Page:Small Souls (1919).djvu/34

26 “They have all received me so nicely. So simply.”

“Why, of course, Connie. You’re their sister.”

Constance was silent. . . . Dorine, with two of the young nieces, poured out the tea, brought it round:

“Have a cup, Constance? Milk? Sugar?”

How familiar and pleasant it sounded, just as though she were really one of them, as though she always had been one of them: “Have a cup, Constance?”. . . As if it wasn’t the first cup of tea she had had there for years and years! . . . Dear Dorine! Constance remembered her as a girl of seventeen, shy, not yet out, but even then caring, always caring, for others. She was not pretty, she was even plain, ungraceful, clumsy, badly-dressed. . ..

“Yes, Dorine, I should like a cup. . . . Come here, Dorine. Sit down and talk to me: the girls can see to the tea.”

She drew Dorine to the sofa beside her and nestled between her mother and her sister:

“Tell me, Dorine, do you still look after everybody so well? Do you still pour the tea?”

Her voice had a broken sound, full of a melancholy that permeated her simple, bantering words. Dorine made some vague reply.

“When I went away,” said Constance, “you were not seventeen. You were always cutting bread-and-butter for Bertha’s children. Otto and Louise were