England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Social classes -- England -- Fiction
Dorothy looked at the speaker curiously. She was a girl who had joined
the company for the last three rehearsals and during this first
fortnight in Manchester had kept herself apart. Lily had spoken to her
once or twice, but Dorothy, who was afraid there might be an unpleasant
reason for such deliberate seclusion, had begged Lily not to be in too
great a hurry to make friends with her. During Onzie's monologue Miss
Scarlett had apparently been unconscious of what was happening in the
compartment, and from the corner opposite Lily she had been staring out
at the landscape, that was scarred and grimed and misshapen by industry
like the hands of the toilers who lived in it. She was different from
all the other girls, Dorothy was thinking--rather foreign-looking with
her deep, brown, slanted eyes and mass of untidy brown hair, her wide
nose, high cheek-bones, and distinctly ugly mouth, the underlip of which
only just escaped protruding. She was dressed, too, in a style that was
quite unlike that of anybody else and without any regard for the
prevailing fashion. Dorothy remembered with a flickering smile that
when she had first seen her at rehearsals she had thought she was one of
the Hungarian artistes who had come to see why her club-room was being
used by a theatrical company. Now when in a deep voice she suddenly
turned round and commented on Fay Onslow's last remark Dorothy was
astonished to hear that she spoke the same kind of English as herself;
she indeed, in her surprise, almost gave utterance aloud to her thought
that this gipsy creature was a lady.
"Hell! I've left my cigarettes behind," the lady ejaculated.
"There now, what a nuisance for you!" said the good-natured Onzie. "Have
one of mine, dear."
"Which are they? Turks or Virgins?" asked Miss Scarlett, leaning over
and screwing up her eyes to see what Onzie was offering.
Dorothy corrected her opinion and decided that Miss Scarlett had been a
lady once upon a time; yet even while she was condemning her vulgarity
she was thinking that her ladyhood was not so far away in the past. Her
speech and manner had the assurance of age, but she could not be much
more than twenty-two or twenty-three, perhaps not even so much as that.
Presently the train stopped for a dreary Sunday wait, and while some of
the gentlemen of the company, with a view to future favors, were
scuttling about the platform in search of tea for the ladies from whom
they would demand them, Dorothy took this opportunity of asking Lily
what she thought about inviting Sylvia Scarlett to share their rooms at
Birmingham.
"She seems quite different from the other girls," Dorothy explained. "I
mean, she talked as if she was a lady. Don't you think so? And really,
you know, we can't afford these rooms unless we do get a third person."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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