As a child I hugged to my bosom for years an observation I had overheard an aunt of mine whisper to my mother one afternoon as they sat knitting and talking, not thinking I was listening. 'You never can tell,' murmured my aunt, keeping her eyes carefully fixed upon her needles; 'children change so. I have known the plainest girls grow up into quite beautiful women. I should not worry about it if I were you--not yet awhile.' My mother was not at all a bad-looking woman, and my father was decidedly handsome; so there seemed no reason why I should not hope. I pictured myself the ugly duckling of Andersen's fairy-tale, and every morning on waking I would run straight to my glass and try to persuade myself that the feathers of the swan were beginning at last to show themselves."
Miss Ramsbotham laughed, a genuine laugh of amusement, for of self-pity not a trace was now remaining to her.
"Later I plucked hope again," continued Miss Ramsbotham her confession, "from the reading of a certain school of fiction more popular twenty years ago than now. In these romances the heroine was never what you would call beautiful, unless in common with the hero you happened to possess exceptional powers of observation.
But she was better than that, she was good. I do not regard as time wasted the hours I spent studying this quaint literature. It helped me, I am sure, to form habits that have since been of service to me. I made a point, when any young man visitor happened to be staying with us, of rising exceptionally early in the morning, so that I always appeared at the breakfast-table fresh, cheerful, and carefully dressed, with, when possible, a dew-besprinkled flower in my hair to prove that I had already been out in the garden. The effort, as far as the young man visitor was concerned, was always thrown away; as a general rule, he came down late himself, and generally too drowsy to notice anything much.
But it was excellent practice for me. I wake now at seven o'clock as a matter of course, whatever time I go to bed. I made my own dresses and most of our cakes, and took care to let everybody know it. Though I say it who should not, I play and sing rather well.
I certainly was never a fool. I had no little brothers and sisters to whom to be exceptionally devoted, but I had my cousins about the house as much as possible, and damaged their characters, if anything, by over-indulgence. My dear, it never caught even a curate! I am not one of those women to run down men; I think them delightful creatures, and in a general way I find them very intelligent. But where their hearts are concerned it is the girl with the frizzy hair, who wants two people to help her over the stile, that is their idea of an angel. No man could fall in love with me; he couldn't if he tried. That I can understand; but"--Miss Ramsbotham sunk her voice to a more confidential tone--"what I cannot understand is that I have never fallen in love with any man, because I like them all."
"You have given the explanation yourself," suggested the bosom friend--one Susan Fossett, the "Aunt Emma" of The Ladies' Journal, a nice woman, but talkative. "You are too sensible."
Miss Ramsbotham shook her head, "I should just love to fall in love. When I think about it, I feel quite ashamed of myself for not having done so."
Whether it was this idea, namely, that it was her duty, or whether it was that passion came to her, unsought, somewhat late in life, and therefore all the stronger, she herself would perhaps have been unable to declare. Certain only it is that at over thirty years of age this clever, sensible, clear-seeing woman fell to sighing and blushing, starting and stammering at the sounding of a name, as though for all the world she had been a love-sick girl in her teens.
Susan Fossett, her bosom friend, brought the strange tidings to Bohemia one foggy November afternoon, her opportunity being a tea-party given by Peter Hope to commemorate the birthday of his adopted daughter and sub-editor, Jane Helen, commonly called Tommy.
The actual date of Tommy's birthday was known only to the gods; but out of the London mist to wifeless, childless Peter she had come the evening of a certain November the eighteenth, and therefore by Peter and his friends November the eighteenth had been marked upon the calendar as a day on which they should rejoice together.
"It is bound to leak out sooner or later," Susan Fossett was convinced, "so I may as well tell you: that gaby Mary Ramsbotham has got herself engaged."
"Nonsense!" was Peter Hope's involuntary ejaculation.
"Precisely what I mean to tell her the very next time I see her," added Susan.
"Who to?" demanded Tommy.
"You mean 'to whom.' The preeposition governs the objective case," corrected her James Douglas McTear, commonly called "The Wee Laddie," who himself wrote English better than he spoke it.
"I meant 'to whom,'" explained Tommy.
"Ye didna say it," persisted the Wee Laddie.
"I don't know to whom," replied Miss Ramsbotham's bosom friend, sipping tea and breathing indignation. "To something idiotic and incongruous that will make her life a misery to her."
Somerville, the briefless, held that in the absence of all data such conclusion was unjustifiable.
"If it had been to anything sensible," was Miss Fossett's opinion, "she would not have kept me in the dark about it, to spring it upon me like a bombshell. I've never had so much as a hint from her until I received this absurd scrawl an hour ago."
Miss Fossett produced from her bag a letter written in pencil.
"There can be no harm in your hearing it," was Miss Fossett's excuse; "it will give you an idea of the state of the poor thing's mind."