“My dear child,” said Jimmie in astonishment, “what an idiotic question!”
“But I want really a nice one,” said Aline, coaxingly.
“Then get one, dear,” said Jimmie, swinging round on his stool, so as to look at her.
“But I'd like you to give me this one as a present. I don't want it to be like the others that I help myself to and you know nothing about—although they all are presents, if it comes to that—I want you to give me this one specially.”
Jimmie laid down palette and mahl-stick and brush, and from a letter-case in his pocket drew out three five-pound notes.
“Will this buy one?”
The girl's eyes filled with tears. “Oh, you are silly, Jimmie,” she cried. “A quarter of it will do.”
She took one of the notes, kissed him, and ran out of the studio, leaving Jimmie wondering why the female sex were so prone to weeping. The next day he saw a strange woman established at the dining-room table. He learned that it was a dressmaker. For the next week an air of mystery hung over the place. The girl, in her neat short frock and with her soft brown hair tied with a ribbon, went about her household duties as usual; but there was a subdued light in her eyes that Jimmie noticed, but could not understand. Occasionally he enquired about the new frock. It was progressing famously, said Aline. It was going to be a most beautiful frock. He would have seen nothing like it since he was born.
“Vanity, thy name is little girls,” he laughed, pinching her chin.
On the evening of the 31st of December Jimmie, in his well-worn evening suit, came down to the dining-room, and for the first time in his life waited for Aline. He sat down by the fire with a book. The cab that had been ordered drew up outside. It was a remarkable thing for Aline to be late. After a while the door opened, and a voice said, “I am ready.” Jimmie rose, turned round, and for a moment stared stupidly at the sight that met his eyes. It was Aline certainly, but a new Aline, quite a different Aline from the little girl he had known hitherto. Her brown hair was done up in a mysterious manner on the top of her head, and the tip of a silver-mounted tortoise-shell comb (a present, she afterwards confessed, from Constance Deering, who was in her secret) peeped coquettishly from the coils. The fashionably-cut white evening dress showed her neck and shoulders and pretty round arms, and displayed in a manner that was a revelation the delicate curves of her young figure. A little gold locket that Jimmie had given her rose and fell on her bosom. She met his stare in laughing, blushing defiance, and whisked round so as to present a side view of the costume. The astonishing thing had a train.
“God bless my soul!” cried Jimmie. “It never entered my head!”
“What?”
“That you're a young woman, that you're grown up, that we'll have all the young men in the place falling in love with you, that you'll be getting married, and that I'm becoming a decrepit old fogey. Well, God bless my soul!”
She came up and put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.
“You think it becoming, don't you, Jimmie?”
“Becoming! Why, it's ravishing! It's irresistible! Do you mean to say that you got all that, gloves and shoes and everything, out of a five-pound note?”
She nodded.
“Good Lord!” said Jimmie in astonishment.
In this manner came realisation of the fact that the tiny child he had undressed and put to sleep in his own bed ten years before had grown into a woman. The shock brought back some of the old perplexities, and created for a short while an odd shyness in his dealings with her. He treated her deferentially, regarded apologetically the mean viands on which he forced this fresh-winged goddess to dine, went out and wasted his money on adornments befitting her rank, and behaved with such pathetic foolishness that Aline, crying and laughing, threatened to run away and earn her living as a nursery-maid if he did not amend his conduct. Whereupon there was a very touching scene, and Jimmie's undertaking to revert to his previous brutality put their relations once more on a sound basis; but all the same there stole into Jimmie's environment a subtle grace which the sensitive in him was quick to perceive. Its fragrance revived the tender grace of a departed day, before he had taken Aline—a day that had ended in a woeful flight to Paris, where he had arrived just in time to follow through the streets a poor little funeral procession to a poor little grave-side in the cemetery of Bagneux. Her name was Sidonie Bourdain, and she was a good girl and had loved Jimmie with all her heart.
The tender grace was that of March violets. The essence of a maid's springtide diffused itself through the house, and springtide began to bud again in the man's breast. It was a strange hyperphysical transfusion of quickening sap. His jesting pictured himself as of a sudden grown hoary, the potential father of a full-blown woman, two or three years short of grandfatherdom. But these were words thrown off from the very lightness of a mood, and vanishing like bubbles in the air. Deep down worked the craving of the man still young for love and romance and the sweet message in a woman's eyes. It was a gentle madness—utterly unsuspected by its victim—but a madness such as the god first inflicts upon him whom he desires to drive to love's destruction. In the middle of it all, while Aline and himself were finding a tentative footing on the newly established basis of their relationship, the ironical deity took him by the hand and led him into the cold and queenly presence of Norma Hardacre. .
After that Jimmie fell back into his old ways with Aline, and the Great Frock Episode was closed.
Chapter V—A BROKEN BUTTERFLY
ALINE sat in the studio, the picture of housewifely concern, mending Jimmie's socks. It was not the unoffending garments that brought the expression into her face, but her glance at the old Dutch clock—so old and crotchety that unless it were tilted to one side it would not consent to go—whose hands had come with an asthmatic whir to the hour of eleven. And Jimmie had not yet come down to breakfast. She had called him an hour ago. His cheery response had been her sanction for putting the meal into preparation, and now the bacon would be uneatable. She sighed. Taking care of Jimmie was no light responsibility. Not that he would complain; far from it. He would eat the bacon raw or calcined if she set it before him. But that would not be for his good, and hence the responsibility. In slipping from her grasp and doing the things he ought not to do, he was an eel or a twelve-year-old schoolboy. Last night, for instance, instead of finishing off some urgent work for an art periodical, he had assured her in his superlative manner that it was of no consequence, and had wasted his evening with her at the Earl's Court Exhibition. It had been warm and lovely, and the band and the bright crowd had set her young pulses throbbing, and they had sat at a little table, and Jimmie had given her some celestial liquid which she had sucked through a straw, and altogether, to use her own unsophisticated dialect, it had been perfectly heavenly. But it was wrong of Jimmie to have sacrificed himself for her pleasure, and to have deceived her into accepting it. For at three or four o'clock she had heard him tiptoeing softly past her door on his way to bed, and the finished work she had found on his table this morning betrayed his occupation. Even the consolation of scolding him for oversleep and a spoiled breakfast was thus denied. She spread out her hand in the sock so as to gauge the extent