But it was Susan herself who returned to the subject. She came into my room where I sat reading--a collection of the tiniest little books in the most sumptuous gilt morocco had been yet another of Mrs Monnerie's kindnesses--and she stood for a moment musing out through my silk window blinds at the vast zinc tank on the roof.

"Was that true?" she said at last. "Did you really know some one who killed himself? Who was he? What was he like?"

"He was a young man--in his twenty-ninth year," I replied automatically, "dark, short, with gold spectacles, a clergyman. He was the curate at St Peter's--Beechwood, you know." I was speaking in a low voice, as if I might be overheard.

It was extraordinary how swiftly Mr Crimble had faded into a vanishing shadow. From the very instant of his death the world had begun to adjust itself to his absence. And now nothing but a memory--a black, sad memory.

But Susan's voice interrupted these faint musings. "A clergyman!" she was repeating. "But why--why did he--do that?"

"They said, melancholia. I suppose it was just impossible--or _seemed_ impossible--for him to go on living."

"But what made him melancholy? How awful. And how can Aunt Alice have said it like that?"

"But surely," argued I, in my old contradictory fashion, and spying about for a path of evasion, "it's better to call things by their proper names. What is the body, after all? Not that I mean one has any right to--to _not_ die in one's own bed."

"And do you really think like that?--the body of no importance? You?

Why, Miss M., Aunt Alice calls you her 'pocket Venus,' and she means it, too, in her own sly way."

"It's very kind of her," said I, breathing more freely. "Some one I know always calls me Midgetina, or Miss Midge, anything of that sort. I don't mean, Miss Monnerie, that it doesn't _matter_ what we are called. Why, if that were so, there wouldn't be any Society at all, would there? We should all be--well--anonymous." Deep inside I felt myself smile. "Not that that makes much difference to good poetry."

Susan sighed. "How zigzaggedly you talk. What has poetry to do with Mr Crimble?--that was his name, wasn't it?"

"Well, it hasn't very much," I confessed. "He hadn't the time for it."

Susan seated herself on a cushion on the floor--and with how sharp a stab reminded me of f.a.n.n.y and the old, care-free days of _Wuthering Heights_.

Surely--in spite of f.a.n.n.y--life had definitely taken a tinge of Miss Bronte's imagination since then. But it was only the languor of Susan's movements, and that because she seemed a little tired, rather than merely indolent. And if from f.a.n.n.y's eyes had now stooped a serpent and now a blinded angel; from these clear blue ones looked only a human being like myself. Even as I write that "like myself," I ponder. But let it stay.

"So you really did know him?" Susan persisted. "And it doesn't seem a nightmare even to think of him? And who, I say, made it impossible for him to go on living?" So intense was her absorption in these questions that when they ceased her hands tightened round her knees, and her small mouth remained ajar.

"You said '_what_' just now," I prevaricated, looking up at her.

At this her blue eyes opened so wide I broke into a little laugh.

"No, no, no, Miss Monnerie," I hastened to explain, "not _me_. It isn't my story, though I was in it--and to blame. But please, if you would be so kind, don't mention it again to Mrs Monnerie, and don't think about it any more."

"Not think about it! _You_ must. Besides, thoughts sometimes think themselves. I always supposed that things like that only happened to quite--to different people, you know. Was _he_?"

"_Different?_" I couldn't follow her. "He was the curate of St Peter's--a friend of the Pollackes."

"Oh, yes, the Pollackes," said she; and having glanced at me again, said no more.

The smallest confidence, I find, is a short cut to friendship. And after this little conversation there was no ice to break between Susan Monnerie and myself, and she often championed me in my little difficulties--even if only by her silence.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Miss Monnerie's visits were less punctual though more frequent than Percy Maudlen's. "And where is the toadlet?" I heard him drawl one afternoon as I was being carried downstairs by the light-footed Fleming, on the padded tray which Mrs Monnerie had had made for the purpose.

"The toadlet, my dear Percy, is about to take a little gentle exercise with me in the garden, and you shall accompany us. If you were the kind of fairy-tale hero I used to read of in my nursery, you would discover the charm, and live happy ever after. But I see nothing of the heroic in you, and little of the hereafter. Miss M. is a feast of mercies."

"H'm. Providence packs his mercies into precious small quarters at times," he yawned.

"Which suggests an uncivil speculation," replied his aunt, "on the size of your hat."

"But candidly, Aunt Alice," he retorted, "is your little _attachee_ quite all there--I mean, all of her that there is? Personally I wouldn't touch her, if I could help it, with a pair of tongs.... A nasty trick!"

Then, "Hah!" cried Mrs Monnerie in a large, pleasant voice, "here is Miss M. Percy has been exposing a wounded heart, precious one. He is hurt because you look at him as if there were positively nothing more of him than what is there to see."

"Not at all, Aunt Alice," Percy drawled, with a jerk of his cane. "It was for precisely the opposite reason. Who knows you ain't a witch, Miss M.? Distilled? Heavens, Aunt Alice! you are not bringing Cherry _too_?"

