And Jessie--who had started this
intercourse at fourteen with abstract objections to
stepmothers--had been active enough in resenting this. Increasing
rivalry and antagonism had sprung up between them, until they
could engender quite a vivid hatred from a dropped hairpin or the
cutting of a book with a sharpened knife. There is very little
deliberate wickedness in the world. The stupidity of our
selfishness gives much the same results indeed, but in the
ethical laboratory it shows a different nature. And when the
disaster came, Mrs. Milton's remorse for their gradual loss of
sympathy and her share in the losing of it, was genuine enough.
You may imagine the comfort she got from her friends, and how
West Kensington and Notting Hill and Hampstead, the literary
suburbs, those decent penitentiaries of a once Bohemian calling,
hummed with the business, Her 'Men'--as a charming literary lady
she had, of course, an organised corps--were immensely excited,
and were sympathetic; helpfully energetic, suggestive, alert, as
their ideals of their various dispositions required them to be.
"Any news of Jessie?" was the pathetic opening of a dozen
melancholy but interesting conversations. To her Men she was not
perhaps so damp as she was to her women friends, but in a quiet
way she was even more touching. For three days, Wednesday that
is, Thursday, and Friday, nothing was heard of the fugitives. It
was known that Jessie, wearing a patent costume with buttonup
skirts, and mounted on a diamond frame safety with Dunlops, and a
loofah covered saddle, had ridden forth early in the morning,
taking with her about two pounds seven shillings in money, and a
grey touring case packed, and there, save for a brief note to her
stepmother,--a declaration of independence, it was said, an
assertion of her Ego containing extensive and very annoying
quotations from "A Soul Untrammelled," and giving no definite
intimation of her plans--knowledge ceased.
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