Huggo, standing unsteadily, unsteadily regarded her.
“Point is, where are you going? All dressed
up and somewhere to go! I’ll bet you have!
I’ve seen you jazzing about the place when you
haven’t seen me, Dods. And heard about
you! There was a chap with me watching you at
the Riddle Club the other night told me some pretty
fierce—”
“Oh, dash, I’ve left my fan,” cried
Doda, and turned and ran back up the stairs.
Huggo called, “I say, Dods. I’m in
a row. So’ll you be one day, if you don’t
look out for yourself.”
Doda’s voice: “Oh, dry up—you
fool!”
Strike on!
Her Doda! The one that was her baby girl, that
was her tiny daughter! The one that was to be
her woman treasury in which she’d pour her woman
love; that was to be her self’s own self, her
heart’s own heart, her tiny woman-bud to be
a woman with her in the house of Harry and of Huggo!
Her Doda!
Look, there she is! There’s lovely Doda!
She’s fourteen. It’s early in 1915,
in the first twelve months of the war. (That war!)
She’s at that splendid school. She’s
been there nearly three years. She loves it.
She’s never so happy as when she’s there,
except, judging by her chatter, when she’s away
in the holidays at the house of one of her friends.
It’s at home—when she is at home—that
she’s never really happy. She’s so
dull, she always says, at home. She always wants
to be doing something, to be seeing something, to be
playing with somebody. She can’t bear being
in the house. She can’t bear being, of
an evening, just alone with Rosalie. “Oh,
dear!” she’s always saying. “Oh,
dear, I do wish it would hurry up and be term time
again.”
“Darling, you are a restless person,”
Rosalie says.
“Well, mother, it is dull just sticking here.”
“You know how Benji loves to have you home,
Doda. Benji simply lives for you. I’ve
never known a brother so devoted. You ought to
think of Benji sometimes, Doda.”
“Well, I can’t be always thinking of Benji.
I’m surely entitled to be with my own friends
sometimes. I don’t ask Benji to be devoted
to me.”
She’s strangely given to expressions like that:
“I didn’t ask for”—whatever
circumstance or obligation it might be that was irksome
to her. “Not traditions—precedents!”
The watchword of the school was strangely to be traced
in her attitude, still in her childish years, towards
a hundred commonplaces of the daily life. She
was always curiously older than her years. She
seemed to have a natural bent away from traditionally
childish things and towards attractions not associated
with childhood. She did excellently well at the
school. She was, her reports said, uncommonly
quick and vivid at her lessons. She was always
in a form above her years. Her friends, while
she was smallish, were always the elder girls, and
the elder girls gave her welcome place among them.
“Perhaps a shade precocious,” wrote the
lady principal in one of the laconic, penetrating
sentences with which, above her signature, each girl’s
report was terminated: and, in a later term, “Has
‘Forward!’ for her banner, but should
remember ’not too fast’.”
