"Say 'Good-night, Charlie.' They call me 'Charlie' at home."
There was no help for it if she wished to escape. "Good-night, Charlie," she mumbled, and rushed away to her own room, in a condition between laughing and crying which recalled Bessie's attacks.
"It is all so ridiculous!" she kept saying to herself as she undressed. "'Good-night, Charlie!' Imagine my having called him 'Charlie.' Charlie, indeed!" She set her teeth at the remembrance. "I would rather have hit him than called him Charlie!"
But as she undressed herself the more serious side of the position presented itself for consideration. Her mother wanted her to get married--she had owned as much, and she had an absolute faith in her mother's wisdom. Did girls marry men feeling about them as she felt about this man and Reggie Forcus, she wondered? It was indisputable that men, "horrider than they," as she phrased it to herself, found quite nice girls to marry them. Ought she to take one or the other? She did not wish to--but ought she?
She got into her night-dress, brushed her hair, even said her prayers--the self-same prayers in the identical words she had said by her bedside in Queen Anne Street on the night of the New Year's party, long ago; she had not even left her father's name out of her petitions--debating these things. She slept in a tiny bedroom through Mrs. Day's, and when she got up from her knees she took her candle and went into her mother's room. "I will hear what mama has to say about it," she told herself.
Mrs. Day was lying awake in the darkness, thinking of Bernard and the dangers of India.
"Mama," Deleah said, holding the candle aloft to peer at her mother. Its light fell on her own charming face half hidden in the loose waves of curling black hair. "You aren't asleep, are you? Of course you aren't! I believe you lie there all night, staring into the shadows and thinking of miserable things! I wonder if it would really make things better, if you would like it very much, that she also has made up her mind to marry Mr. Gibbon!"
Deleah stared for a minute, and then she laughed; and Mrs. Day saw that she laughed whole-heartedly. "Bessie takes all my young men!" she said. "You see, mama, with the best will in the world to please you, I can't get married; so there's an end of it; and I may as well go to bed."