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The Old Lady

By Eleanor Scott

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Adela Young must have come up to Oxford at the same time as myself; but no one, in a way, knew that she had. She was one of those people whom one never notices, physically or mentally – the kind of person whose adjectives you always qualify with “-ish.” She was smallish, thinnish, palish, with dim brownish hair and pale scared eyes. She had a timid, withdrawing manner; she dressed always in rather dismal neutral tints – dull greys and dim greens and fawnish drab, and tussore silk, to match her sallow skin. She was a good deal ignored.

I should never have known Adela, or the old lady, if it hadn’t been for a silly bet. One does these things in one’s first year – risky, futile, daring things – rather caddish things sometimes – with perhaps half-a-crown on them. Someone had ragged me on my numerous acquaintances, and I’d retorted by saying that anyone could make friends with anyone else if they wanted to. Maude Evans caught me up at once.

“Rot!” she said, with her usual affectation of breezy brusquerie. “There’s some people no one would ever know.”

“I bet there’s nobody in College I couldn’t get to know if I wanted to,” I asserted, with more assurance than was at all warranted. Maude had that effect on me.

Maude thought rapidly. I could see her, as I watched her challengingly, going over all the various types of people – the superior, the literary, the sporting, the fashionable, the “swots.” I felt pretty safe. I was only a fresher, but I had possibilities of friendships with all these types.

“You’d never get to know little Whatshername- that washed- out little dishcloth – Young, that’s it. I bet you’d never get thick with her.”

I had my doubts too, really. It was like betting you’d quarrel with a sofa-cushion. But of course I took her on.

“Bet I will,” I said at once.

“How much?” Maude caught me up. She always had rather an eye to the main chance.

“Oh – what you like.” I expected the usual half-crown.

“Bet you a fiver you don’t.”

That stung me. Maude would never have risked such a sum -five pounds means a good deal to a girl undergraduate – if she hadn’t felt certain of winning.

“Right,” I said immediately.

Then we settled the terms of the bet. I was to have invited and been invited – the latter was, of course, the important point – to six walks or meals by the end of the term: to have got some sort of real confidence (“heart to heart talk,” we called it) out of little Young, and have wangled an invitation to stay at her home before the end of the next term – the summer term. (Continue Reading…)