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.