Chapter I

“_Ribbons and laces for sweet pretty faces—_
_Oh, come to the market and buy._”

When Linda was quite a tiny child, and, as her mother, who did not
understand her, or attempt to do so, would say, “a very naughty child,”
the only way in which to keep her quiet and prevent her from being
naughty, was to allow her to sort out her grandmother’s “ribbon box.”

Linda’s grandmother was an old-fashioned grandmother. She wore a cap of
snowy lace on her grey hair, and black silk frocks that touched the
ground all round, and a gold watch chain a yard and a half long which
went twice round her neck and hung down to her waist, and she still put
sprigs of lavender amongst her clothes instead of the new fashionable
scented sachet, and she was a firm believer in a button bag and a ribbon
box.

If a garment wore out, or was about to be given away to a poor relation,
or someone in the village, she first looked it carefully over to see if
there were any special buttons attached to it which were worth keeping
in case they should come in for another frock or coat or whatever might
be in the making; and if they were, snip! Grannie’s scissors cut them
neatly off, and they were carefully put away in the button bag.

The same thing applied to oddments of lace and silk, and ribbons, or
bits of fancy trimming, and such things; they all found their way into
the ribbon box, where, be it admitted, they generally stayed
indefinitely, as the occasion never seemed to arise when their
usefulness could be put into practice again.

And Linda loved that button bag and that ribbon box!

To turn the buttons out on the floor and marshal them into long, varying
lines, would keep her good for hours, and her idea of complete happiness
for a long time after, as her mother plaintively said, “One would have
expected her to have outgrown such childishness”—was to be allowed to
“dress up” in the contents of the ribbon box.

Priceless odd lengths of lace, yellow with age, and as silky as a
cobweb, lovely soft pieces of ribbons, each either too long or too short
to be of any real use; queer-shaped oddments of silk and bright-coloured
satin, and strange, old-fashioned little bunches of flowers cut from
grannie’s bonnets; all these were the joy of Linda’s heart, whereas
expensive toys and dolls which opened and shut their eyes, and said
“Mamma,” left her cold and unresponsive.

“She inherits her father’s commercial mind,” her mother complained
fretfully; she was a fretful person altogether, who never once in all
the years of her married life had managed to forget that she came of an
alleged blue-blooded stock, whereas plain, good-natured Thomas Dawson
could only boast a line of not very respectable tradespeople as
ancestors, and was proud of it.

“I’m a self-made man,” he would say, thumping himself on the chest. “I
never had any education, and I’ve managed to do without it. When I die I
shall be worth nearly a hundred thousand pounds.”

“Thomas is so . . . coarse!” his wife would complain to her mother. “Of
course we all know that without money life would be impossible——”

(She did not think it necessary to add that it was because she had found
it so impossible that she had married Thomas Dawson.) “But surely there
is no need to be _always_ talking about it?”

“Thomas talks about the only thing he understands,” her mother would
answer in her sweet voice. “And, after all, think how much worse it
would be if he talked about things of which he was entirely ignorant?”

She herself lived quite happily and comfortably in the house of her
daughter and son-in-law, and asked no questions.

She had a small and insufficient income of her own which Thomas
generously supplemented, and at the back of her tolerant, old-fashioned
mind, though she would not have admitted it for the world, she
considered that Thomas had behaved very foolishly in marrying her
daughter at all.

Mrs. Lovelace rather despised her daughter, chiefly because of the way
she incessantly complained of Thomas.

Mrs. Lovelace herself had been married to a gentlemanly blackguard, to
whose glaring faults and many peccadilloes she had kept her eyes shut
through fifteen years of complete unhappiness, because it was her idea
of loyally keeping her marriage vows, and she had no patience with the
modern wife who walked through the highways of the world screaming her
misery aloud, and advertising the mistakes which she had made of her own
accord.

“You have no pride, Marion,” she would say sedately to Thomas’s wife.
“When I was a girl we were always taught to keep our troubles to
ourselves.”

“You never had a trouble like Thomas,” Marion would answer bitterly.
“And Linda is just like her father! Heaven knows what will become of
her.”

“Linda is a very dear child,” Grannie would answer warmly, and look
across the room to where auburn-haired Linda was sitting on the floor
entirely surrounded by bright-coloured buttons, and dressed up like a
May girl in odd pieces of silk and lace out of the ribbon box.

“She has her father’s temper,” Mrs. Dawson said snappily. “I suppose she
inherited it with his red hair.”

“Linda’s hair is not red,” Mrs. Lovelace would object with dignity. “It
is chestnut—a real, beautiful chestnut.”

Linda looked up at that moment, turning her pale, rapt face to the two
women.

“Ten pink buttons, Grannie,” she said solemnly, as if the affairs of
nations depended upon her calculation being correct. “And only five blue
ones. I wonder where the other one is?”

Mrs. Lovelace adjusted her spectacles and looked affectionately at her
granddaughter.

“Those blue buttons were on a dress I had when your mother was a little
girl like you are now,” she said reminiscently. “And one of them got
loose, and I meant to sew it on, but forgot, and so it was lost. That
shows you, Linda, the necessity of never putting a duty off when it
should be done at once. I hope you will remember that, my dear child.”

“Linda never remembers anything I tell her,” Mrs. Dawson complained.
“And it’s your fault, mother; you and Thomas spoil her shockingly.”

Then she gave a final look at herself in the mirror over the
mantelshelf, duly admired her feathered hat and expensive furs, and went
out to where her latest extravagance, a grey-lined limousine, waited at
the door.

Mrs. Lovelace rose from her chair and went to the window, watching till
her daughter was out of sight; then she sighed, and came back to where
Linda squatted happily on the floor, surrounded by her ribbons and
laces.

The child looked up and smiled, her pretty face framed in a piece of old
lace tied under the chin by a big blue bow.

“Grannie,” she said, solemnly.

“Yes, my treasure?”

Linda scrambled to her feet, looking down at the strewn floor and the
dozens of buttons with awe and respect in her eyes.

“Grannie,” she said again. “When I grow up what do you think I shall
do?”

“I don’t know, my darling. Wear pretty clothes like mother, I suppose,
and drive about in a motor-car.”

Linda screwed up her rosebud mouth.

“Oh, no!” she said, fervently. “Nothing silly like that! I’m going to
keep a shop.”