Sisters Three

Excerpt

New Year’s Day.

“I wish something would happen!” sighed Norah.

“If it were something nice,” corrected Lettice. “Lots of things happen every day, but they are mostly disagreeable. Getting up, for instance, in the cold, dark mornings—and practising—and housework, and getting ready for stupid old classes—I don’t complain of having too little to do. I want to do less, and to be able to amuse myself more.”

“We want a change, that is the truth,” said Hilary, bending forward on her seat, and sending the poker into the heart of the fire with a vigorous shove. “Our lives jog-trot along in the same way year after year, and it grows monotonous. I declare, when I think that this is the first day of another January it makes me ill! Fifty-two more Mondays to sit in the morning-room and darn stockings. Fifty-two Saturdays to give out stores. Three hundred and sixty-five days to dust ornaments, interview the cook, and say, ‘Well, let me see! The cold mutton had better be used up for lunch’—Oh, dear me!”

“I’ll tell you what—let’s have a nice long grumble,” said Lettice, giving her chair a hitch nearer the fire, and bending forward with a smile of enjoyment. “Let’s hold an Indignation Meeting on our own account, and discuss our grievances. Women always have grievances nowadays—it’s the fashionable thing, and I like to be in the fashion. Three charming and beauteous maidens shut up in the depths of the country in the very flower of their youth, with nothing to do—I mean with far too much to do, but with no amusement, no friends, no variety! We are like the princesses in the fairy tales, shut up in the moated tower; only then there were always fairy godmothers to come to the rescue, and beautiful princes in golden chariots. We shall have to wait a long time before any such visitors come tramping along the Kendal high-road. I am sure it sounds melancholy enough to make anyone sorry for us!”

“Father is the dearest man in the world, but he doesn’t understand how a girl of seventeen feels. I was seventeen on my last birthday, so it’s worse for me than for you, for I am really grown-up.” Hilary sighed, and rested her sleek little head upon her hand in a pensive, elderly fashion. “I believe he thinks that if we have a comfortable home and enough to eat, and moderately decent clothes, we ought to be content; but I want ever so much more than that. If mother had lived—”

There was a short silence, and then Norah took up the strain in her crisp, decided accents. “I am fifteen and a half, and I look very nearly as old as you do, Hilary, and I’m an inch taller. I don’t see why I need go on with these stupid old classes. If I could go to a good school, it would be another thing, for I simply adore music and painting, and should love to work hard, and become celebrated; but I don’t believe Miss Briggs can teach me any more than I know myself, and there is no better teacher for miles around. If father would only let me go abroad for a year; but he is afraid of trusting me out of his sight....