It was raining harder than ever when the train reached Birmingham, and the girls decided to indulge in the luxury of a cab. The rooms looked as if they really would be very comfortable, and the landlady insisted proudly that managers had been known to stay in them, not mere business managers whose only aim in life seemed to be making fusses about the starching of their white shirts, but acting managers, one of whom had even brought his children, which, as she pointed out, proved that the lodgings were homely.
Sylvia was some time getting ready for supper, and Dorothy, thinking it would not be nice to begin without her, made Lily wait quite half an hour. When Sylvia did come down at last, Dorothy was nearly sure that she had been crying, and the mystery of her origin once more obtruded itself. Dorothy wished now that she had arranged for Sylvia and herself to share the second room instead of Lily and herself. This strange new girl perplexed her self-assurance, and she proposed that if the new association prospered--they drank to its success in the pale India ale which the landlady provided--they should take it week about to sleep in the single room. Dorothy tried to extract confidences from Sylvia by confiding in her the history of Lily as far as she knew it; when that did not elicit anything she offered a gilded version of her own prior circumstances. The following week at Derby she shared the bedroom with Sylvia and went so far as to give her an almost truthful account of the Wilfred Curlew business, but nothing could she get from Sylvia in return. Moreover, there was nothing in her belongings that afforded a clue to her history; there was not a single photograph or initialed ornament; all her possessions were left lying about the room, and her trunk was never locked; and when every morning the girls called at the stage door for their correspondence she only in the company never received a letter, nor even bothered to look if there was one waiting for her in the rack. But if Sylvia was mute about the past she was not at all reserved about the present. There was nobody like her for seizing upon the eccentricities of the various members of the company to make merry with, and if sometimes Dorothy felt that she went too far in laughing at herself, she could not be angry because she used to laugh as much, indeed more, at Lily. She was a match, too, for any landlady; and gradually, as the association begun at Birmingham hardened into permanency, Dorothy and Lily left the entire management of their weekly home to Sylvia: who had a delightful capacity for keeping the weekly bills reasonable without ever seeming to be economical.