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One didn't do that kind of thing. She replaced the bundle and closed the box. Then she tidied the room and wiped the mirror. Early next morning, immediately on coming out of her bath, she went in to Doda. She opened the door softly and she distinctly saw the lids of Doda's eyes flash up and close again. "Doda!" Doda pretended to be asleep.
"Powder!" murmured Rosalie. The state of the room dismayed her. The intense orderliness of her own character forbade her ringing for a maid. She simply could not look at untidiness like that without tidying it. She started to tidy. Doda's box was open. Its contents looked as if a dog had burrowed in it, throwing up the things as he worked down.
Benji was no more than a baby, but he was extraordinarily devoted to Doda, liked only the things that Doda liked, and did not like the things that Doda didn't like, or, in the language sometimes a little unpleasantly emphatic that always was Doda's and Huggo's, that Doda "simply loathed." Rosalie had some old bound numbers of treasured juvenile periodicals of the rectory days.
In a very short while she found her feet and that excuse no longer was put forward. Every girl of Doda's association was on her feet in 1919; and for Doda very much easier, at that, than for the generality, to establish her position in the house. By 1920, when she was nineteen, she was conducting her life as she pleased, as nineteen manifestly should.
She was in some other room and did not appear. She said afterwards, and proved, that she had been away the previous night, leaving Doda at the flat, and had returned to find her as she was found; and had immediately called the nearest doctor and then Doda's mother. It was the doctor that opened the door to Rosalie.
There was a chap with me watching you at the Riddle Club the other night told me some pretty fierce " "Oh, dash, I've left my fan," cried Doda, and turned and ran back up the stairs. Huggo called, "I say, Dods. I'm in a row. So'll you be one day, if you don't look out for yourself." Doda's voice: "Oh, dry up you fool!" Strike on! Her Doda!
Even Benji didn't like them. They were markedly different from the books the children did like. Their illustrations were mainly of children in domestic scenes. "Don't they look stupid?" was Doda's comment; and Benji, copying, thought they were stupid too.
There was also Huggo. What was Huggo doing? Overnight Rosalie had seen Doda, come in late from an evening with a very intimate friend of hers always known, through some private joke of Doda's, as "the foreign friend." The foreign friend, not in the least foreign but English, was a young married woman living apart from her husband. Doda had brought her to the house once.
The titillation of watching the clock for tea, and of tea, and then, most sharpest titillation of them all, watching the clock for time!; for off!; for out!; away! That is the charm of it in detail. The charm in general, as once expressed to Rosalie by one of Doda's friends brought in to tea one Sunday is, "You see, it gets you through the day." That's it. The night's all right.
There lay also a sheet of paper covered in Doda's bold handwriting. It began "Wonderful Old Thing." Rosalie had not touched these evidences of an unknown interest in Doda's life. She stooped, staring upon them, the lifted bundle of clothes in her hand. The stare that took in "Wonderful Old Thing" took in also the first few lines. They were not nice. But she oughtn't to read it.
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