Part 9

"Well, you have spoken, haven't you?"

She, as it were, seized upon and recovered the smile that darted out to play reprehensibly about the corners of her mouth.

"I had to," said she.

Soft-footed and soft-tongued, moving like a breath, that was how Rose Eldred first appeared to George Tanqueray.

He had asked her name, and her name, she said, was Rose.

If you reasoned about Rose, you saw that she had no right to be pretty, yet she was. Nature had defied reason when she made her, working from some obscure instinct for roundness; an instinct which would have achieved perfection in the moulding of Rose's body if Rose had only grown two inches taller. Not that the purest reason could think of Rose as dumpy. Her figure, defying nature, passed for perfect. It was her face that baffled you. It had a round chin that was a shade too large for it; an absurd little nose with a round end, tilted; grey eyes a thought too round, and eyebrows too thick by a hair's-breadth. Not a feature that did not err by a thought, a hair's-breadth or a shade. All but her mouth, and that was perfect. A small mouth, with lips so soft, so full, that you could have called it round. It had pathetic corners, and when she spoke it trembled for very softness. From her mouth upwards it was as if Rose's face had been first delicately painted, and then as delicately blurred. Only her chin was left clean and decided.

And as Nature, in making Rose's body, had erred by excess of roundness, when it came to Rose's hair, she rioted in an iniquitous, an unjust largesse of vitality. Rose herself seemed aware of the sin of it, she tried so hard to restrain it, coiling it tight at the back, and smoothing it sleek as a bird's wing above her brows. Mouse-colored hair it was on the top, and shining gold at the temples and at the roots that curled away under the coil.

She wore a brown skirt, and a green bodice with a linen collar, and a knot of brown ribbon at her throat.

Thus attired, for three days Rose waited on him. For three days she never spoke a word except to tell him that a meal was ready.

In three days he noticed a remarkable increase in his material comfort. There was about Rose a shining cleanliness that imparted itself to everything she laid her hands on. (Her hands were light in their touch and exquisitely gentle.) His writing-table was like a shrine that she tended. Every polished surface of it shone, and every useful thing lay ready to his hand. Not a paper out of its order, or a pen out of its place. The charm was that he never caught her at it. In all her ministrations Rose was secret and silent and unseen.

Only every evening at nightfall he heard the street door open, and Rose's voice calling into the darkness, sending out a cry that had the magic and rhythm of a song, "Puss--Puss--Puss," she called; "Minny--Min--Min--Minny--Puss--Puss--Puss." That was the hymn with which Rose saluted the night. It ought to have irritated him, but it didn't.

It was all he heard of her, till on the fourth evening she broke her admirable silence. She had just removed the tablecloth, shyly, from under the book he was reading.

"It isn't good for you to read at meal-times, sir."

"I know it isn't. But what are you to do if you've nobody to talk to?"

A long silence. It seemed as if Rose was positively thinking.

"You should go out more, sir."

"I don't like going out."

Silence again. Rose had folded up the cloth and put it away in its drawer. Yet she lingered.

"Would you like to see the little dogs, sir?"

"Little dogs? I didn't know there were any."

"We keep them very quiet; but we've seven. We've a fox and a dandy" (Rose grew breathless with excitement), "and an Aberdeen, and two Aberdeen pups, and two Poms, a mole and a white. May they come up, sir?"

"By all means let them come up."

She ran down-stairs, and returned with the seven little dogs at her heels. Tanqueray held out his hand invitingly. (He was fond of animals.) The fox and the dandy sniffed him suspiciously. The old Aberdeen ran away from him backwards, showing her teeth. Her two pups sat down in the doorway and yapped at him.

Rose tried not to laugh, while the Poms ran round and round her skirts, panting with their ridiculous exertions.

"That's Prince--the mole--he's a pedigree dog. He doesn't belong to us. And this," said Rose, darting under the table and picking up the white Pom, "this is Joey."

The white Pom leaped in her arms. He licked her face in a rapture of affection.

"Is Joey a pedigree dog, too?" said Tanqueray.

"Yes," said Rose. She met his eyes without flinching.