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Regiment of Women

<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2> The spring term was nearly over, holidays and a trip to Italy deliciously near; yet Clare Hartill sat at breakfast and frowned over a neatly-written letter. Clare Hartill did not encourage the re-entry of old friends into her life. She did not forget them. She would look back upon the far-off flaming intimacy with regret, would quote its pleasures to the friend of the hour with disconcerting enthusiasm; but she was never eager for the reappearance of any whose ways had once diverged from her own. Pleasant memories, if you will; but, in the flesh, old friends were tiresome. They claimed instant intimacy; were free-tongued, fond, familiar; could not realise that though they might choose to stand still, she, Clare, had grown out of their knowledge, beyond their fellowship. She, indeed, would find them terribly unaltered; older, glamourless, yet amazingly, humiliatingly the same. She would look at them furtively as she entertained them, and shudder at the lapse from taste that surely must have explained her former affection. She would be gracious, kind, yet inimitably distant, and would send them away at last, subdued, vaguely disquieted, loyal still, yet very sure that they would never trouble her again. Which was exactly what Clare Hartill intended. Yet she had her fits of remorse withal, her secret bitter railing at fate and her own nature, for that she could neither keep a friend nor live without one. Recovering, she would be complacent at having contrived, without loss of prestige, to rid herself of bores. There was one fly in her ointment. Who knows not that fly, earnest and well-intentioned, which, when it is dug out with a hairpin, cleanses itself exhaustively and forthwith returns to the vaseline jar? Such a fly, optimistic and persistent,[152] was the correspondent who invariably signed herself, "Ever, dear Clare, your affectionate little friend, Olivia Pring. P.S. Do you remember...?" There would follow a reminiscence, at least twenty years old, that Clare never did remember. Olivia Pring was a school-mate. There had been a term together in the Lower Third. For a few weeks she had been Clare's best friend and she never let Clare forget it. Clare, with removes and double removes, had disappeared speedily from Olivia's world, but she never quite shook off Olivia. Olivia, amiable, admiring, impervious to snubs, refused to be shaken off. She went her placid way, became a governess, and an expert in the more complicated forms of crochet. She wrote to Clare about twice a year—dull, affectionate letters. Clare, that involute character, amazed herself by invariably answering them. At long intervals Olivia would be passing through London, and would announce herself, if quite convenient, as intending to visit her dear Clare that afternoon. She would describe the lengthy tussle between herself and her employer, before she had wrested the requisite permission to stay the night—and did Clare remember the last visit but three, and the amusing evening they had had? And the letter was invariably delayed in the posting, and its arrival would precede that of Olivia by a bare half-hour. Olivia, growing even fatter and more placid, would apologise breathlessly between broad smiles at the sight of Clare and recollections of the dear old days. And Clare, as one hypnotised, would go to her linen cupboard and give out sheets for the spare room. There would follow an evening of interminable small-talk for Clare, of sheer delight for Olivia Pring, who, consciously and conscientiously commonplace, enjoyed dear Clare's daring views as a youthful curate might enjoy, strictly as an onlooker, what he imagines to be the less respectable aspects of an evening in Paris. And Clare would retire to bed at ten-fifteen and sleep as[153] she had not slept for weeks. Olivia would be regretfully obliged to catch the eight-eleven, and would depart amid embraces. And Clare would order up a second breakfast and wonder why she stood it. Yet the pile of unused doileys in her linen cupboard increased yearly. A doiley was Olivia's invariable tribute, and arrived, intricate and unlovely, within a week of her visit. Clare fingered her letter in quaint helplessness. She had a sleepless night behind her, and a big morning's work before, and her usual end-of-term headache. Olivia was arriving—she glanced at the hopelessly legible sheets—at three-fifty. No chance of mistake there. Clare decided that it was quite impossible for her to survive a seven