CHAPTER II

When Cousin Stickles knocked at her door, Valancy knew it was half-past
seven and she must get up. As long as she could remember, Cousin
Stickles had knocked at her door at half-past seven. Cousin Stickles
and Mrs. Frederick Stirling had been up since seven, but Valancy was
allowed to lie abed half an hour longer because of a family tradition
that she was delicate. Valancy got up, though she hated getting up more
this morning than ever she had before. What was there to get up for?
Another dreary day like all the days that had preceded it, full of
meaningless little tasks, joyless and unimportant, that benefited
nobody. But if she did not get up at once she would not be ready for
breakfast at eight o’clock. Hard and fast times for meals were the rule
in Mrs. Stirling’s household. Breakfast at eight, dinner at one, supper
at six, year in and year out. No excuses for being late were ever
tolerated. So up Valancy got, shivering.

The room was bitterly cold with the raw, penetrating chill of a wet May
morning. The house would be cold all day. It was one of Mrs.
Frederick’s rules that no fires were necessary after the twenty-fourth
of May. Meals were cooked on the little oil-stove in the back porch.
And though May might be icy and October frost-bitten, no fires were
lighted until the twenty-first of October by the calendar. On the
twenty-first of October Mrs. Frederick began cooking over the kitchen
range and lighted a fire in the sitting-room stove in the evenings. It
was whispered about in the connection that the late Frederick Stirling
had caught the cold which resulted in his death during Valancy’s first
year of life because Mrs. Frederick would not have a fire on the
twentieth of October. She lighted it the next day—but that was a day
too late for Frederick Stirling.

Valancy took off and hung up in the closet her nightdress of coarse,
unbleached cotton, with high neck and long, tight sleeves. She put on
undergarments of a similar nature, a dress of brown gingham, thick,
black stockings and rubber-heeled boots. Of late years she had fallen
into the habit of doing her hair with the shade of the window by the
looking-glass pulled down. The lines on her face did not show so
plainly then. But this morning she jerked the shade to the very top and
looked at herself in the leprous mirror with a passionate determination
to see herself as the world saw her.

The result was rather dreadful. Even a beauty would have found that
harsh, unsoftened side-light trying. Valancy saw straight black hair,
short and thin, always lustreless despite the fact that she gave it one
hundred strokes of the brush, neither more nor less, every night of her
life and faithfully rubbed Redfern’s Hair Vigor into the roots, more
lustreless than ever in its morning roughness; fine, straight, black
brows; a nose she had always felt was much too small even for her
small, three-cornered, white face; a small, pale mouth that always fell
open a trifle over little, pointed white teeth; a figure thin and
flat-breasted, rather below the average height. She had somehow escaped
the family high cheek-bones, and her dark-brown eyes, too soft and
shadowy to be black, had a slant that was almost Oriental. Apart from
her eyes she was neither pretty nor ugly—just insignificant-looking,
she concluded bitterly. How plain the lines around her eyes and mouth
were in that merciless light! And never had her narrow, white face
looked so narrow and so white.

She did her hair in a pompadour. Pompadours had long gone out of
fashion, but they had been in when Valancy first put her hair up and
Aunt Wellington had decided that she must always wear her hair so.

“It is the _only_ way that becomes you. Your face is so small that you
_must_ add height to it by a pompadour effect,” said Aunt Wellington,
who always enunciated commonplaces as if uttering profound and
important truths.

Valancy had hankered to do her hair pulled low on her forehead, with
puffs above the ears, as Olive was wearing hers. But Aunt Wellington’s
dictum had such an effect on her that she never dared change her style
of hairdressing again. But then, there were so many things Valancy
never dared do.

All her life she had been afraid of something, she thought bitterly.
From the very dawn of recollection, when she had been so horribly
afraid of the big black bear that lived, so Cousin Stickles told her,
in the closet under the stairs.

“And I always will be—I know it—I can’t help it. I don’t know what it
would be like not to be afraid of something.”

Afraid of her mother’s sulky fits—afraid of offending Uncle
Benjamin—afraid of becoming a target for Aunt Wellington’s
contempt—afraid of Aunt Isabel’s biting comments—afraid of Uncle James’
disapproval—afraid of offending the whole clan’s opinions and
prejudices—afraid of not keeping up appearances—afraid to say what she
really thought of anything—afraid of poverty in her old age.
Fear—fear—fear—she could never escape from it. It bound her and
enmeshed her like a spider’s web of steel. Only in her Blue Castle
could she find temporary release. And this morning Valancy could not
believe she had a Blue Castle. She would never be able to find it
again. Twenty-nine, unmarried, undesired—what had she to do with the
fairy-like chatelaine of the Blue Castle? She would cut such childish
nonsense out of her life forever and face reality unflinchingly.

She turned from her unfriendly mirror and looked out. The ugliness of
the view always struck her like a blow; the ragged fence, the
tumble-down old carriage-shop in the next lot, plastered with crude,
violently coloured advertisements; the grimy railway station beyond,
with the awful derelicts that were always hanging around it even at
this early hour. In the pouring rain everything looked worse than
usual, especially the beastly advertisement, “Keep that schoolgirl
complexion.” Valancy _had_ kept her schoolgirl complexion. That was
just the trouble. There was not a gleam of beauty anywhere—“exactly
like my life,” thought Valancy drearily. Her brief bitterness had
passed. She accepted facts as resignedly as she had always accepted
them. She was one of the people whom life always passes by. There was
no altering that fact.

In this mood Valancy went down to breakfast.