The Eye of Love by Margery Sharp Read Free Book Online Page A

hour and twenty minutes. In a happy lover, such conduct wasn’t altogether inexcusable: old Mrs Gibson, and Aunt Beatrice, like a couple of inexperienced commères, with many a beck and smile pulled off the feat of presenting it as infatuation. “So much my Harry admires her playing!” murmured Mrs Gibson. “It was music brought them together!” declared Aunt Beatrice. They had no audience except old man Joyce, perhaps they were rehearsing for the engagement-party, but their efforts weren’t wasted. The evening not only passed off without disaster, but could be accounted a positive success.
    In the taxi going home old Mrs Gibson wasn’t even sleepy. Champagne and brandy, and wearing her best dress, and seeing her Harry at last on the way out of his troubles—all combined to rejuvenate her. In Moscow, she’d have been ready to dance till morning … The slight bother of hauling Harry out, and then getting him upstairs, and after that getting him to bed, tarnished her happiness not a whit. So a boy should come home, on such an evening!

CHAPTER FIVE
    1
    Loyal to their sad vows, Mr Gibson and Miss Diver refrained from all communication. Mr Gibson’s only solace, at this time, lay in remembering the hundred pounds put by April the Fifth into Dolores’ Post Office savings account. He still wished he’d made her promise not to try her luck again; for it was inconceivable to him that the future held any more luck for either of them, in either great things or small.
    Dolores, treading the round from agency to agency and from shop to shop, was of the same mind.
    2
    Alas that her romanticism wasn’t more flexible, that she had seen herself too long as a Spanish rose to see herself now a Sleeping Beauty! It would have helped her, if only a little; the image more-over would have been a truer one—supposing Beauty waked not by the Prince, but by the vanishment of her enchanted palace. Essentially, for ten years, Miss Diver’s life had been as sheltered as the sleeping princess’s, and as cut off from all reality. When she needed money, Mr Gibson supplied it, and the common rubs of social life never bruised her, for she had none. She had sought no friends, because she didn’t want any. (An early overture from Number 10, where there were so many rowdy parties, she’d snubbed at once. “Quite right,” said Mr Gibson. “I like my little woman to be particular …” Dolores basked in his approval, but in fact the gesture cost her nothing.) Even before the advent of Martha, the work of the little house, and a little small-talk in the local shops, and a novel borrowed from the library, easily filled each day until King Hal came at evening to his Spanish rose. Even when he didn’t spend the night, he came each evening, for half-an-hour.
    In their secret garden (5, Alcock Road, W.2), she’d dreamed away ten years; and woke ill prepared to face the world without.
    She had lost, for example (dreaming in Mr Gibson’s eye of love), all ideas of what she looked like to any other eye. The first time the girls in the queue laughed at her, she didn’t even notice; the second time, she was panic-stricken.
    There was always a queue, if any shop had a vacancy. One vacancy drew twenty or thirty applicants.
    Dolores on this second occasion was well towards the front; and had dressed with particular care to make herself look as young as possible. Perhaps her skirt was on the short side—considering the boniness of her legs; perhaps her blouse too peek-a-boo, considering the salt-cellars at her collar-bones; but when the girls behind sniggered, she at first, again, didn’t realise who was their butt. “Skinny Lizzie,” they’d been whispering; but no one behind, or indeed before (Dolores looked both ways), seemed to deserve the cruel jibe. Many of those queueing were certainly thin, but only with a thinness then regrettably