see her now as she put the final touches to her room before leaving it, arranging a paper here and a paper there, going to the bookshelf and pushing back a book that jutted in front of the others, setting a chair against the wall, placing the blotting-pad exactly in the middle of the table, finally taking her hat and coat and putting them on with the same careful and almost automatic distinction—this sufficiently revealed her. She seemed, as she looked for the last time about the room with her bright eyes, like some sharp little bird, perched on a window-sill, looking beyond closed windows for new adventure.
It was one of the striking points in her that her eyes always seemed to be searching for some disorder in some place outside her immediate vision.
She closed the door behind her. As she stepped into the passage someone was coming down the staircase to her right, and looking up she saw that it was Rachel Beaminster. Rachel was on her way from her grandmother's room, and before she saw Miss Rand standing there, waiting to let her pass, her face was grave and, in that half-light, strangely white. Then, as she saw Miss Rand, she smiled—
"Good evening, Miss Rand."
"Good evening, Miss Beaminster."
"I'm afraid that this ball is giving you a lot of trouble."
"I think that everything is arranged now, Miss Beaminster. I hope that it will be a great success."
Rachel sighed and then laughed.
"Don't I wish the whole stupid thing was over. And I expect you do too!"
Miss Rand smiled a very little. "It's good for the servants," she said. "They're always happy when they're really busy."
For a moment they stood there smiling. It occurred to Rachel that Miss Rand must be rather nice. She had never thought of her before as anything but Aunt Adela's secretary.
"Good night, Miss Rand."
"Good night, Miss Beaminster."
II
In Portland Place Miss Rand drew a little breath and paused. So many times during the last five years had she walked from Portland Place to Saxton Square, and from Saxton Square to Portland Place, that the streets and houses encountered by her had become individual, alive, always offering to her some fresh adventure or romance. Portland Place itself was no bad beginning, with its high white colour, its air, and its dark mysterious park hovering at the edge of it.
If one had not known, Miss Rand thought, one might have supposed that just beyond it lay the sea, so fresh and full of breezes was the air. The light was yellow now and the houses black and sharp against the faint sky. In another half-hour the lamps would be lit.
It was pleasant and fitting that the end of Portland Place should be guarded by the Round Church and the Queen's Hall. "Leave that calm and chaste society behind you," those places said, "but before you plunge into the wicked careless world (that is Oxford Circus) choose from us. Here you have religion or music, both if you will, but here at any rate we are, the very best of our kind."
The Queen's Hall looked shabby in the evening light, but Miss Rand liked that; it heightened her sense of the splendour within—Beethoven and Wagner and Brahms needed no illumination—it was your musical comedy demanded that.
Miss Rand liked good music.
Then there was the Polytechnic with wonderful offers in the windows enticing you to see Rome for eleven guineas, and Paris for three, and there was a hat shop with three glorious hats wickedly dangling on poles, and there was a pastry-cook's, a tobacconist's, and a theatre agency: all this variety paving the way between music and religion and the whirling, tossing, heaving melodrama of Oxford Circus.
Miss Rand loved Oxford Circus. It was like the sea in that it was never from one moment to another the same. Miss Rand knew the way that it had of piling the melodrama up and up, faster and faster, wilder and wilder, bursting into a frantio climax and then sinking back, for hours perhaps, into comparative silence. She knew all its moods, from its broom and milkman mood in the early morning, to its soiled and slinking mood somewhere between midnight and one o'clock.
Just now it was getting ready for the evening. Up Regent Street the cabs and buses were straining, the flower women with their baskets were bunched in splashes of colour against the distant outline of the Round Church. Out of every door people were pouring, and in the middle of the Circus three of the four lines of traffic were turned suddenly into something sleepy and indifferent by the hand of a policeman. For an instant the restless movement seemed to be crystallized—the hansoms, the bicycles, the omnibuses, the carts were all held, then at a sign the flow and interflow had begun once more; life was hurled in and hurled out again, stirred and tossed and turned, as though some giant cook were up in the heavens busy over a giant pudding.
And the light faded and the lamps came out, and Miss Rand, walking through two streets that were as dark and secret as though they were spying on the Circus and were going to give all its secrets away very shortly, passed into Saxton Square.
To-night Miss Rand had more to think about than Oxford Circus. She was tired after all the work that there had been during the last few days, and she always noticed that it was when she was tired that she was ready to imagine things. She had been imagining things all day and had found it really difficult to keep steadily to her proper work, but out and beyond her imaginations there was, before her, this definite, tremendous fact—namely, that she would find, this evening, on entering her little drawing-room, that Mr. Francis Breton was being entertained at tea by her sister and mother.
It was a quarter to seven now, so perhaps he had gone, but at any rate there would be a great deal that her mother and sister would wish to tell her about him. A week ago Mr. Francis Breton had come to live on the second floor in 24 Saxton Square, had put there his own furniture, had brought with him his own man-servant (a most sinister-looking man). These matters might have remained (although, of course, Miss Lizzie Rand's connection with the Beaminster family made his arrival of the most dramatic interest) had not Miss Daisy Rand (Miss Lizzie Rand's prettier and younger sister) happened, one evening, to run into Mr. Breton in the dark hall; she screamed aloud because she thought him a burglar, became very shaky about the knees, and needed Mr. Breton's assistance as far as the Rand drawing-room. Here, of course, there followed conversation; finally Mr. Breton was asked to tea and accepted the invitation.
On this very afternoon must this tea-party have taken place. Lizzie Rand knew her mother and sister very well, and she had, long ago, learnt that their motto was, "Let everything go for the sake of adventure." That was well enough, but when your income was very small indeed, and you wished to do no work at all and yet to have your home pleasant and your life adventurous, certainly someone must suffer. Everything had always fallen upon Lizzie.
Mrs. Rand's husband had been a colonel and they had lived at Eastbourne; on his death it was discovered that he had debts and obligations to a lady in the chorus of a light opera then popular in London. The debts and the lady Mrs. Rand had covered with romance, because she considered that they were due to the Colonel's insatiable appetite for Adventure—but, romance or no, there was now very little to live upon.
They moved to London. Daisy was obviously so pretty that it would be absurd to expect her to work, and "she would be married in a minute," so Lizzie had, during the last five years, kept the family. It would be impossible to give any clear idea of the effect on Mrs. Rand that Lizzie's connection with the Beaminster family had. Mrs. Rand loved anything that was great and solemn and ceremonious; she loved Royalties, bands and soldiers gave her a choke in her throat, the "Society News" in the Daily Mail was like a fine picture or a splendid play. She was no snob; it was simply that she saw life as a background to slow stately figures gorgeously
