Angel Read Online Free Page A

said Angel, yawning languorously.
    â€œYou always do. You’d do better to get off to bed.” Mrs Deverell rattled the poker in the bars of the grate and took up the bellows.
    â€œMiss Little came in for some soda. She was telling me that poor old Mrs Turner passed away last night with dropsy.”
    â€œHow disgusting!” Angel said, yawning until tears fell. The first yawn had been affected. Now she could not stop.
    Her mother put a little saucepan of milk on the hob and some cups and saucers on a tray. It did not occur to Angel to stir herself to help.
    The next morning Gwen and Polly were not waiting at the gate as usual, and Angel, hesitating there, saw their mother watching her in the darkness beyond the lace curtains. As Angel looked towards her she stepped back from the window. The dark stuff of her dress merged with the shadowy room: only her colourless face could be discerned.
    Angel gave a push to the iron gate. At the sound of it grating on its hinges, the woman came quickly to the window and rapped on it with her knuckles and shook her head. Her face looked pinched with suspicion and disdain, and Angel, going on down the road, wondered why she was feeling that she had been made despicable. She worried a little, hurrying lest she should be late, until she saw other girls dawdling in front of her.
    She had never had any especial friends and most people seemed unreal to her. Her aloofness and her reputation for being vain made her unpopular, yet there were times when she longed desperately, because of some uneasiness, to establish herself; to make her mark; to talk, as she thought of it, on equal terms: but since she had never thought of herself as being on equal terms with anyone, she stumbled from condescension to appeasement, making what the other girls called ‘personal remarks’ and offending with off-hand flattery.
    Conversation would be dropped when she approached, as it was this morning between Ellie and Beattie, two girls of her own age. When she reached them, she came upon the sort of stubborn silence which meant that they hoped she would hurry on.
    â€œAre we late?” she asked, with an affected breathlessness.
    â€œWe didn’t think so,” Ellie said.
    â€œBut if you fancy you are, do go on,” said Beattie.
    She slowed down to their pace and walked beside them. She began to talk about school, with no response from either of them. It was a less interesting subject than the one they had just dropped.
    When Ellie stopped by the railings to tie a bootlace, Angel stood by and praised the smallness of her feet.
    â€œThey’re no smaller than yours,” Ellie said roughly.
    Angel glanced down at her own, and seemed surprised to find that this was so.
    â€œI suppose you mean you think they’re small for me,” said Ellie, and Beattie laughed suddenly.
    After a long silence Beattie remarked thoughtfully: “So she decided on the cream merino, then?”
    She implied that Angel’s presence made no difference to the conversation she had interrupted, and they both continued it, with mysterious references, so that Angel could not join in. They had indeed been discussing Ellie’s sister’s wedding, but with more intimate conjectures than those concerned with her trousseau.
    â€œYou know I was telling you what Cyril said about the grey pelisse. . . .”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWell. . .” She lowered her voice and both girls laughed. Angel tried to appear unaffected by the conversation. She despised their animation about such a home-made trousseau; could imagine the deplorably coy behaviour of the bride and those around her; the wedding at the hideous Congregational Church, and the little house crowded with boorish relations afterwards. Although Ellie and Beattie were from better-off homes than her own, she had other standards to judge them by.
    Ellie and Beattie had drifted pleasurably on to imagining their own wedding-dresses and to