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Miss Modernity:
Marjorie Bowen:
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Miss Modernity
by
Marjorie Bowen
Cover based on a painting by Edmund Blair Leighton (1853-1922)
First published in The Windsor Magazine, August 1924
This e-book edition: Project Gutenberg Australia, 2023
"Really, Captain Lambton, if I had known that your views were
quite so obsolete—" "Common-sense is never out of fashion," he
retorted briskly, "and what you propose to do is just a piece of folly."
ELIZABETH WHARTON had every inducement to be
modern and efficient; she had an active mind, three hundred a
year, no responsibilities, a good education, and naturally, as an
outcome of all these things, a fairly complete self-assurance. Of
course she had not had very much experience, for she was only
twenty-three, but she rather despised experience, and she was
exceptionally well armed with theories.
Her mother had recently married again and gone to America, and
Elizabeth lived with a friend of the same type in rooms, that
were fairly cheap and decidedly picturesque, somewhere off the
Fulham Road. Elizabeth was studying for the Bar; she had, in
fact, only one more examination before her, and she looked on
this as an expert rider looks upon the last fence to be leapt
before certain victory.
Elizabeth was quite happy in her fairly complete
self-assurance; she was young, healthy, and very much in earnest,
and though she wore glasses and shingled hair, she had a certain
satisfaction—unconscious, perhaps-in the exquisite cut of
her one-piece serge frocks, in the perfection of her pale silk
stockings, and the gleam of her openwork patent-leather
shoes.
If she had not been an efficient young woman, she would have
been a pretty young girl, for she did not really need
glasses—they were just part of her kit, like an officer's
epaulettes—and her hair was the kind that wanted so hard to
be long and curly that she had to crop it every week.
Her friend, Connie Smeeton, firmly supported her in her
attitude towards life, for Connie could never have been charming.
If she had not been efficient, she would have been merely dull
and perhaps disagreeable. She intended to be an engineer, and she
was a little plain and more than a little dowdy.
Connie was always slightly apprehensive lest Elizabeth should,
in some moment of aberration, spoil her career and betray her
standard by marriage. "If only you don't fall in love—" she
would say, with a sigh.
At which Elizabeth would be serenely amused. Elizabeth knew
all about love; she had read quite a number of scientific works
on the subject. Marriage she regarded as a pitiful survival of
the Middle Ages, all very well, perhaps, for ordinary stupid
women, but for anyone like herself or Connie—
"Falling in love," said Elizabeth, "is the last folly of an
idle, ill-educated mind feebly searching for diversion, and
marriage is the last refuge of all the women who are not any good
for anything else."
And then Elizabeth came into a fortune, a real fortune; it was
left her by an uncle who had quarrelled with her entirely over
her choice of a "career." The old tyrant had actually wanted her
to live with him, to pour out his coffee in the morning, his tea
in the afternoon, and play cribbage in the evening. On her
indignant refusal, he had called her "a hard young fool," but now
he had died and left her all he possessed on condition that she
managed the property herself and took up residence in the old
Manor House; also everything was to go to a distant relation if
and when she married.
Elizabeth cried secretly. If the old man had been reasonable,
she would have liked him, and she had always fostered the hope
that one day she would both startle and win him by some sparkling
forensic display when she was a full-fledged barrister.
"Of course it is a challenge," remarked Connie. "The old idiot
thought you would make a mess of everything, and that would teach
you a lesson."
"I suppose so," returned Elizabeth dubiously.﹃Poor dear, he
was such a hopeless reactionary. I don't think I'll accept; it
just means smashing up my life-work,﹄she added with the air of
forty-five at least.
But Connie was a shrewd young person. She said: "Elizabeth,
you know that you've only got three hundred, and it's really an
awful pinch, even the two of us living like this. It is no use
just being stiff-necked. You might find a life-work in looking
after this place."
"Oh, yes," agreed Elizabeth. "Poor Uncle Joshua ran everything
in the most archaic fashion. The place must be chaotic. And of
course I know a great deal about property administration, estate
work, and model farming."