hours' tête-à-tête with her affectionate friend Olivia Pring. If only Alwynne could help her out. But Alwynne, she knew, was taking the skimmings of the Sixths and Fifths to a suitable Shakespeare performance. She had taken the pick of the classes herself the evening before. No chance of Alwynne, then. And Cynthia! Alack for Cynthia! who could have been trusted to amuse Olivia Pring as much as Olivia Pring would have amused her—Cynthia must be aboard ship by now. Clare, in regretful parenthesis, hoped Cynthia would send a few compatriots to Utterbridge.... Americans gave a fillip to one's duties.... Anyhow Alwynne and Cynthia were out of the question. There was Louise! She brightened. Louise, queer little thing, was always amusing.... Louise would serve her turn.... Louise would be so charmed to come.... Clare laughed a little consciously. Perhaps she had neglected Louise a trifle of late, perhaps it was not altogether fair of her. A happy thought buffered the prick of her yawning conscience. It was Alwynne's fault.... Alwynne, with her ridiculous, well-meaning objections.... She, Clare, had given in to them, for peace and quiet sake.... And now, most probably, Louise was not too content with life.... One knew what schoolgirls were.... Never mind! Clare would be very nice to Louise this[154] evening.... Louise should enjoy herself, and, incidentally, preserve Clare from expiring of boredom at poor Olivia's large, flat feet. The invitation was given during the eleven o'clock break. Clare would occasionally join the school in Big Hall, and share its milk and biscuits. Often enough to make it any day's delightful possibility, not often enough for it to be other than an event. She would sit on the platform steps, watching the gay promenaders below, informal, approachable, tossing the ball to the daring few, hedged about, in turn, by the tentative many. Sometimes she would stroll about the hall with a girl on either side, or one only. She had a curious little trick of catching the girl she spoke with by the elbow, and pushing her gently along as she talked, bending over (she was very tall) and enveloping. Everybody knew the "Gendarme Stunt" as Cynthia Griffiths irreverently termed it, and no one would have dreamed of approaching or interrupting such a tête-à-tête. Nevertheless, Miss Hartill had not exchanged three sentences with Louise Denny on the morning of Olivia Pring's arrival, before every girl in Big Hall knew of it, and twice the number of eyes were following them, with an elaborately accidental gaze, in their progress. Possibly Clare was a little touched by Louise's delight at the invitation. At any rate she managed, in spite of her headache, to be a very charming companion. She confessed to the headache, and asked Louise for advice. And Louise, deeply concerned, could think of nothing but a recipe she had found in Clare's own Culpeper, in which rhubarb and powdered dormice figured largely. She suggested it in a doubtful little voice. The school would have given a good deal to know what made Miss Hartill laugh so. Miss Hartill told Louise all about her visitor, whom, she declared, she depended on Louise to entertain, and added a couple of comical tales of their mutual schooldays. Unfortunately Clare's novelli owed their charm more to her inventive touches and graphic manner than to the actual[155] underlying fact. Louise was left with the impression of an Olivia Pring who had been Friar Tuck to Clare's Robin Hood. She appreciated the honour of being asked to meet her to a degree that would have tickled Clare, had she guessed it. "Miss Olivia Pring!" Louise meditated all day over Miss Olivia Pring. Evidently Miss Hartill's best friend.... She hoped Miss Olivia Pring would like her.... How dreadful it would be if she didn't ... for what might she not say of her to Miss Hartill? Louise must be careful, oh, so careful, of her manners and her speech.... It was rather hard luck that she would not have Miss Hartill to herself.... It would be dreadfully uncomfortable—talking before a stranger.... Except for the delightfulness of being asked by Miss Hartill, she could have wished that Miss Hartill had not asked her. Rather an ordeal for a thirteen-year-old—supper with Miss Hartill and Miss Olivia Pring. Now shyness, like any other painful sensation, is inexplicable to such as have not experienced it, is at once forgotten by such as outgrow it, but to those at its mercy, to sheer suffering, paralysing, stultifying, a spiritual Torture of the Pear. Clare Hartill should have understood; she had her own furtive childhood for reference; but Clare Hartill