"With your money," I told her, "you could provide that hospital with any number of indoor maids to do the work!"
"Yes. And how'd they do it? Not as I should," maintained the Soldier's-Orphanage-trained girl very proudly. "I know the ways o' some o' these townified maids; haven't I watched 'em all down Laburnum Grove? I'm going to make my 'bit' another way!"
From morn until dewy eve the girl who was once Miss Million, the heiress, works harder than ever she worked when she was my Aunt Anastasia's maid-of-all-work. Thursday is her afternoon off; Thursday sees her motoring in the Park, exquisitely got up in a frock and furs that were bought during the "shopping orgy" of the first week of her wealth. And----
She has thought it over once again, and she has promised to marry her aviator on his very first leave.
"Seemed to make all the difference, him being a soldier; seems to make anybody just twice the man they was before. And him just three times, seeing he'd no real call to go and fight, only he wanted to!" she admitted to me, when we were all packing up to come away from the house in Wales, where we had left the ventriloquist's wife in charge.
So that, if all's well, I shall yet have the task of attiring Miss Nellie Million in her shimmering bridal-gown and her filmy veil for that wedding of hers on which I had set my heart from the beginning.
Only--her bridesmaids will have to be Marmora, the Breathing Statue Girl, and the lively little Boy-Impersonator.
Vi Vassity and I will be debarred from that function, because we're both married women.
For when he persisted, "Why are you so sure you could never care?"
I said frankly, "I hate to hurt you. But--Reginald, I don't like the way your hair grows."
He looked at me in utter bewilderment through the darkness-made-visible of those Welsh lamps.
He said: "But a man can't help the way his hair grows!"
"No. And a woman can't help the way she feels about it," I told him sadly but resolutely.
He saw at last that I meant I wasn't going to take him. He went--after saying all those things about remembering me as the sweetest girl he'd ever met, and if ever I wanted a friend, et cetera--all the pathetic, well-meant, useless things that I suppose a rejected man finds some comfort in.