"Well," replied Connie, who for a long time had seen little
prospect of earning either fame or money at engineering,﹃I think
you ought to take this on; it seems, in a way, your job. I can
come with you for a bit,﹄she added generously, "to give you
moral support."
Elizabeth thanked her, but declared that she was in absolutely
no need of moral support, so Connie had to offer her company on
the usual terms of a mere guest.
With a great deal of weight and gravity Elizabeth threw
herself into her new task. The lawyers informed her of a codicil
to the will which gave her a good deal of annoyance. Herein her
uncle expressed his wish that she should employ as her bailiff or
steward a certain Captain Harry Lambton, who was greatly in need
of such a position.
"But suppose the man isn't efficient?" asked Elizabeth.
"Oh, I believe there is no doubt about that, Miss Wharton.
Captain Lambton has been farming on his own near Crofton."
"Then why didn't my uncle employ him himself?" asked Elizabeth
crisply.
"Ah, well, Mr. Wharton always liked to do everything himself,
you know."
"So shall I," replied Elizabeth. "I intend to take complete
charge of everything."
"Quite so, quite so," agreed the impassive lawyer. "This is a
mere suggestion on the part of the late Mr. Wharton, a mere
suggestion."
Elizabeth told Connie about it, and Connie thought that
Captain Harry Lambton ought to be interviewed, so Elizabeth wrote
to him and asked him to call on her soon after her arrival at
Crofts.
"But I know what he is like," she told Connie, with the
cruelty of her self-assured youth. "Some poor war derelict that
one can't help being sorry for, but doesn't want. I suppose he is
eking out a pension on a poultry farm."
Elizabeth interviewed Captain Lambton in the large terrace
room at Crofts. After the rooms off the Fulham Road, Crofts
seemed very large, lofty, and noble. Just at first Elizabeth's
composure was a trifle ruffled; she thought that the reflection
of herself in the big mirrors showed a creature rather out of
place in the grand old house. Somehow that boyish-looking figure
with the close aureole of fair hair, in the straight tube frock
and the narrow watered silk bow at the throat, did not look quite
like that of the mistress of Crofts Manor House.
Realising this, Elizabeth was extraordinarily dignified with
Captain Lambton. She put him through his paces with swift
precision, and this despite the fact that her heart was
discomposingly softened by his very obvious lameness and his very
gay and gallant demeanour.
He was a man of about thirty-eight. Very ordinary, Elizabeth
told herself quickly—oh, yes, a very ordinary type indeed.
Eton, Oxford, the Guards, the War, a poultry farm. He had brown
hair with a wave, and a plain, humorous face. He seemed extremely
good-natured, and his manner was courteously casual; yet he, too,
somehow seemed sure of himself.
"I'm afraid you'll find me thoroughly mid-Victorian, Miss
Wharton," he said. "I'm one of the fellows who've rather been
left behind in the ditch while progress goes by on the
high-road."
"You mean you are one of those who cling to the wheels instead
of getting into the cart," said Elizabeth cleverly. "Personally,
I'm a great believer, I'm afraid, in efficiency."
"Oh, that! I saw too much of that in the late troubles to be
awfully keen," smiled Harry Lambton. He glanced at the slight
boyish Elizabeth, and added: "But of course that was all before
your time. I dare say efficiency is quite a new game to you, Miss
Wharton."
Elizabeth considered this impertinence, but she smiled sweetly
to show that it was the impertinence one can condone in an
inferior. She was exasperated.
But she engaged Captain Lambton. She was further exasperated
when he himself suggested that the salary she offered was far too
high, but she coldly agreed to the figure he named, inwardly
raging lest he should think it was ignorance that had prompted
the extravagance of her first proposal. She was so far from grace
that she would rather he had thought it what it really
was—an effort of charity.
For Harry Lambton had been quite devastatingly honest about
his position. There was an unmarried sister, a younger brother, a
married sister none too well off, none trained or efficient.
