The Golden Calf | Page 6

do,' she said, in her loving half-childish way, while Miss Rylance looked on with ineffable contempt. 'You are so clever and so beautiful; you were born to be happy.'
'Do you think so, pet?' asked Ida, with cold scorn; 'then I ought to have been born with a little more money.'
'What does money matter?' cried Bessie.
'Not very much to a girl like you, who has never known the want of it.'
'That's not true, darling. I never go home for the holidays that I don't hear father grumble about his poverty. The rents are so slow to come in; the tenants are always wanting drain-pipes and barns and things. Last Christmas his howls were awful. We are positive paupers. Mother has to wait ages for a cheque.'
'Ah, my pet, that's a very different kind of poverty from mine. You have never known what it is to have only three pairs of wearable stockings.'
Bessie looked as if she were going to cry.
'If you were not so disgustingly proud, you horrid thing, you need never feel the want of stockings,' she said discontentedly.
'If it were not for what you call my disgusting pride, I should degenerate into that loathsome animal a sponge,' said Ida, rising suddenly from her dejected attitude, and standing up before her admiring little friend,
'A daughter of the gods, divinely tall And most divinely fair.'
That fatal dower of beauty had been given to Ida Palliser in fullest measure. She had the form of a goddess, a head proudly set upon shoulders that were sloping but not narrow, the walk of a Moorish girl, accustomed to carrying a water-jug on her head, eyes dark as night, hair of a deep warm brown rippling naturally across her broad forehead, a complexion of creamiest white and richest carnation. These were but the sensual parts of beauty which can be catalogued. But it was in the glorious light and variety of expression that Ida shone above all compeers. It was by the intellectual part of her beauty that she commanded the admiration--enthusiastic in some cases, in others grudging and unwilling--of her schoolfellows, and reigned by right divine, despite her shabby gowns and her cheap ready-made boots, the belle of the school.

CHAPTER II.
'I AM GOING TO MARRY FOR MONEY.'
When a schoolgirl of sixteen falls in love with one of her schoolfellows there are no limits to her devotion. Bessie Wendover's adoration of Miss Palliser was boundless. Ida's seniority of three years, her beauty, her talent, placed her, as it were, upon a pinnacle in the eyes of the younger girl. Her poverty, her inferior position in the school, only made her more interesting to the warm-hearted Bessie, who passionately resented any slight offered to her friend. It was in vain that Miss Rylance took Bessie to task, and demonstrated the absurdity of this childish fancy for a young person whose future sphere of life must be necessarily remote from that of a Hampshire squire's daughter. Bessie despised this worldly wisdom.
'What is the use of attaching yourself to a girl whom you are never likely to see after you leave school?' argued Miss Rylance.
'I shall see her. I shall ask her home,' said Bessie, sturdily.
'Do you think your people will let you ?'
'Mother will do anything I ask her, and father will do anything mother asks him. I am going to have Ida home with me all the summer holidays.'
'How do you know that she will come?'
'I shall make her come. It is very nasty of you to insinuate that she won't.'
'Palliser has a good deal of pride--pride and poverty generally go together, don't you know. I don't think she'll care about showing herself at the Grange in her old clothes and her three pairs of stockings, one on, one off, and one at the laundress's,' said Miss Rylance, winding up with a viperish little laugh as if she had said something witty.
She had a certain influence with Bessie, whom she had known all her life. It was she who had inspired Bessie with the desks to come to Mauleverer Manor, to be finished, after having endured eight years of jog-trot education from a homely little governess at home--who grounded the boys in Latin and mathematics before they went to Winchester, and made herself generally useful. Miss Rylance was the daughter of a fashionable physician, whose head-quarters were in Cavendish Square, but who spent his leisure at a something which he called 'a place' at Kingthorpe, a lovely little village between Winchester and Romsey, where the Wendovers were indigenous to the soil, whence they seemed to have sprung, like the armed men in the story; for remotest tradition bore no record of their having come there from anywhere else, nor was there record of a time when the land round Kingthorpe belonged to any other family.
Dr. Rylance,