After the Armistice Ball Read Online Free Page A

of Daisy’s candelabra, she looked as though she were squinting against light coming from below, as one does wading at noon in the bright sea.
    Then Cara, the younger, smaller by half a head; she had always made me think of a woodland creature, a changeling. Not a goblin exactly – she was a pretty thing, after all – but certainly nothing so pink-and-white as ‘fairy’ or ‘pixie’ suggests; a velvety little elf perhaps, for although her hair too was fair her general complexion was dark and her brown eyes had a soft twinkle which echoed the upward curl of her lips. Hers was an expression which brought an answering grin from anyone who saw it, having about it none of that insolence which in life or in oils can sometimes make a permanent smile look so very smug and annoying. There was, I thought, something almost simian about this smile. The upper lip had a downy softness to it, as did indeed the whole of her face so that her dark brows seemed merely an intensification, rather than looking like the two worms painted on to the fashionable nakedness of her sister’s skin or, I feared, my own. Was she pretty? I think so, but it is hard to know where looks stopped and personality began. Cara Duffy, you see, was what disapproving matrons used to call a hoyden, which is to say she was always in the highest of spirits, burbling over with jokes and giggles and seeming, even when just sitting quietly, to be surging with fun like a child’s balloon tugging harmlessly at its string. So perhaps this is where one’s pleasure in her sprang from, since on paper, I must admit, a furry little creature with velvety eyes does not sound half so alluring as an alabaster vision such as Clemence. Even tonight, though, when Cara seemed unnaturally subdued, standing beside her father and not speaking, one knew where one would rather rest one’s eyes. And she was subdued, poor thing; marriage and womanhood looming, I supposed, and hoydenish girlhood almost gone. Such a pity it has to come to that.
    I brought my attention back to Lena Duffy’s voice.
    ‘. . . should have opened Dunelgar if home was too far, but her father was fully determined on St George’s or St Giles’, and there was nothing I could do to change his mind. Anyway, now, under the circumstances -' She broke off and stared at me, fingering her necklace chain and apparently waiting for some response. ‘Under the circumstances, none of us has the heart for a lot of fuss and commotion, so she will be married at home as she should be. Not much of a silver lining though, is it?’
    Lena Duffy’s purr had coarsened. To be honest it always had something else in it besides the comfortable chuckle that was its main ingredient, something more rasping, as though a single crow had got into a chorus of pigeons. Now though there was a note of real spitefulness. I have already touched on the subject of my feminine intuition. At this moment it stretched just far enough to tell me I was supposed to understand something here, but it went no further.
    ‘I don’t think I’ve met the young man,’ I said, making what I hoped was a harmlessly general remark, ‘although Hugh tells me he was once in a coxless eight with a brother.’
    ‘Elder brother,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘But he died at Arras.’ One thinks one is tired of the euphemisms and casual endearments, but this bald statement in place of the ‘lost at Arras, poor sweet’ was shocking. It was only too clear, even to me, that it was meant to convey not even the mildest of honours to a hero, nor a warning that there was a dead brother to be tiptoed around should I find myself in conversation with the young man later. It was quite simply a point of information: Mrs Duffy had done nothing so lax as let her daughter become engaged to a second son without any prospects. The brother was dead and thus the engagement was a triumph. I turned away slightly to hide the expression I could not bring under control and wished that someone might