"Translating and fancy leather work," he had said, and
Elizabeth's fine lip had curled. Hence her munificent offer, and
hence, on his rejection of this, her remark, resulting from an
inward smart: "I thought that was what you wanted the job for?"
"Of course it's for the money I'm taking the place," he
assured her cheerfully.
"It could hardly be for anything else," replied Elizabeth
unpleasantly. "I know you are the kind of man to hate working
under a woman."
He looked at her quizzically.
"Well, now, do you know, I never think of it like that," he
smiled. "I suppose because these very efficient modern women
don't quite seem to me feminine, one thinks of them as—"
"Freaks?" finished Elizabeth sharply, with a blush that
annoyed her intensely. "Well, I am one of them, Captain Lambton.
I don't wish you to regard me as anything—feminine."
"I should never dream of taking such a liberty," he answered
her gravely.
"I am probably," continued the lady rigidly, "a rather
different type from any you have seen before."
"Oh, yes," he agreed. "The post-war flapper is out of date,
isn't she? No, I have never had an intimate acquaintance with
anyone of your generation."
Elizabeth cruelly seized her opportunity.
"This will hardly be an intimate acquaintance, Captain
Lambton. I hope it is completely understood that everything is
entirely in my charge, and that you work under my orders?"
She was almost surprised herself, to find how well she did it;
it was the manner that she had long practised in secret as that
she would use when rising to cross-examine the defendant.
She hoped that he writhed a little, but could not be sure. He
merely answered: "Oh, quite!"
Connie said afterwards, "He is quite nice," as she might have
spoken of a new dog. "But you'll need to keep him in his
place—he has got no end of cheek."
"He won't dare show any to me," said Elizabeth severely. "And
I must say I didn't notice any 'cheek.' Of course, Connie, if you
make yourself cheap bandying jokes with him—"
There was a great deal to do at Crofts, and Elizabeth tackled
so many reforms at once and with such swift zeal that she found
herself uncomfortably occupied. It was incredibly more difficult
to produce model farms, cottages, water-supply and drainage than
she would have believed, and much more hopeless a task to start
village clubs, recreation rooms, and playgrounds than would ever
have occurred to her. Theory went to the wind in a thousand,
thousand fragments.
"The amount of stupidity, prejudice, and ignorance that one
has to combat!" exclaimed Elizabeth.
"Don't give up, dear, for a lot of duds," advised Connie, who
was enjoying her stay at Crofts. "Every reformer has had these
difficulties to contend with. Think of Joan of Arc, of Florence
Nightingale!"
"Don't be an idiot," said Elizabeth sharply.
"Well," replied Connie, "if the whole thing is too much for
you—"
"Nothing is too much for me. Of course I am enjoying the work.
It just hurts me to think how much wrong thinking there is
about." But, in spite of this valiant disclaimer, Elizabeth began
to look very worried and fine-drawn and pale.
By now she was intensely unpopular, had quarrelled with most
of her neighbours, and was on the verge of law-suits with two of
them, besides being entangled in legal difficulties with the
local Borough Council. Very few of the tenants and villagers had
responded to her efforts on their behalf, and her many
improvements seemed to raise more ridicule than praise. Besides,
she had been on more than one occasion very notably "done" by
crafty rogues who had played up to her ideas, and the estate was
becoming unpleasantly burdened.
Elizabeth had discovered, not without bitterness, how much
easier it is to manage three hundred a year than ten thousand,
and how much more satisfactory to be a law unto a few rooms off
the Fulham Road than to a big house, three villages, and many
acres, a host of dependents, servants, workmen and acquaintances,
all critical and some hostile.
"You've one comfort," said Connie cheerfully (Connie, after
all, wasn't concerned very much), "that Lambton man doesn't make
a bore of himself. I should think he must be a sort of Robot. He
doesn't appear to have two ideas in his head. Two? Not even one!"
"Captain Lambton," retorted Elizabeth acidly, "is doing
exactly as I asked him, acting under me and offering no advice or
suggestion."