Yes, Cherry was coming too, with his globular eye and sneering nose. And so poor Percy, with a cold little smile on his fine pale features, had to accommodate himself to Mrs Monnerie's leisurely pace, and she to mine, while Cherry disdainfully shuffled in our rear. We were a singular quartette, though there were only two or three small children in the palisaded garden to enjoy the spectacle; and they, after a few polite and m.u.f.fled giggles, returned to their dolls.

It was a stifling afternoon. As I trod the yellow gravel the quivering atmosphere all but blinded me with its reflected glare. The only sounds to be heard were the clang of a milkman's hand-cart, and the pirouettes of a distant piano.

"And what," Mrs Monnerie suddenly inquired, looking down on me, with mauve-tinted cheek, from under her beribanded, long-handled parasol, "what is Miss M. thinking about?"

As a matter of fact I was walking at that moment in imagination with Mrs Bowater at Lyme Regis, but I seized the opportunity of hastening round from between aunt and nephew so that I could screen myself from the sun in Mrs Monnerie's ample shadow, and inquired why London gardeners were so much attached to geraniums, lobelias, calceolarias, and ice-plants?

Mightn't one just as well _paint_ the border, Mrs Monnerie, red, yellow, and blue? Then it would last--rain, snow, anything.

"Now I'll wager, Percy, you hadn't noticed _that_," said Mrs Monnerie in triumph.

"I make it a practice," he replied, "never to notice the obvious. It is merely a kind of least common denominator, as I believe you call 'em, and," he wafted away a yawn with his glove, "I take no interest in vulgar fractions."

I took a little look at him out of the corner of my eye, and wished that as a child I had paid more heed to my arithmetic lessons. "Look, Mrs Monnerie," I cried piteously, "poor Cherry's tongue is dangling right out of his head. He looks _so_ hot and tired."

She swept me a radiant, if contorted, gleam. "Percy, would you take pity on poor dear Cherry? Twice round, I think, will be as much as I can comfortably manage."

So Percy had to take poor dear Cherry into his arms, just like a baby; and the quartette to all appearance became a trio.

But my existence at No. 2 was not always so monotonous as that. Mrs Monnerie, in spite of her age, her ebony cane, and a tendency to breathlessness, was extremely active and alert. If life is a fountain, she preferred to be one of the larger bubbles as near as possible to its summit. She almost succeeded in making me a minute replica of herself.

We shared the same manicurist, milliner, modiste, and coiffeur. And since it was not always practicable for Mahometta to be carried off to these delectable mountains, they were persuaded to attend upon her, and that as punctually as the fawn-faced man, Mr G.o.dde, who came to wind the clocks.

Whole mornings were spent in conclave in Mrs Monnerie's boudoir--Susan sometimes of our company. Julius Caesar, so my little Roman history told me, had hesitated over the crossing of one Rubicon. Mrs Monnerie and I confabulated over the fording of a dozen of its tributaries a day. A specialist--a singularly bald man in a long black coat--was called in.

He eyed me this way, he eyed me that--with far more deference than I imagine Mr Pellew can have paid me at my christening. He a.s.sured Mrs Monnerie of his confirmed belief that the mode of the moment was not of the smallest consequence so far as I was concerned. "The hard, small hat," he smiled; "the tight-fitting sleeve!" And yet, to judge by the clothes he did recommend, I must have been beginning to look a pretty dowd at Mrs Bowater's.

"But even if Madam prefers to dress in a style of her own choice," he explained, "the difference, if she will understand, must still be _in_ the fashion."

But he himself--though Mrs Monnerie, I discovered after he was gone, had not even noticed that he was bald--he himself interested me far more than his excellent advice; and not least when he drew some papers out of a pocket-book, and happened to let fall on the carpet the photograph of a fat little boy with an immense mop of curls. So men--quite elderly, practical men, can blush, I thought to myself; for Dr Phelps had rather flushed than blushed; and my father used only to get red.

Since nothing, perhaps, could make me more exceptional in appearance than I had been made by Providence, I fell in with all Mrs Monnerie's fancies, and wore what she pleased--pushing out of mind as well as I could all thought of bills. I did more than that. I really began to enjoy dressing myself up as if I were my own doll, and when alone I would sit sometimes in a luxurious trance, like a lily in a pot. Yet I did not entirely abandon my old little Bowater habit of indoor exercise.

When I was alone in my room I would sometimes skip. And on one of Fleming's afternoons "out" I even furbished up what I could remember of my four kinds of Kentish hopscotch, with a slab of jade for dump. But in the very midst of such recreations I would surprise myself lost in a kind of vacancy. Apart from its humans and its furniture, No. 2 was an empty house.

I do not mean that Mrs Monnerie was concerned only with externals. Sir William Forbes-Smith advised that a little white meat should enrich my usual diet of milk and fruit, and that I should have sea-salt baths. The latter were more enjoyable than the former, though both, no doubt, helped to bring back the strength sapped out of me by the West End.

My cheekbones gradually rounded their angles; a livelier colour came to lip and skin, and I began to be as self-conscious as a genuine beauty.