Lilian Part 23

The pride of her reception in Clifford Street wafted her easily up the somewhat austere stairs of the first floor establishment in Piccadilly.

She had long been familiar with the face of the commissionaire, and the bra.s.s signs, of this mysterious shop, but never till the leading word attracted her eyes as she was driving from Montpelier Square to Clifford Street had it occurred to her what the word signified. The deceiving staircase led to splendid rooms, indicating that the renown of the establishment could not be spurious. A bright and rosy young woman came smilingly forward and gave Lilian a chair. One other customer, a stout lady with her back to the world, was being served in a distant corner.

A marvellous calm reigned, and the noise of Piccadilly seemed to beat vainly against the high, curtained windows.

"Layettes?" Lilian began questioningly, with a strange exultation. The aspect of the interior had revived her taste for luxury while giving it a new direction.

"Yes, madam."

The esoteric conversation was engaged. Lilian sat entranced by the fineness and the diminutiveness and the disconcerting elegance of the display ranged abroad for her on the gla.s.s counter. She was glad that through culpable sloth she had done absolutely nothing as yet with her own needle. It was the books from Dr. Samson that had aroused her to the need for action of some sort, for she had had no wise woman to murmur in her eager ear the traditions and the Spanish etiquette of centuries of civilized maternity.

"I shall bring Gertie to see these to-morrow," she thought. "It will please her frightfully to come, and she'll stop me from being too extravagant. Only I must arrange it so that her work won't be interfered with. Perhaps at lunch time. Never do to upset discipline right at the start!"

And she asked to see still more stock. The articles stimulated her memory and her imagination into a kind of tranquil and yet rapturous contemplation of the events, voluptuous, tender and tragic, which had set her where she was. The thrill of conception, the long patience of gestation, the coming terror of labour mingled all together in her now mystical mind. Her destiny had been changed, or at least it was gravely diverted. Instead of glittering in public as the lovely darling and blossom of luxurious civilization, and in private rendering a man to the highest possible degree happy--instead of this she was secretly and obscurely building a monument, in her body and also in her heart, to Felix--Felix whom already she had raised to be the perfect man, Felix who might have been alive then if she had not one evening behaved like a child, or if his sense of his duty towards her had not been so imperious. (Her commonsense had at last cured her of regarding herself as his murderess.) Whether she had loved him to the height of which she was capable of pa.s.sionate love was doubtful. But she had profoundly admired him; she had been pa.s.sionately grateful to him for his love of her; and, come what might when her beauty was restored to its empire, no other man could ever stand to her in the relation in which Felix had stood. He had set his imprint upon her and created her a woman. And so she was creating him a G.o.d.

All these movements of her brooding mind originated from the spectacle of the articles on the counter. They did not prevent her from discussing layettes with the bright, rosy, shop-girl. That innocent, charming and unimaginative young creature fingered the treasures with the casualness of use. For her layettes were layettes, existing of and for themselves; they connoted nothing.