampier boy give you back that locket of yours?"
"I forgot all about it," said Gwenna, picking up the head of pink clover
that had fallen out of her blouse. "I'll ask him next time. He's going
to take me up soon, you know, again."
Just as an alarm is "set" to sound at some given hour, so the whole of
the girl's innocent being was set, to wait and wait for that "next time"
of meeting him--whenever it should be.
CHAPTER X
LESLIE, ON "THE ROOTS OF THE ROSE"
Leslie Long was lounging in a rickety deck-chair under the acacia tree
that overshadowed the small lawn behind the Ladies' Residential Club.
Miss Long looked nonchalantly untidy and her hair was coming down again.
But she had an eye to an occasion on which she meant to shine. She was
carefully darning a pair of silk stockings, stockings she was to wear
with her all-mauve Nijinski rig at a costume dance in a week's time. She
was looking forward to that dance.
It was a late Saturday afternoon, a fortnight after that Saturday that
Gwenna Williams had spent in the country with the Dampier boy. Most of
the girls in the Club were out somewhere now. Only one of the students
from the College of Music was practising Liszt's "Liebestraum."
Presently however, a sunshine-yellow jersey coat appeared on the steps
at the back entrance of the Club. Gwenna Williams was looking out. She
saw her chum in the garden and ran down to her; dropping upon the lawn
at her feet, and nestling her curly head down upon the lengthy knee that
supported the darning-basket.
Gwenna's small face looked petulant, miserable. She felt it. Leslie, to
whom, of course, the other girl was as an open book, asked no question.
She left that to Gwenna, who had never, so far, made any spoken
admission of what had happened--or not happened--since the evening when
they had dressed together to go to that dinner-party at the Smiths'. It
was Gwenna who asked the first question.
With a stormy and troubled sigh, she broke out, a propos of nothing:
"How is one to make him? I mean how is one ever to get a young man to
like one if he hardly ever sees one?"
Leslie looked down at her over the second mauve stocking that she was
drawing over a yellow wooden darning mushroom.
"Tut," said Leslie, with her usual mock unction. "What is all this about
'getting' a young man to like one? What an expression, my love. And,
worse; what a _sentiment_! Surely you know that men (nice men) think
very lightly of a girl who does not have to be _wooed_. With deference,
Taffy. With _reverence_. With hovering uncertainty and suspense
and--er--the rest of that bag of tricks."
The soft, persistent notes of the "Liebestraum" coming through the open
Club windows filled a short pause. Leslie threaded her needle with mauve
silk, then took up her mushroom--and her theme--once more.
"Men care little for the girl who drops like a ripe plum (unripe fruit
being obviously so much sweeter) into their mouths. (Query, why go about
with their mouths open?) Not so. The girl who pleases is the girl who is
hard to please."
A small discouraged sigh from Gwenna, as she sat there with her yellow
jersey coat spread round her like a great dandelion in the grass.
"Oh, but supposing she _isn't_ hard to please?" she faltered. "Supposing
somebody pleased her awfully? If he'd let her, I mean--oh, I daresay you
think I'm dreadful?"
"You outrage my most sacred what's-their-names--convictions, Taffy,"
declared Leslie, solemnly running her needle in and out of the stretched
silk. "How many times must you be told that the girl a man prizes is she
who knows how to set the very highest Value upon herself? The sweetly
reserved Girl who keeps Him Guessing. The ter-_ruly_ maidenly type who
puts a Barrier about herself, and, as it were, says, 'Mind the barbed
wire. Thus far--unless it's going to be made worth my while, for good.'
Haggling little Hebrew!" concluded Miss Long.
For the girl at whom everybody is shocked has standards of her own. Yes!
There are things at which she, even she, is shocked in turn.
Leslie, speaking of that other, belauded type, quoted:
"'_Oh, the glory of the winning when she's won!_'
(per-haps!)."
And in her voice there was honest disgust.
"No, but Leslie! _Stop_ laughing about it all! And tell me, really,
now--" appealed the younger girl, leaning an arm upon her friend's knee
and looking up with eyes imploring guidance. "_You've_ known lots of
men. _You've_ had them--well, admiring you and telling you so?"
"Thank you, yes," said Leslie, demurely darning. "You mightn't think it,
to look at me in this blouse, but I have been--er--stood plenty of
emotional drinks of that kind."
"Then you know. You tell me--" pleaded Gwenna, pathetically earnest. "Is
it true that men don't like you if they think you like them very much?"
Leslie's impish face peeped at her over the silk stocking held up over
the mushroom. And Leslie's mouth was one crooked scarlet curve of
derision.
But it straightened into gravity again as she said, "I don't know,
Taffy. Honest injun! One woman can't lay down rules for another woman.
She's got to reckon with her own type--just pick up that hairpin, will
you--and his. I can only tell you that what is one man's meat
is--another man's won't meet."
Gwenna, at her knee, sighed stormily again.
Leslie, rearranging herself cautiously in the insecure deck-chair, put a
finger through one of Gwenna's curls, and said very gently, "Doesn't the
Dampier boy come to meet it, then?"
Gwenna, carnation red, cried, "Oh _no_! Of _course_ not. I wasn't
_thinking_ of him."
In the same breath she added shamefacedly, "How did you know, Leslie?
You are clever!" And then, in a soft burst of confidence, "Oh, I _have_
been so worrying! All these days and days, Leslie! And to-day I felt I
simply _had_ to tell you about it--or _burst_! I haven't really been
able to think of anything but him. And he--he _hates_ me, I know."
