little tasks, joyless and unimportant, that benefited nobody. But if she did not get up at once she would not be ready for breakfast at eight o’clock. Hard and fast times for meals were the rule in Mrs. Stirling’s household. Breakfast at eight, dinner at one, supper at six, year in and year out. No excuses for being late were ever tolerated. So up Valancy got, shivering.
The room was bitterly cold with the raw, penetrating chill of a wet May morning. The house would be cold all day. It was one of Mrs. Frederick’s rules that no fires were necessary after the twenty-fourth of May. Meals were cooked on the little oilstove in the back porch. And though May might be icy and October frostbitten, no fires were lighted until the twenty-first of October by the calendar. On the twenty-first of October Mrs. Frederick began cooking over the kitchen range and lighted a fire in the sitting room stove in the evenings. It was whispered about in the connection that the late Frederick Stirling had caught the cold that resulted in his death during Valancy’s first year of life, because Mrs. Frederick would not have a fire on the twentieth of October. She lighted it the next day — but that was a day too late for Frederick Stirling.
Valancy took off and hung up in the closet her nightdress of coarse, unbleached cotton, with high neck and long, tight sleeves. She put on undergarments of a similar nature, a dress of brown gingham, thick, black stockings and rubber-heeled boots. Of late years she had fallen into the habit of doing her hair with the shade of the window by the looking glass pulled down. The lines on her face did not show so plainly then. But this morning she jerked the shade to the very top and looked at herself in the leprous mirror with a passionate determination to see herself as the world saw her.
The result was rather dreadful. Even a beauty would have found that harsh, unsoftened sidelight trying. Valancy saw straight black hair, short and thin, always lustreless despite the fact that she gave it one hundred strokes of the brush, neither more nor less, every night of her life and faithfully rubbed Redfern’s Hair Vigor into the roots, more lustreless than ever in its morning roughness; fine, straight, black brows; a nose she had always felt was much too small even for her small, three-cornered, white face; a small, pale mouth that always fell open a trifle over little, pointed white teeth; a figure thin and flat-breasted, rather below the average height. She had somehow escaped the family high cheekbones, and her dark brown eyes, too soft and shadowy to be black, had a slant that was almost Oriental. Apart from her eyes she was neither pretty nor ugly — just insignificant looking, she concluded bitterly. How plain the lines around her eyes and mouth were in that merciless light! And never had her narrow, white face looked so narrow and so white.
She did her hair in a pompadour. Pompadours had long gone out of fashion, but they had been in when Valancy first put her hair up and Aunt Wellington had decided that she must always wear her hair so.
“It is the only way that becomes you. Your face is so small that you must add height to it by a pompadour effect,” said Aunt Wellington, who always enunciated commonplaces as if uttering profound and important truths.
Valancy had hankered to do her hair pulled low on her forehead, with puffs above the ears, as Olive was wearing hers. But Aunt Wellington’s dictum had such an effect on her that she never dared change her style of hairdressing again. But then, there were so many things Valancy never dared do.
All her life she had been afraid of something, she thought bitterly. From the very dawn of recollection, when she had been so horribly afraid of the big black bear that lived, so Cousin Stickles told her, in the closet under the stairs.
“And I always will be — I know it — I can’t help it. I don’t know what it would be like not to be afraid of something.”
Afraid of her mother’s sulky fits — afraid of offending Uncle Benjamin — afraid of becoming a target for Aunt Wellington’s contempt — afraid of Aunt Isabel’s biting comments — afraid of Uncle James’ disapproval — afraid of offending the whole clan’s opinions and prejudices — afraid of not keeping up appearances — afraid to say what she really thought of anything — afraid of poverty in her old age. Fear — fear — fear — she could never escape from it. It bound her and enmeshed her like a spider’s web of steel. Only in her Blue Castle could she find temporary release. And this morning Valancy could not believe she had a Blue Castle. She would never be able to find it again. Twenty-nine, unmarried, undesired — what had she to do with the fairy-like chatelaine of the Blue Castle? She would cut such childish nonsense out of her life forever and face reality unflinchingly.
She turned from her unfriendly mirror and looked out. The ugliness of the view always struck her like a blow; the ragged fence, the tumble-down old carriage-shop in the next lot, plastered with crude, violently coloured advertisements; the grimy railway station beyond, with the awful derelicts that were always hanging around it even at this early hour. In the pouring rain everything looked worse than usual, especially the beastly advertisement, “Keep that schoolgirl complexion.” Valancy had kept her schoolgirl complexion. That was just the trouble. There was not a gleam of beauty anywhere — “exactly like my life,” thought Valancy drearily. Her brief bitterness had passed. She accepted facts as resignedly as she had always accepted them. She was one of the people whom life always passes by. There was no altering that fact.
In this mood Valancy went down to breakfast.
Breakfast was always the same. Oatmeal porridge, which Valancy loathed, toast and tea, and one teaspoonful of marmalade. Mrs. Frederick thought two teaspoonfuls extravagant — but that did not matter to Valancy, who hated marmalade, too. The chilly, gloomy little dining room was chillier and gloomier than usual; the rain streamed down outside the window; departed Stirlings, in atrocious, gilt frames, wider than the pictures, glowered down from the walls. And yet Cousin Stickles wished Valancy many happy returns of the day!
“Sit up straight, Doss,” was all her mother said.
Valancy sat up straight. She talked to her mother and Cousin Stickles of the things they always talked of. She never wondered what would happen if she tried to talk of something else. She knew. Therefore she never did it.
Mrs. Frederick was offended with Providence for sending a rainy day when she wanted to go to a picnic, so she ate her breakfast in a sulky silence for which Valancy was rather grateful. But Christine Stickles whined endlessly on as usual, complaining about everything — the weather, the leak in the pantry, the price of oatmeal and butter — Valancy felt at once she had buttered her toast too lavishly — the epidemic of mumps in Deerwood.
“Doss will be sure to ketch them,” she foreboded.
“Doss must not go where she is likely to catch mumps,” said Mrs. Frederick shortly.
Valancy had never had mumps — or whooping cough — or chicken pox — or measles — or anything she should have had — nothing but horrible colds every winter. Doss’ winter colds were a sort of tradition in the family. Nothing, it seemed, could prevent her from catching them. Mrs. Frederick and Cousin Stickles did their heroic best. One winter they kept Valancy housed up from November to May, in the warm sitting room. She was not even allowed to go to church. And Valancy took cold after cold and ended up with bronchitis in June.
“None of my family were ever like that,” said Mrs. Frederick, implying that it must be a Stirling tendency.
“The Stirlings seldom take colds,” said Cousin Stickles resentfully. She had been a Stirling.
“I think,” said Mrs. Frederick, “that if a person makes up her mind not to have colds she will not have colds.”
So that was the
