Dressmakers -- Fiction; Love stories; Young women -- Fiction
There was great laughter. Even Sally joined in it. Going home, the other
girls in her carriage all insisted upon hearing the song again, and as
they all had the quick ear of Cockneys they could sing it in chorus by
the time the train reached its journey's end. Sally had become, for a
time, the heroine of the occasion. Only Rose, in the other carriage, had
made her protest against the song and its singer.
"Love path!" she said, in a warm voice of indignation. "She's nothing
but a cocket--a white-faced cocket. That's what she is. She nothing but
a white-faced cocket, that Sally Minto!"
From that time onward that was Sally's name among the girls--"Cocket,"
or "White-faced Cocket." Rose had coined the phrase which would stick.
When Sally heard her name the next day, through Muriel's indiscretion,
she looked over at Rose with pinched nostrils and a little dry smile.
She was flattered. The name was the product of Rose's jealousy and
injured vanity; but it was life to Sally, for it was a testimony--the
first she had ever had--to her charm and her dangerousness.
iv
She did not tell Toby the next night about her singing. She rather
carefully refrained from telling him, not out of considerateness, but
from a sort of scorn for his jealousy. To herself she said "Anything for
a quiet life." Toby never dreamed that such a person as Gaga existed,
any more than he guessed at any of Sally's encounters with young men on
the way home. Sally had discretion. Had he been a lover, she might have
told him; but as he was more to her than that she saw no reason to
arouse his jealousy. And really, if a man spoke to her, and looked all
right, where was the harm in letting him walk a little way with her? She
never made appointments, and after a time, when they found she could
take care of herself, and did not want a non-committed male friend,
these fellow-pedestrians soon left her alone. For Sally, each of them
was practice. To mention them to Toby would have been to give them all
too great importance. And he might have made a fuss, and unnecessarily
interrupted her fun. "Where ignorance is bliss," thought Sally, "'tis
folly to call out the guard." And, further, "Let sleeping dogs lie until
the milk is stolen." And so Toby pursued his own path, and never knew a
tenth of what went on in Sally's life and mind. Compared with Sally, he
knew nothing at all. She grew each day more _rusée_, more cunning in
knowledge of the world. And Toby blundered where he should have been
most astute. It was his fate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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