I put the finishing touches to Bettina's dress in our mother's room that night, so that the invalid¹ might have the pleasure of lying there and looking at Betty, all white and golden in the candle-light.  
While I tied her sash I noticed her frowning at herself in the glass.
 
"I look dreadfully missish," she said.
 
When I protested, she said: "Worse, then! Like a charity child at a school-treat!"
 
We were amazed. My mother asked where she had got such ideas. I heard Hermione behind Betty's voice.
 
She turned round and faced our mother with her most beguiling² air. "It's going to be mine some day ... lend me the pearl and emerald pendant." That my mother should be surprised at the suggestion, seemed only natural. But I could not see why she should be so annoyed. I, too, begged her to let Bettina wear the pendant. After all, Bettina was in her seventeenth year ... and this was a real party.[Pg 162]
 
"A girl of sixteen wanting to wear a thing like that!"
 
Bettina frowned. How old must she be before she could wear the pendant?
 
My mother wouldn't say....
 
After Bettina had gone, I asked about the market value of jewels.
 
My mother seemed to think the inquiry³ very odd and somehow offensive. I asked if she thought the big diamond star was worth as much as £600.
 
She said I appeared to have a very sordid⁴ way of looking at things whose real value was that they were symbolic⁵ of something beyond price.
 
I said I knew that. But did she not think that for some great and important end, my father would have been the first to say, let the jewels be sold?
 
My mother put her hand up to her eyes. I blew out one candle and set a shield before the other.
 
She spoke⁶ my name and I started—the voice sounded odd. I went back to the bedside. "Are you ill?" I said. She shook her head and motioned me to sit down.[Pg 163]
 
Then she told me. We were living on the proceeds of the diamond star.
 
The pendant had been sold last summer. There was nothing more worth selling except the furniture, and possibly a few prints.
 
We owed Lord Helmstone six months' rent.
 
I met the shock with the help of my secret. I steadied myself against the thought that, at the worst, I would find the means (through Aunt Josephine or somebody) for qualifying myself to support my mother and sister. I saw myself, at the worst, a humble⁷ soldier enlisting⁸ in that army where Eric held command. I, too, marching with that high companionship ... marching to the world's relief.
 
In the midst of telling how I was forging ahead with my London University Tutorial Correspondence, and to what the year's successful work was leading, I kept thinking that, after all, this ill wind might help to blow away the cloud that Eric's disapproval⁹ had brought lowering over the present and obscuring all the future. My mother will be proud of me, I thought. She will even be a little touched; and then, for all the light was so dim, I saw her face of horror![Pg 164]
 
It was a mad idea. Her daughter a "female doctor"! Never!
 
"Not—not female doctor," I protested. "That does sound——"
 
"Well, you see for yourself how the very sound of it——"
 
I assured her that I didn't dislike the sound of "medical woman." But there was no necessity to emphasise¹⁰ "woman" at all; the only thing important was whether the person was qualified¹¹ to treat the sick. People did not feel they had to say male doctor. "Doctor is enough."
 
I was told that the reason no one said male doctor was because "doctor" was male, and everyone understood that.
 
I left the point, and I pleaded my main cause with all my might. I hadn't any accomplishments—no music, nothing. "I'm not the decorative¹² one, and I like 'doing things'; plain, everyday things." There had to be people like that.
 
It was all no use.
 
That confession¹³ of mine, more than hers about t............