She used that word to console herself. Hate is so infinitely less
discouraging than polite indifference!
Leslie glanced very kindly at the flushed face, at the compact yet
lissom little body sitting up on its heels on the Club lawn. She asked,
"Doesn't the creature _look_ at you? The other day when he took you out
and broke down the motor? Didn't he then?"
"Yes, he did," admitted Gwenna, "a little."
"That's a start, then. So 'Cheer up, Taff, don't let your spirits go
down,'" hummed Leslie. "Ask your Fraeulein at the works if she knows an
excellent slang German phrase for falling in love. 'Der hat sich aber
man ordentlich verguckt?' 'He's been and looked himself well into it'--I
am glad the Dampier boy did look. It _is_ engendered in the eyes, as
poor old Bernard Shaw used to say. It will be all right."
"Will it, d'you think? Will it?"
Gwenna, kneeling beside the dishevelled, graceful figure with its long
limbs stretched out far beyond the deck-chair, gazed up as if into the
face of an oracle.
"What do I _do_," she persisted innocently, "to make him look--to make
him like me?"
"You don't 'do.' You 'be,' and pretty hard too. You, my child, sit
tight. It's what they call the Passive Role of Woman," explained Leslie,
with a twinkle. "Like _this_." And she drew out of her darning-basket a
slender horseshoe-shaped implement such as workwomen use to pick up a
dropped needle, painted scarlet to within half an inch of its end. She
held it motionless a little away from her darning. There was a flash in
the sunlight and a sharp little "click" as the needle flew up and clung
to the magnet.
"D'you see, Turtle-dove?"
"Yes; but _that_ isn't what you seemed to be talking about just now,"
objected Gwenna. "You seemed to think that a girl _needn't mind_ 'doing'
something about it. Letting a person see that she liked him."
"That isn't 'doing.' A girl can get in such a lot of useful
execution--excuse my calling spade work spade work--all the time she is
going on being as passive as--as that magnet," pronounced the mentor.
"Of course you've got to take care to look as nice as you know how to
all the time.
"And here you score, Miss Williams. Allow a friend to say that you're
not only as pretty as they make 'em, but you know how to take care that
you're as pretty _as they're made_!"
The younger girl, puzzled, asked the difference.
"I mean that you've cultivated the garden, and haven't got to start
digging up the weeds and sweeping the lawn five minutes before you
expect the garden-party," explained Leslie, in the analogies that she
loved. "Some girls don't seem to think of 'making the most of
themselves' until the man comes along that they want to make much of
_them_. Then it's so often a scramble. You've had the instinct. You
haven't got your appearance into any of the little ways that put a man
off without his knowing quite what he's been put off _by_. One excellent
thing about you----"
"Yes?" said Gwenna, rapt, expectant.
The particular unsolicited testimonial that followed was unexpected
enough.
"For one thing, Taffy, you're always--_washed_!"
"Why, of course. But, Leslie--surely--so's _everybody_!"
"_Are_ they?" ejaculated Miss Long darkly. "They think they are. They
simply haven't grasped how much soap and water and loofah go to that, in
big towns. Half the girls aren't what _I_ call tubbed. How many of them,
with bathrooms a yard from their bedrooms, bother to have a scrub at
night as well as in the mornings? It's at night they're grimy, Taff.
It's at night they leave it on, powder and all, to work into themselves
until that 'unfresh' look gets chronic. My dear, I tell you that the
two-bath-a-day rule would give us much less of the Lonely-and-Neglected
Women Problem. There!"
Gwenna Williams, twisting between finger and thumb the stalk of a daisy
she had picked off the lawn, murmured something about it's being funny,
love having anything to do with how often a girl _washed_!
"Of course you think Leslie is revoltingly unpoetic to suggest it. But
it's sound enough," declared the elder girl. "Flowers don't look as if
'anything to do with' earth had ever touched them, do they? But aren't
their roots bedded deep down in it right enough? All these hints I give
you about Health and Body-culture, these are the Roots of the Rose.
Some of them, anyhow. Especially _washing_. I tell you, Taff"--she spoke
sepulchrally--"_half the 'nice' girls we know don't wash enough_.
_That's_ why they don't get half the attention they'd like. Men like
what they call a 'healthy-looking' girl. As often as not it simply means
the girl happens to be specially _clean_. Beauty's skin-deep; moral,
look after your skin. Now, you do. No soap on your face, Taff?"
"No; just a 'clean' after washing, with Oatine and things like that."
"Right. Costs you about fourpence a week. It might cost four guineas, to
judge from the economical spirit of some girls over that," said Leslie.
"Then, to go on with this grossly material subject that is really the
root of Poetry, do you shampoo your hair nice and often? It looks thick
and soft and glossy and with the curls all big, as if you did."
"Oh, yes, I do. But then that's easy for me; it's short."
"Mine's long enough, but I do it religiously every fortnight. Pays me,"
said Miss Long candidly as she went on working. "Untidy it may be, but
it does feel and smell all right. One of my medical students at the
hospital where I trained for five minutes--the boy Monty, the Dean's
son--_he_ said once that the scent of my hair was like cherry-wood.
'Course I didn't confide in _him_ that I watered it well with bay rum
and rosemary every night. Better than being like Miss Armitage, the
suffragette-woman here, who's so nice-minded that she's 'above'