had a headache, and she was very tired of Olivia Pring. Olivia was so placid, so shapeless, so ridiculous, in her pink flannel blouse, and the reckless glasses, that were ever on the point of toppling over the precipice of her abbreviated nose into the abyss of her half-open mouth. It certainly did not occur to Clare that Louise could feel the slightest discomfort on account of Olivia Pring. But Louise was blind to the flannel blouse, and the foolish face, and the unmanageable glasses. She was wearing glasses of her own, rose-coloured affairs, through which Miss Pring appeared, not only as a "grown-up" and a stranger, but as the intimate of Deity in Undress. Miss[156] Pring did nothing to dispel the illusion—she had conscientiously flattened the high spirits out of too many little girls to be interested in a new specimen. She addressed herself chiefly to Clare—recalling incessantly, and enlarging upon, trifling incidents of their mutual past, which every fresh sentence of the badgered hostess contrived to recall to her elastic memory. Louise, always sensitive, her shyness growing with every word, could but take each unexplained allusion as a personal snub, and feeling herself entirely superfluous, began to imagine that Miss Hartill was already regretting the invitation. Panic-struck she tried to remedy matters by effacing herself as completely as possible. It was wonderful what a small and insignificant person Louise could sometimes look, and did look that evening in one of Clare's big arm-chairs. Her prim little whisper and deprecatory smile might have struck Clare as pathetic if Clare had not been so very tired of the affectionate reminiscences of Olivia Pring. As it was, she was annoyed. She had asked Louise of the bright eyes and quick stammer and extravagant imagery, to supper with her—the panther-cub, not the leveret. She had talked of Louise too—had looked forward to putting the child through its paces, if only for the benefit of Olivia Pring. She had even surmised that Louise would take Olivia's measure, and at a nod from Clare would be delicately, deliciously impertinent. Indeed, she had thought her capable of it. But it was only a schoolgirl after all—a silly tongue-tied schoolgirl—that she had for an instant compared with Alwynne: Alwynne, monstrously absent, a match for ten Olivias. She yawned, shrugged her shoulders, and suggested, in fine ironic fit, a game of "Old Maid." Olivia was extremely pleased. She so much preferred Old Maid—or Beggar-my-Neighbour, perhaps?—to Bridge. She did not approve of Bridge. In her position it did not do. Clare would remember that she had always said.... Clare fetched the cards.[157] Louise! Louise! You have done yourself no good to-night. Shy? Nonsense! What is there to be shy about? A few words from Miss Hartill—a prompting or two—a leading question—could have broken the ice of your shyness for you, eh? And Miss Hartill knows it, as well as you, if not better. That shall not avail you. Who are you, to set Miss Hartill's conscience itching? Miss Hartill has a headache. Pull up your chair, and deal your cards, and stop Miss Hartill yawning, if you can. Believe me, it's your only chance of escape. Louise was a clumsy dealer. Her careful setting out of cards irritated Clare to snatching point. Olive triumphed in every game. On principle, Clare disliked losing, even at Beggar-my-Neighbour. And they played Beggar-my-Neighbour till ten o'clock. Louise grew more cheerful as the evening progressed, ventured a few sentences now and then. Clare was dangerously suave with both her guests; but Louise, taking all in good faith, hoped after all, that she had not appeared as stupid as she felt. It had been dreadful at first, she reflected, as she put on coat and hat. But it had gone better afterwards.... She didn't believe Miss Hartill was cross with her.... That had been a silly idea of her own.... Miss Hartill was just as usual. She made her farewells. Clare came out into the hall and ushered her forth. "Good-bye!" Louise smiled up at her. "It was so kind of you to have me. I have so much enjoyed myself." Then, the formula off her tongue: "Miss Hartill, I do hope your head's better?" "Thank you!" said Clare inscrutably. "Good-night!" Then, as the maid went down the stairs: "Louise!" "Yes, Miss Hartill?" Clare was smiling brilliantly. "Don't come again, Louise, until you can be more amusing. At any rate, natural. Good-night!" She shut the door. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [158] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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