The Vanity Girl

Book excerpt: With whatever romance one might be tempted to embellish the origin of Lonsdale Road on account of an architectural superiority to the streets around, it would be fanciful merely for that to endow it with any influence upon the character of the people who live there. Apart from a house where the drains are bad, that has achieved the reputation of being haunted, because the landlord prefers to let it stay empty rather than spend money on putting the drains in order, Lonsdale Road possesses as unromantic a lot of residences as the most banal of West Kensington streets. The nearest approach to a scandal is the way human beings and cats go courting in the lane at the end; but since the former do not live in Lonsdale Road and the latter are not amenable to any ethical code administered by the police, the residents do not feel the burden of a moral responsibility for their behavior. Such a dignified road within seven minutes of the railway station had in the year 1881 made a strong appeal to Mr. Gilbert Caffyn, who, having just been appointed assistant secretary to the Church of England Purity Society at the early age of twenty-six, with a salary of £150 a year, was emboldened by his father's death and the inheritance of another £200 a year in brewery shares to persuade Miss Charlotte Doyle that their marriage was immediately feasible. Mr. Caffyn had been all the more anxious to press for a happy conclusion of a two years' engagement because Mrs. Doyle was showing every sign of imminent decease, an event which would eliminate a traditionally unsatisfactory relationship and enrich her daughter with £300 a year of her own. Mr. Caffyn therefore sold a quarter of his shares, purchased a ninety-nine years' lease of 17 Lonsdale Road, the last house on the right-hand side away from the growing traffic of West Kensington, and got married. If No. 17 was nearest the railway, it was also rather larger than the other houses, an important consideration for the assistant secretary of the Church of England Purity Society, who was bound to expect at least as many children as a clergyman. Still, for all its extra windows, it was not a very large house; and when in the year 1902 Mr. Caffyn, now secretary of the Church of England Purity Society, with a salary of £400 a year, looked at his wife, his nine children, his two servants, and himself, he wondered how they all managed to squeeze in. He hoped that his wife, who had been mercifully fallow for seven years, would not have any more children, though it might almost be easier to have more children than to provide for the rapid growing up of those he had already. Why, his eldest son Roland was twenty. The question of his moving into cheap rooms to suit his position as the earner of a guinea a week at a branch bank had been mooted several times already, and Mr. Caffyn had been compelled to turn his study (which he never used) into a bedroom for him and his brother Cecil, now a lanky schoolboy of fifteen, rather than expose himself to the likelihood of having to supplement the bank clerk's salary from his own. Then there was Norah, who was eighteen ... but at this moment Mr. Caffyn realized that he had only eight minutes to catch his train up to Blackfriars, and the problem of Norah was put aside. It was a hot morning in late September, and he had long ceased to enjoy running to catch a train.