The Doll by Daphne du Maurier

servants can’t have the things I want. Why didn’t I go on being a thief? Because I was scared, and I had to have a job that was easy to do. Why did I choose, beyond anything else in the world, to be what I am? Is that what you want, to put it in headlines?’ She laughed, she shrugged her shoulders, she was no longer the Mazie who had told her story, but the Mazie of the moment – ugly, older, hard, false, and without feeling.
    She said: ‘Because when I got to the bottom of that moving stairway I walked to a train, and I got out at a station, and I got in another train, and I got out at another station – and as I stood on the platform I prayed hard to God that He should give me a sign. And He did.’
    She finished her nails. She dabbed her face with powder, her lips with rouge. She pulled on her coat and her hat, she stood ready with her bag under her arm. She opened her mouth and laughed.
    ‘What was the sign?’ she said. ‘Why, it came straight from God written big above my head, in letters of fire at the end of the platform – “Follow The Red Light For Piccadilly”.’

Tame Cat
    I t was difficult to believe that she had grown up at last. She had looked forward to this moment all her life, and now it had come. The little petty worries of childhood lay behind her for ever. No more French, no more hateful plodding round the Louvre, with Mademoiselle in charge, no more sitting at the round table in the petit salon – an English novel surreptitiously concealed behind the volume of history.
    Already the life at the pension seemed dim and quite unreal. The child who cried herself to sleep because Mademoiselle had frowned was a stranger to her, a lost shadow. And the chatter of the girls, the little fierce intimacies of day to day, once so important, were now empty, nonsensical things scarce remembered. She was grown up.The wonderful things of life lay before her. To say what she liked, to go as she pleased, to stay at a dance until three in the morning, perhaps, and drink champagne. She might be seen home in a taxi by a young man who would want to kiss her (she would refuse, of course), and the next morning he would send her flowers. Oh! and there would be so many new friends, new things, and new faces. It would not be all dancing and theatres, of course; she knew that. Later on she must settle down seriously to her music; but just for a while she wanted to fill herself with this warm, happy flood of excitement, so new, so tremulous; like the carefree flight of a butterfly, on a May morning, she would dance and she would sing.
    ‘I’m grown up! I’m grown up!’ The words sang in her ears, and the clatter of the train took the theme and thundered it loud, over and over again. ‘I’m grown up! I’m grown up!’
    She thought of the welcome that awaited her. Mummy, exquisitely dressed and more beautiful than ever, lovelier than she could ever hope to be, hugging her carelessly and rumpling her hair, ‘Darling, you’re like a fat puppy – go away and play.’ But Mummy would not be able to say that this time, because she had grown so slim since last holidays, and then, having her hair waterwaved had made such a difference to the shape of her face. The new dress, too, and the touch of colour on her lips. Mummy would be proud of her at last. What fun they would have, going about together everywhere, doing the same things, meeting the same people! This was, perhaps, the thing to which she had looked forward most in her life – being with Mummy. They would be such companions. Darling Mummy was so generous, so hopelessly extravagant; she really needed someone to look after her. They would be like sisters.
    Of course, there was Uncle John . . . She could not remember the time when there had not been Uncle John. He was not really any relation at all, but it was just the same as though he were. It was at Frinton they had met him first, she believed, when she was a tiny girl, bathing with Mummy in shallow water; but