back in the bottom drawer of her bureau.
Then she drew from the same secret drawer where she hid the key another book bound with leather, and started to write.
Ever since she had been quite young, Sir James had encouraged his daughter to keep a diary.
“You are growing up,” he had said, “in a world of change—a world where everything will be very different from what we knew in the past. There are new inventions and new discoveries every day and new thoughts which should be recorded.”
He smiled at Cassandra.
“You will also meet new people and have many contacts with those who are famous. Put it all down. If nothing else, you will have the history of your own life to read when you are old. I have always regretted more than I can possibly say that I never recorded mine.”
Obediently, because she always did as her father wished her to do, Cassandra kept her diary.
She wrote in it every evening before she went to bed, until there were already a number of volumes locked away, while the current book was kept at hand in her secret drawer.
She showed it to no-one, not even to her father, although occasionally when something happened which she had anticipated she would read him extracts.
Then he would admire her perspicacity and the fact that what she had expected had occurred, almost exactly as she had predicted.
Cassandra wrote now for only a short time, then put the book back in the secret drawer and shut it. Moving from her Sitting-Room she went into her bed-room.
As she walked across the thick carpet to the mirror over her dressing-table, she stared at her own reflection but she was thinking of something very different.
“I must see him first,” she said aloud. “I want to be sure that I am doing the right thing before I upset Papa.”
As if her thoughts moved from her inward preoccupation to her visual appearance, she looked critically at herself.
Her red-gold hair loosened by Hannah had been brushed until every strand, shining vividly in the lights of the dressing-table, seemed to dance tempestuously over her head.
Her blue eyes in vivid contrast stared back at her from between their long dark lashes.
“It is most unfair!” one of Cassandra’s friends had exclaimed petulantly. “I spend hours trying to think how I can darken my eye-lashes without Mama being aware of it, and yours are as black as ink.”
“They are quite natural, I assure you,” Cassandra said laughingly.
“I am aware of that,” her friend had replied. ‘That’s just what makes it so unfair! If your white skin, your dark eye-lashes and your red hair owed their appearance to artifice, they would be easier to bear. As it is, Cassandra, you look deliciously, flamboyantly theatrical, without making any effort to do so.”
Cassandra could hear the touch of envy in her friend’s voice, but now she remembered the words. “Flamboyantly theatrical!”
‘It is true,’ she thought and knew it was the same criticism which the older generation levelled against her.
“She is pretty, very pretty,” she had heard one Dowager say disagreeably, “but far too theatrical for my taste!”
“Flamboyantly theatrical!”
Cassandra had often repeated the words to herself, and because she was given to telling herself stories and imagining situations which intrigued her just before she went to sleep, she had invented one in which she had become a Gaiety Girl.
Losing all her money, she had gone to London and approached George Edwards with a request that she might be in the chorus.
“You are too pretty for that, my dear,” he would reply. “I will give you a part, and let us see if the audience will appreciate you as enthusiastically as the ‘Stage-door Johnnies’.”
Of course in Cassandra’s imagination, she had been a success over-night.
She had been applauded until the Gaiety Theatre had shaken with the noise of it, and there had been a queue of ardent admirers in their top hats, white ties and tails waiting to take her out