Collins
The housemaid at Morton, second of three, with whom Stephen Gordon falls in love at the age of seven.
Promotion, and the new footman. She keeps her place by lying when a superior servant challenges her, and she takes Stephen's chocolate drops because she likes them.
The book
At a glance
- Book One, chapters two and three
- Twenty, and rather ample for it
- Second of three housemaids at Morton
- Stephen renames her fat hunting pony Collins, which is how the name survives in the book
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeCollins is a housemaid at Morton and the first person Stephen Gordon loves in The Well of Loneliness, the 1928 novel by the English writer Radclyffe Hall. She is fictional. She is twenty, florid, full-lipped and full-bosomed, with unusually blue and arresting eyes, and she is what the household calls second of three, which means she may one day hope for promotion.
Stephen has walked past her sweeping the stairs for two years without noticing her. One morning Collins looks up and smiles, and the novel gives the seven-year-old a staggering revelation. The affair, such as it is, lasts one spring and ends with a broken flower pot.
How the book draws them
- The dirty nailsStephen reaches out to stroke her sleeve; Collins picks up the hand, exclaims at the state of the nails, and Stephen bolts upstairs to cut them. When the nurse comes down to upbraid her, Collins invents a story on the spot in which Stephen showed her the nails herself. Stephen hears the lie, is appalled by the injustice of it, and finds she loves her anyway.
- The housemaid's kneeShe rolls down a coarse woollen stocking in the night-nursery to display a blotchy swollen knee, presses the dent to show the water, and says it may mean a horrible operation and that it all comes from polishing the floors. It is the most intimate conversation of Stephen's childhood.
- What Stephen does about itPrays for three weeks to be given the knee instead, and when that fails, kneels on the nursery carpet in twenty-minute stretches until her own knees are raw. Shown the results, Collins is thoroughly shocked, says it is wicked, and then hugs the child.
- The dressing-upShe plays along with Stephen in costume, particularly as Nelson, calling the cook in to admire. Afterwards she and the cook agree between themselves that the child is a queer fish, always dressing herself up and play-acting.
- The end of itThe new footman tells her to stop the kid hanging around in case she blabs, so Collins turns cold. Stephen finds the two of them in the potting shed, watches him drag her towards him by the wrists and kiss her, and throws a broken flower pot into his face hard enough to open his cheek. Sir Philip sends them both away the next day.