Title:  What Every Woman Knows

Author:  James M. Barrie

Release Date:  May, 2004 [EBook #5654] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on August 5, 2002] [Date last updated:  February 1st, 2003]

Edition:  11

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS

JAMES M. BARRIE

ACT I

(James Wylie is about to make a move on the dambrod, and in the little Scotch room there is an awful silence befitting the occasion.  James with his hand poised—­for if he touches a piece he has to play it, Alick will see to that—­raises his red head suddenly to read Alick’s face.  His father, who is Alick, is pretending to be in a panic lest James should make this move.  James grins heartlessly, and his fingers are about to close on the ‘man’ when some instinct of self-preservation makes him peep once more.  This time Alick is caught:  the unholy ecstasy on his face tells as plain as porridge that he has been luring James to destruction.  James glares; and, too late, his opponent is a simple old father again.  James mops his head, sprawls in the manner most conducive to thought in the Wylie family, and, protruding his underlip, settles down to a reconsideration of the board.  Alick blows out his cheeks, and a drop of water settles on the point of his nose.

You will find them thus any Saturday night (after family worship, which sends the servant to bed); and sometimes the pauses are so long that in the end they forget whose move it is.

It is not the room you would be shown into if you were calling socially on Miss Wylie.  The drawing-room for you, and Miss Wylie in a coloured merino to receive you; very likely she would exclaim, “This is a pleasant surprise!” though she has seen you coming up the avenue and has just had time to whip the dustcloths off the chairs, and to warn Alick, David and James, that they had better not dare come in to see you before they have put on a dickey.  Nor is this the room in which you would dine in solemn grandeur if invited to drop in and take pot-luck, which is how the Wylies invite, it being a family weakness to pretend that they sit down in the dining-room daily.  It is the real living-room of the house, where Alick, who will never get used to fashionable ways, can take off his collar and sit happily in his stocking soles, and James at times would do so also; but catch Maggie letting him.