The new steward was, indeed, keeping exactly to his bond.
Elizabeth would never have admitted to anyone, not even to
Connie, not even to herself, that she sometimes longed for him to
throw aside his good-humoured composure and say or do—well,
anything that showed some interest in her affairs. He was exactly
what she had asked him to be—the perfect paid
servant—and this exasperated Elizabeth very much.
She even, as she got deeper and deeper into difficulties, more
and more disliked and opposed, more and more nerve-racked and
anxious, tried to challenge Harry Lambton into crossing or
criticising her will. She wanted him, really, as a whipping boy;
the least word from him would have been the signal for a
passionate defence of her own actions, a haughty exposition of
her own ideals, a flagellation of his outworn creeds, provincial
viewpoint and middle-class prejudice.
But he never gave her the chance. He took all she did for
granted, and his cheerful "Right!" in reply to the most
preposterous of her suggestions began to irritate her beyond
endurance. She found herself casting about for something that
would rouse Harry Lambton, some absolute dynamite of a proposal
that would bring him out into the open.
Now here Connie came in useful. Connie had put in for the job
of doing the village water-supply and drainage, which had gone
hopelessly wrong. Elizabeth knew quite well that Connie was
incapable of doing this work, and was secretly annoyed that she
had had the cheek to ask, but she saw here a golden opportunity
for exploding the calm of Captain Lambton.
On the first chance she intended to inform him that Connie had
got the work in hand. So impatient was she that she telephoned
him to come up to Crofts Manor House.
When she went down to meet him in the big terrace room, she
found him gazing at a large picture of her
great-great-grandmother that hung over the black-and-white marble
mantelpiece.
"Isn't she jolly?" he said enthusiastically. "I think I fell
in love with her the moment I saw her."
"I am having the picture removed," cut in Elizabeth. "It is
rather a bad Winter-halter, and out of period with the room."
"But she is such a dear," persisted Harry Lambton. "She never
could be out of period with anything."
Elizabeth glanced coldly at the painting, which represented a
young woman in a white silk pelisse, with a large Leghorn straw
bonnet, filled with blue flowers, that just showed the smooth
bands of her fair hair. She wore a blue sarcenet gown, and
carried a tiny little parasol with a heavy fringe. The fair
smooth face was set in a smile of ideal sweetness.
"What a pity she can't come to life!" smiled Harry Lambton.
"She is the type you admire?" asked Elizabeth, adjusting her
glasses. "A simpering, cloying doll?"
"I love her," he returned, unabashed. "Do you know that the
whole kit is upstairs in the chest in the big bedroom? Mr.
Wharton showed it to me. He used to regret that there was no
woman nowadays with so small a waist and foot."
"I haven't had time for frivolities," said Elizabeth sweetly.
"The costume is most unhygienic, isn't it?"
Then, turning her back on her great-great-grandmother and
looking down at the formal bunch of papers in her hand, she
sprung her mine.
"I'm really very bothered about this water and drainage
question, and I've decided to put the work into the hands of my
friend Miss Smeeton."
"Miss Smeeton?"
"She is a qualified engineer, you know," smiled Elizabeth,
"and really first-class."
She had done it at last; his nice plain face lost the look of
indifferent good humour and became perplexed, angry.
"You don't realise how serious it is," he said. "You've fooled
enough already, Miss Wharton. You ought to have a first-class
firm of engineers down at once—"
"My friend is a first-class engineer," interrupted Elizabeth.
"Nonsense!" he answered briskly. "Nonsense, Miss Wharton! This
experiment will cost you thousands."
She had brought him to the attack now, her mine had drawn him
from his fortress, and he was doing battle, foot and horse, in
the open. Elizabeth was enjoying herself.
"Really, Captain Lambton, if I had known that your views were
quite so obsolete—"
"Common-sense is never out of fashion," he retorted briskly,
"and what you propose to do is just a piece of folly."
"You know nothing whatever of Miss Smeeton's qualifications."
