Summary
In a gilded parlour where mahogany gleams like wet coal, Dr. Manning—widower, bacteriologist, collector of cracked porcelain—returns from the orphanage clasping a wisp of a girl whose eyes already know the weight of coins. Gloriana, rechristened in a drawing-room ceremony that smells of rose-water and sealing wax, is presented to a house that has never been a home: chandeliers sweat crystal, servants glide on soundless soles, and Mrs. Manning—veiled in Parisian crepe, her accent a atlas of every port she has never truly entered—dispenses philanthropy like stale bonbons, all destined for continents she will never smell. The child, sponge-thin and moon-pale, absorbs sermons on distant famine while her own governess, Miriam, darns stockings by candle-glow, knuckles raw from laundering the very linens that swaddle the Manning wealth. One dusk, after a supper where charity is discussed in the subjunctive mood, Gloriana pilfers banknotes crisp as autumn leaves and presses them into Miriam’s trembling palm; the paper still carries the perfume of distant coffee plantations and the ink of export contracts. Accusations detonate: Mrs. Manning’s voice ricochets off ancestral portraits, the word thief splinters like a thrown decanter. Yet the moment the syllable leaves her mouth it rebounds, boomerang of conscience, for the child’s confession is a mirror tilted under the woman’s powdered chin, revealing a neck that has never bent in service to the neighbour lying cold three blocks away. Epiphany arrives not as celestial choir but as domestic tremor: the silver coffee pot rattles, the Persian rug seems to unroll toward city alleys where frostbitten fingers rap on kitchen doors. By morning the mansion’s gates yawn wider than ever, and the lady who once signed cheques for flood victims in Bengal now finds herself ankle-deep in local mud, silk hem drinking puddle-water like parched parchment.
Dr. Manning cherishes Gloriana, his newly-adopted young daughter, but Mrs. Manning, who directs overseas charity projects, has as little concern for Gloriana as she does for the poverty-stricken people in her own city. After listening to her new mother philosophize about the importance of charity, Gloriana takes some money from Mrs. Manning's desk and gives it to Miriam, her impoverished governess. Mrs. Manning at first accuses Miriam of theft, but when Gloriana confesses, Mrs. Manning suddenly realizes that she has been blind to the poverty that surrounds her, and she vows to start devoting her energy into helping those who are closer to home.
