The Boy with Wings Part 14

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 s.h.i.+ne. 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 Sat.u.r.day afternoon, a fortnight after that Sat.u.r.day 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 suns.h.i.+ne-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 gra.s.s.

"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 Fraulein 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 Pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sive as--as that magnet," p.r.o.nounced 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.