"Neither do you, Miss Wharton. But I know this, that if she is
going to monkey about with this water and drainage, you'll get
into serious trouble—worse than you're in now," he added,
bringing up his heavy guns.
"Oh, you think I'm in trouble, do you?" She pounced on that,
rather losing her icy self-control.
"I know you're in a nice old mess. Of course, it isn't part of
my job to tell you so, but I can't allow this."
Elizabeth now swept her big artillery into action.
"Oh, indeed! I suppose you forget that I am entirely my own
mistress in the matter?"
"But you aren't," he assured her. "You've no right to start
typhus in the place, and that is what it will be, if things
aren't looked to soon. Sanitation is beastly difficult, and you
ought to have left the people alone, unless you had a good scheme
to offer. They're almost without water now, and there's a nasty
feeling in the place. I suppose Miss Smeeton won't expect
bouquets—won't mind a few stones?"
He looked so very angry and stern, as he said this, that
Elizabeth surrendered, bag and baggage, and employed, curiously
enough, feminine tactics.
"I think it is perfectly horrid of you to speak to me like
that," she declared. "I can't think how you can be so unkind! You
know that I have been doing my very best for the place."
The victor was not to be appeased by this white flag.
"You've done your very worst," he said unkindly. "It would
take ten years' work to put right the damage you'd have done if I
hadn't kept my eye on things a bit."
This furled the white flag out of sight.
"Oh, indeed!" cried Elizabeth furiously. "So you haven't been
carrying out my orders?"
He gave her a disarming grin.
"Well, some of them were too idiotic," he admitted, "and I
thought if I could just keep things going for a bit until you
found your feet—"
Elizabeth collapsed into one of the big tapestry chairs; she
really couldn't hold herself upright any longer. So this was what
had been behind his pleasant reserve, his immovable good humour,
his ready acquiescence! He had been treating her as a joke, as a
little fool who had to "find her feet," perhaps—oh, very
likely!—making a jest of her behind her back.
She had not been able to rest until she had probed behind his
mask, and now that she had done so she was shattered by her
knowledge. But she bore herself bravely.
"How amusing!" she said in a voice that was almost steady. "I
really thought you were serving me loyally, Captain Lambton. This
discovery is very unpleasant."
"It was the best loyalty that I could think of," he answered
simply.
"To make me a laughing stock by accepting my orders, then not
executing them?"
"But no one knew," he said. "Of course you don't think that I
told people? You jumped it out of me, you know. I never meant to
tell you. I only just tried what I could to keep you out of a
mess, and I'm afraid that I haven't been very successful."
Elizabeth sat still. She was trying hard to make an effort to
compose something bitter, cutting, and conclusive with which to
dismiss the wretched man; she wanted to be very dignified and not
in the least agitated. But during the seconds that she was
pulling herself together he upset all her calculations by an
absurd remark.
He had been looking at her very intently, and he suddenly, in
a different kind of voice, said:
"What do you wear those glasses for? I'm sure your eyes are
quite good. And without them you would be just like
great-great-grandmother."
Elizabeth looked up, really furious, in quite a school girlish
sort of way, but she contrived to cling to her woman-of-the-world
manner.
"Really? I suppose that is your ideal woman, the soft,
clinging type, all cotton-wool and toilet vinegar!"
"Oh, yes! I warned you that I didn't get on with efficient
women, didn't I?" he said rather forlornly.
"You should not have tried," retorted Elizabeth, slightly
mystified. "But I thought you did not admit I was efficient."
He smiled.
"You efficient? Good Heavens, of course you aren't! That is
why we have got on so well together. I thought from the first you
were just great-great-grandmother over again."
Elizabeth rose.
"I suppose you are trying to be funny," she said icily. "It is
so dreadfully out of date, that type of humour."
He protested.
"I'm not joking, really. Every time I look at you I think of
great-great-grandmother, and—and—" under her hostile
stare he changed the end of his sentence﹃—how glad I
should be if she came to life,﹄he concluded feebly.
