‘My wife, Mrs Minter,’ Minter said, drawing her still farther in, ‘and our beloved daughter, Stella.’
The family stood together. They looked expectant. Minter stared at Janet Striker as if for help. Yet she looked at Denton, who saw it was his turn. ‘I’m happy to see,’ he said, ‘that Miss Minter isn’t the young lady we’re looking for.’
‘Looking for!’ the woman cried. ‘Why should you be looking for her?’
Minter turned his head to say something to her, but Denton said loudly, ‘It’s a case of mistaken identity, ma’am. Another young woman of the same name.’ He didn’t say how disappointed he was.
‘I should think so!’ she said. ‘Very mistaken, indeed, I should think! You really ought to determine your facts in a better fashion, I think!’
‘Now, Mother-’ Minter managed to say.
‘Anyone who knows her knows that there can’t be any confusion about who she is! I can’t hardly understand how her identity could be confused! I think you must be very ignorant people!’
‘Oh, Mama-!’ the girl moaned.
‘Hush, dear.’
‘My wife is overwrought,’ Minter said. ‘Stella is the apple of our eye.’
‘Apple, indeed!’ Mrs Minter shouted. ‘A girl of such accomplishments-! ’
‘That’s enough, Mother!’ Minter said. He had reverted to the clergyman’s voice; the effect was instantaneous, Mrs Minter’s mouth remaining open but no sound coming out. The girl blushed and looked at Janet Striker in appeal, perhaps apology; she looked at Denton and gave him a tentative, awkward smile. She was sixteen, the birth record had told him that; she had the adolescent’s embarrassment at her parents, however they loved her and she them. Her smile to Denton seemed to ask for an understanding of that, and on an impulse, he said to her, ‘Is that your picture on the mantel, Miss Minter?’
Her mother started to answer for her, but Minter said, ‘Now!’ in a warning voice; the girl, after a second or two, blushing some more, said, ‘I was just finished at the common school. I was only fourteen then.’
‘And look,’ Minter said, ‘at all she’s accomplished since! She’s won a scholarship to the Roedean School!’
‘And will go on to university — her teachers say so!’ the mother burst out.
‘That’s wonderful,’ Denton said. ‘Wonderful. You went to the local school, then? And stayed after age eleven, and went on as long as you could.’
‘I love studying.’
‘What’s your favourite?’
‘Science. I’m going to be a scientist.’
‘Or a teacher,’ her mother said; unresolved conflict hovered over the words.
‘Yours is an unusual name,’ Denton said. The girl nodded, blushed, as if to suggest that the name was not her doing. ‘I wonder,’ Denton started, looking aside at Janet Striker, the idea forming in his head as he asked the question, ‘if any other girls have ever used your name. Pretended to be you.’
‘What, as a kind of cheat? To get money or something?’
‘No, dear,’ Mrs Striker said, picking up Denton’s notion, ‘no, more from, perhaps, admiration. Or envy. “The sincerest form of flattery,” do you know that saying?’
‘Yes, but that’s imitation.’
‘Well, yes, dear, that’s I think what Mr Denton means. Imitating you. Has there ever been anybody like that?’
Mrs Minter laughed, a dismissive, contemptuous laugh. ‘They all envy her.’
‘Oh, Mama-’
‘Well, some are quite nasty, you’ve said so yourself! The green-eyed monster, that’s what afflicts people.’
Denton crossed his arms over his chest, his words trying to pull the talk back to his question. ‘But has there ever been anybody — some special friend, some girl who admired you, maybe talked like you, even said she wanted to be like you-?’
Stella Minter looked at her mother, made nervous movements with her shoulders, said, ‘Alice, I suppose.’
Her mother sniffed.
‘Well, she did admire me, Mama! She said so!’ She looked at Denton. ‘She was ever so unhappy, she said, and she wanted to make something of herself, to become somebody. She hadn’t my advantages, you see. We were such good friends, and she came here and she asked questions about everything, about-’
‘When they were very little girls; I think that when they are still in the age of innocence, little girls can be accepted where, later, they cannot,’ her mother said.
‘She wanted to know what a maid did, and what all the books I owned were, and how to play the piano, and — just everything! She was so sweet and she was my best friend, but-’ She glanced at her mother. ‘As Mama says, it was all right when we were little girls. She used to come here every day. I couldn’t go to her house, you see-’
‘A public house,’ Mrs Minter said. ‘We didn’t know, in the beginning. Then — it would have been most improper.’
‘Alice,’ Janet Striker said. ‘Alice what?’
‘Satterlee,’ Mrs Minter said. ‘The Satterlees, we found out too late, were low and common.’
‘Oh, Mama-’
‘You don’t understand these things yet, Stella. I couldn’t know her mother — to think of such a thing makes me ill; was it right that her child should know you? We decided not, finally. The girl was appealing when she was little, but at twelve, you can understand our position. It wasn’t proper.’
Minter smiled. ‘But it was a spectacle to see them together! Little Alice was another Stella! She did talk like our Stella; you could hear her using the big words, hear her trying to talk proper. She’d borrow books and try to read them, I suppose.’
‘Steal them, you mean.’
‘She didn’t!’
‘One of your books simply disappeared!’
‘She wanted to learn things, Mama.’
‘Giving herself airs,’ the mother said.
‘Mama, she was trying to better herself. She was trying to be proper.’
Janet Striker said, ‘Did she ever play at being you?’
The girl blushed again. ‘I suppose. Maybe.’ She looked at her mother. ‘We had a game. When we played me giving a tea party with my tea set. I’d be somebody — oh, it’s awfully silly, but we were children — I’d be one of the royal princesses or a maid of honour, and she’d be me. It was just a game.’
‘And she called herself Stella?’ Mrs Striker said.
‘That was the game. She was Stella.’
‘But you said,’ Minter interrupted, ‘that a girl using the name had passed away.’ Mrs Minter said ‘Oh’ in a tiny voice and turned her daughter aside as if to protect her, but the girl shrugged her off. ‘Do I hear now that you think this other girl might have known our Stella?’
Denton and Janet Striker exchanged a look; she said, ‘It seems possible.’
‘You mean Alice Satterlee?’ Stella said. ‘She’s — passed away?’
‘We don’t know,’ Denton said. ‘We’re trying to find out.’
Tears stood in the girl’s eyes, and Denton realized what a nice girl she probably was — truly touched, probably lonely, sentimental, treasuring the memory of somebody who had worshipped her. Her mother saw the tears, however, as danger and, after a glare at Denton, pushed the girl from the room.
‘Mrs Minter is very protective of our Stella,’ Minter said. ‘She doesn’t allow emotional scenes.’
‘How well did you know the Satterlees?’ Denton said.
‘As Mrs Minter said, they weren’t our sort of people. We never crossed paths, as the saying is.’
‘They lived in a pub?’
‘That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I believe they lived next to the public house.’