Delsie

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The day that was to mark the beginning of the change in Delsie Sommer’s life began like any other. The sun did not shine more brightly; she awoke with no tingling feeling of excitement, no presentiment at all that her life was to be turned topsy-turvy, that danger and excitement and romance were awaiting her around the corner.

No, she awoke with a slight nagging headache at seven o’clock, dragged herself out of bed to light the fire and put on water for tea, dressed hurriedly in her well-worn navy bombazine gown, and twisted her dark hair into its required knot, like a spinster. She gulped her tea, bread, and cheese in the austere but tidy apartment on the third floor of Miss Frisk’s genteel rooming house. On went the winter pelisse and dark bonnet even if it wasn’t quite winter yet, because the sky was gray and there was sure to be rain before she got home. Silently down the stairs to the second storey-back up to get the notebooks she invariably forgot. It was some unconscious rejection of the role of schoolmistress, she supposed, that accounted for this habitual forgetting of the students’ books. She wished she could set fire to them all and throw Mr. Umpton, the principal, on top of the blaze.

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