The Golden Calf | Page 6

her
eyes than an artist's lay figure, which is put away in a dark closet when
it isn't in use. She wanted to give you girls a lesson in tidiness, so she
put me into her pillory. Fortunately I'm used to the pillory.'

'But you are looking white and worried, you dear lovely thing,'
exclaimed Bessie, who was Ida Palliser's bosom friend. 'It's too bad the
way they use you. Have this neck-ribbon,' suddenly untying the bow so
carefully elaborated five minutes ago. 'You must, you shall; I don't
want it; I hate it. Do, dear.'
And for consolation Miss Wendover tied the cherry-coloured ribbon
under her friend's collar, patted Ida's pale cheeks, and kissed and
hugged her.
'Be happy, darling, 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