My darling, I do so adore you. Please, please, come out to Spain and give up not knowing your own mind. I miss you tremendously. I feel this beautiful city is wasted without you. I'm sure if you determined not to bother about anything but love, you'd never regret it. You wouldn't really. Dearest, sweetest Jenny, do come. I'm longing for my treasure. It's wonderfully romantic sitting here in the patio of the hotel--a sort of indoor garden--and thinking so hard of my gay and sweet one away in London. Darling, I'm sending you kisses thick as stars, all the way from Spain. All my heart,
Jenny was lying in bed when she received this letter. The unfamiliar stamp and crackling paper suited somehow the bedroom at Stacpole Terrace to which she was not yet accustomed. Such a letter containing such a request would have seemed very much out of place in the little room she shared at home with May. But here, so dismal was the prospect of life, she felt inclined to abandon everything and join her lover.
The Dales were a slovenly family. Mr. Dale himself was a nebulous creature whom rumor had endowed with a pension. It never specified for what services nor even stated the amount in plain figures; and a more widely extended belief that the household was maintained by the Orient management through Winnie and Irene Dale's dancing, supplanted the more dignified tradition. Mr. Dale was generally comatose on a flock-exuding chair-bed in what was known as "dad's room." There in the dust, surrounded by a fortification of dented hatboxes, he perused old Sunday newspapers whose mildewed leaves were destroyed biennially like Canterbury Bells. Mrs. Dale was a beady-eyed, round woman with a passion for bonnets, capes, soliloquies and gin. Her appearance and her manners were equally unpleasant. She possessed a batch of grievances of which the one most often aired was her missing of the _Clacton Belle_ one Sunday morning four years ago. Jenny disliked her more completely than anybody in the world, regarding her merely as something too large and too approximately human to extirpate. Winnie Dale, the smoothed-out replica of her mother, was equally obnoxious. She had long lost all the comeliness which still distinguished Irene, and possessed an irritating habit of apostrophizing her affection for a fishmonger--some prosperous libertine who occasionally cast an eye, glazed like one of his own cods, at Jenny herself. Ethel, the third sister, was still in short frocks because her intelligence had not kept pace with her age.