Mrs. Warrens Daughter | Page 5

off cablegram from Chancery Lane
post-office, buy strawberries and cakes from Fleet Street shops, and so
back to the office by four o'clock. Meantime Norie is reading through
some of the recent correspondence on the file.)
Vivie (on her return): "Pouf! It was hot in Fleet Street! I'm sorry for
poor Frankie, because he seems so to have set his heart on marrying me.
But I do hope he will take this answer as final."
_Norie_: "I suppose you are not refusing him for the same old
reason--that vague suggestion that he might be your half-brother?"
_Vivie_: "Oh no! Besides I pretty well know for a fact he isn't, he
simply couldn't be. I'm absolutely sure my father wasn't Sam Gardner,
any more than George Crofts was. I believe it was a young Irish
seminarist, some student for the priesthood whom my mother met in
Belgium the year before I was born. If I ever find out more I will tell

you. You haven't seen 'Soapy Sam,' the Vicar of Woodcote, or that
beast, George Crofts; but if you had, you'd be as sure as I am that
neither of them was my father--thank goodness! As to Frank--yes--for a
short time I was fond of him--till I learnt about my mother's
'profession.' It was rather a silly sort of fondness. He was two years
younger than I; I suppose my feeling for him was half motherly ... I
neither encouraged him nor did I repel him. I think I was
experimenting ... I rather wanted to know what it felt like to be kissed
by a man. Frank was a nice creature, so far as a man can be. But all
those horrid revelations that broke up our summer stay at Haslemere
four years ago--when I ran away to you--gave me an utter disgust for
marriage. And what a life mine would have been if I had married him
then; or after he went out to South Africa! Ghastly! Want of money
would have made us hate one another and Frank would have been sure
to become patronizing. Because I was without a father in the legitimate
way he would have thought he was conferring a great honour on me by
marrying me, and would probably have expected me to drudge for him
while he idled his time away.... Oh, when I think what a life I have led
here, with you, full of interesting work and bright prospects, free from
money anxieties--dearest, dearest Norie--I can't thank you enough. No,
I'm not going to be sentimental--the New Woman is never that. I'm
going to get the tea ready; and after we've had tea on the balcony we
really must go into business matters. Your being away so much the last
fortnight, things have accumulated that I did not like to decide for
myself..."
Norie (speaking rather louder as Vivie is now busy in the adjoining
roomlet, boiling the kettle on the gas stove and preparing the tea): "Yes.
And I've got lots to talk over with you. All sorts of plans have come
into my head. I don't know whether I have been eating anything more
than usually brain stimulating--everything has a physical basis--but I
have come back from this scattered holiday full of new ideas."
Presently they are seated on camp-stools sipping tea, eating
strawberries and cakes, under the striped sun-blind.
Norie continues: "Do you remember Beryl Clarges at Newnham?"

_Vivie_: "Yes--the pretty girl--short, curly hair, brown eyes, rather full
lips, good at mathematics--hockey ... purposely shocked you by her
outspokenness--well?"
_Norie_: "Well, she's had a baby ... a month ago ... awful rumpus with
her people ... Father's Dean Clarges ... Norwich or Ely, I forget which ...
They've put her in a Nursing Home in Seymour Street. Mother wears a
lace mantilla and cries softly. Beryl went wrong, as they call it, with an
architect."
_Vivie_: "Pass your cup ... Don't take all the strawberries (_Norie_:
"Sorry! Absence of mind--I've left you three fat ones") Architect?
Strange! I always thought all architects were like Praddy--had no
passions except for bricks and mortar and chiselled stone and twirligig
iron grilles ... perhaps just a thrill over a nude statue. Why, till you told
me this I'd as soon have trusted my daughter--if I had one--with an
architect as with a Colonel of Engineers--You know! The kind that
believes in the identity of the Ten Lost Tribes with the British and is a
True Protestant! Poor Beryl! But how? what? when? why?"
_Norie_: "I think it began at Cambridge--the acquaintance did ... Later,
it developed into a passion. He had already one wife in Sussex
somewhere and four children. He took a flat for her in Town--a
studio--because Berry had given up mathematics and was going in for
sculpture; and there,