**Written for FanFic100!**

Seventeen

091. Birthday.

In a little bedchamber in a stately London house, through a little pair of gauzy curtains picked by the inhabitant's fair hand, the slender rays of a summer sun slid, casting innumerable bright golden beams about the room and contents. They shone upon a little wooden bed; and upon half a dozen silk dresses thrown about the room with a charming carelessness, as if the owner could simply wave her hand and immediately spirit a new one into her presence. The rays of light illuminated a little washing table and many silver hairpins scattered thereon, then ran like liquid across the floor to a full-length mirror, and then, at last –

illuminated the frightened face of a little Irish maid fleeing out the door, crying, "La, Miss Dora, no need to be so upset, faith!"

"Get out!" cried Dora Spenlow, upon whose figure the rays stopped; but if they had been sentient, they would have looked at the child with a perplexed air. Again she cried, not tyrannically, but with great and sincere vexation, "Polly, do you not hear? I want to be quite alone!"

Then she burst into tears, as she was wont to do when sorely vexed.

Polly vanished, and as soon as she was gone Dora wanted her back, though even in her distress, she had to almost smile at her own contrariness. No feeling lasted for very long with the poor girl; her great tears were already beginning to dry as she picked her little Jip off of a green silk on which, in a patch of the golden sun, he was contentedly toasting himself.

She bundled Jip in her two arms as if she were holding a baby and went to retrieve her handkerchief which she had thrown, by way of missile, at Polly. "Poor Jip," she sighed, wiping her face flushed and damp with tears, "whatever shall we do?"

Jip seemed pleased with the process of gnawing her kerchief, but his little mistress simply sat on the one edge of her bed that was not draped in the dresses she had deemed unfit for her 17th birthday. She looked at her reflection in the mirror. It looked strange to her.

"What a…a beast I am today, Jip! Look at me – how foolish I look – I am not a child, you know." She frowned at the Dora in the mirror, and with her own hands arranged the curls of that Dora's head with little satisfaction. "No, we are not children Jip, not anymore. I was a child when I first met you though, love, don't you remember? After Papa got back from the banks in Europe, with you in a box! And we just ran about the garden all day (you were glad to get out of the box). Oh, Jip, weren't those happy times?"

Jip licked her hand, and saw that his mistress now wore – was it a quiet look? It was certainly much calmer than her face in her impulsive outbursts, but it was not so much a calm face as one of resignation. It was a look Jip, who had been her constant companion, and never seen before.

"I am turning seventeen today, Jip. And…and none of my dresses will do. They are all very pretty but why don't any of them have sleeves? Like the puffed ones on my summer frock for my 12th birthday, when Papa gave me the flowers." She stood, with the same solemn look, and let Jip upon the floor. She looked in the mirror upon the face of the other Dora. "No one has given me flowers for my birthday since then. Maybe only little girls have flowers for their birthday? Julia Mills never does…although I think my mamma might have, even as a lady."

Perhaps she noticed the quiet look on the face of the other Dora, and perhaps it frightened the real Dora – or at least, the one who was not in the mirror. For soon she turned away, and frowned in her usual childish way, and selected a bonnet to match her dress, and beckoned Jip to follow her out of the room; then, as soon as they were out, she dashed back in after her guitar. For her party, she was decided, would be very merry, and happy, and gay – she was quite decided.

Dora may have taken her young woman's cares away with her, but the sun kept shining calmly, in the room where she had laid them bare.