The Making of a Soul | Page 9

don't care a pin for any of 'em!"
"Perhaps that's why," said Toni cheerfully, voicing a truth without in
the least realizing it. "After all, who is there to care for? Jack Brown, or
young Graves, or that funny little Walter Britton out of Lea and
Harper's?" She plunged her glowing face into a basin of cold water as
she spoke.
"No. I s'pose they're not quite your sort." Fanny stared thoughtfully at
her cousin. "I don't know how it is, Toni--you are my cousin, your
father was Dad's own brother--and yet you're as different from us as--as
chalk from cheese."
She in her turn had uttered a profound truth. Between Toni and the rest
of the commonplace lower-middle-class household was a great gulf
fixed, a gulf which was the more inexplicable because it was clearly
visible to the parties on either side of the chasm.
Red-faced, brawny Fred Gibbs, the butcher, his equally red-faced,
though slightly more refined wife, and their several sons and daughters,
belonging, most of them, to the category of "fine" boys and girls, were
a good-humoured, kindly people enough; yet between them and the
pretty, dark-eyed Antonia there was not the slightest vestige of
resemblance, either in looks, manners, or disposition.
Not that Toni gave herself airs. On the contrary, she was the most
cheerful and light-hearted little soul in the world. She flung herself
bodily into all the family's interests and pursuits, helped her uncle with
his books and her aunt with her housework, was Fanny's sworn
confidante and ally in all matters of the heart. The younger children
adored her for her good looks, her vivacity, her high spirits; and even

the flashes of rage which now and then marred her usually sunny
temper were fascinating in their very fire.
Yet--with it all she was not, never would be, one of them. Fanny was
inclined to put it down to her foreign blood--for Toni's mother had been
Italian. The elder Gibbs fancied the girl's superior education was
responsible--for Toni had been to a real "Seminary for Young Ladies,"
in contradistinction to the Council School attended by her cousins;
while as for Toni herself, though she was as fully conscious as the rest
that she was "different, somehow," she could never say, with any
certainty, in what the difference lay.
Perhaps a psychologist would have found Antonia's position an
interesting one. Briefly, her history was this.
The Gibbs were North-Country people, a good old yeoman family who
had been in service with an older and more aristocratic people in the
county of Yorkshire. The family, however, had begun, a few
generations back, to die out. Instead of the usual lusty sons, only
daughters had been born to most of the Gibbs, and they in their turn
married and died, in the nature of things relinquishing their own name,
until there were few left.
So the race dwindled, until old Matthew Gibbs and his two sons Fred
and Roger were the last representatives of the old stock; and to the
father's bitter disappointment neither boy would consent to settle down
on the farm and carry out the tradition of the family. Fred, always a
pushing, commercially-minded lad, found farming too slow and
unprofitable to satisfy him, and he took service in a butcher's shop at
York, as a first step towards his goal, London, in which city he
eventually made his home, married a Cockney girl, and settled down
for the rest of his prosperous life.
The second son, Roger, early showed a desire to travel; and though his
father would have kept him at home, he realized that after all youth will
be served, and let the boy go out into the world as soon as he had
passed his eighteenth birthday.

Being possessed of unlimited confidence, exceptional strength and a
light-hearted determination to make something of life, Roger was
successful from the start. As is often her way with those from whom
she means, later, to exact a heavy toll, Fate smiled upon the
good-looking young man who faced her so gaily. He got one post after
another: secretary, mechanic, groom--for he was equally clever with
hands and head. In this or that capacity he travelled quite extensively
for some years, and finally, having a natural bent for languages, came
to Rome in the position of courier to a rich American family. It
happened that the daughter of the house had an Italian maid, a beautiful,
refined girl from Southern Italy; and the young people quickly fell in
love. In spite of his apparent irresponsibility Roger had saved a little
money, and within six months he had married his Italian girl and
carried her off to live in a village on the side of a mountain not far from
Naples, where for four blissful years