Gynecocracy

CHAPTER 9

By the time we had reached Liverpool Street, Miss Stormont and Mademoiselle had, to my great dismay, struck up a close friendship and agreed that they would take rooms at the same hotel. She had given my governess an account of the slavery in which she kept her young brother and of the floggings she gave him periodically, not always because he was naughty, but because she considered them good for him; and I was very much frightened.

At Liverpool Street I was waddled across to a hansom cab and obliged to get in first and sit in the middle.

By the time we reached the hotel in Piccadilly what little spirit remained in me had disappeared.

As the train had sped along, and I had become warm under Miss Stormont, and my pulse seemed to throb with hers, and our beings seemed to mingle, I had ventured upon a little affectionate pressure, at first with extreme hesitation. She took no notice of it for some time; I repeated it with more assurance.

Her hair, the back of her head, looked so beautiful, she was so coquettish! Would she betray me? I was not left in doubt long. The pressure was gently returned, and if she and Mademoiselle had struck up friendship by the time we reached the station, so had I struck up a warmer one, and as we got out of the carriage had had a little glance which told me I was understood. This made me very happy. But the drive to Piccadilly extinguished it; only for the time though. I could not help feeling indignant at the calm air of possession with which the majority of the women we met had plainly contemplated me, as if I were annexed, and definitely subject to the petticoat, and they knew it.

The smiling hostess of the quiet private hotel where Mademoiselle stayed increased my dismay by her curious and intelligent looks at me.

My bedroom as at home opened off Mademoiselle's, and the landlady pointed it out incidentally and quite as a matter of course, taking it for granted it was what Mademoiselle would wish.

I should have expected her to consider it strange that a youth of my size should sleep in a room to which there was no access but through a young lady's; and should have been much gratified to find my expectation realised. But the fact that Mademoiselle was my governess appeared quite sufficient explanation to her. And if I had been but five or six years old, I could not have been treated with more indifference by these women.

I found that Mademoiselle frequently used the hotel, and was well-known there.

Miss Stormont's room was on the opposite side of the sitting room.

Of course my hands had been unfastened just before we alighted from the train. The first thing Elise did when we got in, and I was waiting in the sitting room while the apartments were being decided upon, was to tie them up again.