"A pity you didn't live in those days, Captain Lambton," said
Elizabeth, "isn't it? And I'm afraid, after what has passed, that
we can't possibly work together."
"Oh, of course, if that is how you feel about it—"
"I do most decidedly. It is against my principles to employ a
man when there are so many women wanting work. I shall have in
future a lady bailiff."
She had triumphed. There was no mistaking the dismay in Harry
Lambton's nice face. Elizabeth underscored her triumph.
"She may have many faults, but she won't bore me by telling me
she has fallen in love with my great-great-grandmother."
"Well, if I bore you—"
"I'm afraid you do." She smiled primly.
I'll clear out, then, at once."
"I don't want you to go at once," said Elizabeth rather
lamely. "I mean, not to put yourself to any inconvenience."
"Not in the least," he returned briskly. "Another chap is
looking after my little place for me. I thought I should be back
there before long."
Well, he went, and Elizabeth was quite free to do exactly as
she liked.
The first thing she did was to quarrel with Connie. She told
her that it was sheer cheek for her to have asked for the
engineering job, and Connie, in a rage, went back to the rooms
off the Fulham Road.
Then Elizabeth sat down and thought for quite a long while,
and the result of her thinking was that she telephoned to the
very firm of engineers Captain Lambton had mentioned in the first
place, and asked them to send someone at once.
After that Elizabeth shut herself up in the estate office and
tried to impress the clerks that she really knew something of
what she was talking about. Curiously enough, she had left off
wearing spectacles lately, and found that she could really see
quite well without them.
Elizabeth was very lonely now, and she began to find her work
dull and uninteresting. She interviewed a great many prospective
lady bailiffs and secretaries, and disliked all of them. She
invited friends to stay with her, and quarrelled with all of them
because they told her that she looked as if she wanted a change.
Once she took the light car out and, quite by accident, of
course, ran across Harry Lambton's little farm; she even caught a
glimpse of him working in his garden.
It wasn't in the least a model farm, but was rather
old-fashioned and ordinary, yet it looked so cosy and
comfortable, so peaceful and friendly, that Elizabeth drove home
positively hating Crofts Manor House and the thousand
complications that it stood for. When she got home she took a
long, long look at great-great-grandmother.
Then she went upstairs to the big bedroom and looked in the
oak chest, that hitherto she had resolutely refrained from
opening. There were the white pelisse, the blue frock, the chip
bonnet, the kid slippers and the tiny fringed parasol.
Elizabeth tried them on. She found that the slippers were
not too large, and that she could lace her waist in
to twenty-two inches, also that the poke bonnet was very
becoming, and hid her "shingled" hair completely, showing only
two smooth golden bands in front. It was surprising to see how
exactly she, the modern efficient young woman, looked like the
ethereal girl in the Winter-halter painting. Elizabeth felt a
funny little thrill of gratification. She ran down stairs to look
again at the portrait, and there, in front of it, was Harry
Lambton.
He had seen a pathetic figure flying past in a light car, seen
a wistful face turned towards him, and he had come over to Crofts
as fast as a push-bike could bring him along, and entered
unannounced.
"Great-great-grandmother come to life!" he exclaimed tenderly,
as she stood in the doorway.
"Great-great-grandmother come to life!" he exclaimed tenderly.
Elizabeth dropped a curtsy and blushed. Somehow in a pelisse
and poke bonnet it was easy to curtsy and blush.
Elizabeth dropped a curtsy and blushed.
"Please, sir," she said in a small voice,
"great-great-grandmamma has got into a horrid muddle, and hopes
you'll be so kind as to help her a little."
"She knows I've always been in love with her," he answered.
Then: "Oh, Elizabeth, why don't you cut it all and marry me? We
should have enough to manage on. I know you'll lose Crofts, but
please do, Elizabeth, darling!"
Elizabeth sailed to the hearth; she looked as lovely as the
portrait that smiled above.
"Wasn't Uncle Joshua a wise old dear?" she said.
THE END
Project Gutenberg Australia