PART II

SUTHERLAND PLACE

I

Richenda Earle could have told Louie Causton that an allowance of

three hundred pounds a year, paid in quarterly instalments, only

permits of a sunny little bedroom and a charming sitting-room in

Lancaster Gate on certain terms, of which terms a dipping sooner or

later into reserves of capital is certainly one. It is true that Louie

still had capital of which she knew nothing. She did not yet, for

example, count her wardrobe as capital, nor reflect that if its

present standard was to be maintained money must be set apart for the

purpose of maintaining it. She did not yet count her time as capital,

nor write off the days she classed as days of "looking about her" as

so many obligations against the time when looking about her would no

longer serve her turn. She did not count her health as capital, nor

her wild, resilient spirits, nor her "placeableness" at a glance among

those whose possession of some capital may be assumed. All she

reckoned as capital was the hundred odd pounds she had placed in a

small but sound bank of her stepfather's recommendation, and (she had

vaguely heard of such things) such additional credit as the Captain's

name might command. But perhaps it is enough to say that she had this

conception of the potency of the Captain's name.

Nevertheless, her second week's bill at Lancaster Gate was enough to

cause her to send for her landlady, and to ask that person whether she

had not a single room anywhere empty that might combine the prettiness

of her present quarters with the convenience of having all her

belongings within a single door. She was conscious of reasonableness,

almost of magnanimity, when she remarked that she didn't mind going up

another flight of stairs. The landlady had such a room, but pointed

out its lack of cupboard-space and the number of Louie's dresses.

That, Louie replied, did not matter; she intended to sell a number of

the older dresses; and her things were carried upstairs.

Her idea in selling the older dresses was that thereby she might add

another thirty pounds or so to her balance; the half-dozen she thought

she could spare had cost thrice that amount. The wardrobe dealer who

waited upon her offered her five pounds for them. Louie thanked her,

told her that she had thoughts of going into a business so lucrative

herself, and bade her good-afternoon.

She had come to London at the beginning of September; before that

month was out she had decided to leave Lancaster Gate. For some reason

or other her quarter's allowance had not arrived, and she wrote to

Chaff about it. Chaff promised to look to the matter. She wrote also

to Richenda Earle, stating the kind of lodging she required, and

asking whether Richenda knew of such an one. To this last letter she

had a reply by return of post. Richenda proposed the house of her

married sister, which was in Sutherland Place, Bayswater. Without

prejudice to her choice, Louie took a walk along Sutherland Place, and

received an impression of a quiet street with milk-carts drawn up by

the kerb and virginia creeper covering the houses with crimson. As she

passed the door Richenda had specified, the door opened, and a squarer

and older Richenda came out with a string bag in her hand. That, Louie

thought, would be Mrs. Leggat, the wife of the estate-agent's clerk.

A week later Louie moved into Mrs. Leggat's first

floor-front-bed-sitting-room. That night she counted her money. The

result of her calculations caused her to jump up, as if she had

thoughts of seeking some occupation or other that very night. Her

quarter's allowance had still not come. Then Mr. Leggat, a

lumpy-headed man with rabbit teeth and a Duke of Wellington nose, came

in to fix a gas-burner for her, and she fell into talk with him. He

wiped his hands ceaselessly on an old rag as he talked. He told her it

was a pity that Rich had not stuck to her book-keeping; he himself

would have been head clerk by this time had he had her thorough

practical grounding instead of having had to knock about the world and

fend for himself; and he asked her what sort of a villa-building-site

Rainham Parva would, in her opinion, make. He added that it was nice

to have "the rooms" (he used the plural) let to somebody they knew

something about, and then, having omitted to shake hands with her on

coming in, did so before going out, and evidently accounted their

introduction complete. He came back presently for a pair of pincers he

had forgotten, left her a Carter Paterson card for her window in case

she should have need of one, said that one of these Sundays they must

all go round to the Earles in Westbourne Grove to tea, made a pun on

the words Earle and Lord, and went out again. An hour later Louie

heard him tiptoeing discreetly past her door on his way upstairs to

bed.

Louie was resolved, however, to put a stop to the "Earle and Lord"

business once for all. She was a Causton, not a Scarisbrick, in

Sutherland Place.

She felt herself to be already on the verge of a new life that

was--let us say amusing--precisely in proportion as it was different

from any life she had ever known. She must be--if the word may

pass--amused; she told herself so, clinching the argument by adding

that it was far better to laugh than to cry. She had promised Richenda

that she would call and see her Mr. Weston at his Business School in

Holborn; and this might be--well, amusing. She went without loss of

time. She took the Oxford Street bus one morning and alighted at the

door of the School.

She mounted three floors of narrow, old-fashioned stairs, asked a

fair, perky boy, who somehow managed to make a good suit of clothes

look cheap, where she should find Mr. Weston, and presently found

herself introducing herself to a thin and melancholy-looking man with

a sparse and colourless beard, a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles, and

a gentle and hopeless voice. This was "the Secretary Bird," then. He

shook hands slackly with her, placed a chair for her in one of the

bays of a sort of =E= that was lined with books of reference, and

she listened to his soft, dispirited voice and to the clicking of

typewriters in an adjoining room. He thanked her for "all her

kindnesses" to Richenda, whatever these might have been, and presently

a skimpy little woman in green plaid, with eyes that peered

quizzically behind spectacles and "destined spinster" written all over

her, tiptoed for a moment at the end of the bay of books, uncertain

whether to approach. Then the fair, perky boy who made good clothes

look cheap also came up. Mr. Weston said: "Excuse me--yes, Miss

Windus?" Louie saw that she was interrupting the morning's work. She

rose.

"I daresay we shall see one another again," she said. "Good-bye."

And, outside on the Holborn pavement again, she said to herself with

decision: "Thanks--but no Business Schools for me!--Poor Richenda!"

Three weeks later she became a student at that very school.

* * * * *

There is no puzzle about it. Some things come no less unexpectedly

that they are more than reasonably to be expected. To put this as

briefly as it can be put, she had merely discovered that an affair of

atmosphere had become an affair of fact. That was all--nothing more,

nothing less. But that was no reason why she should not be amused.

The natural thing for young women in such circumstances to do is to

seek their mothers. If Louie did this natural thing a little

unnaturally--well, she did it unnaturally, that was all. The row,

scene, or whatever it was going to be, had better be got over; then

she could proceed to amuse herself. She had wired that she was coming;

the Captain had met her at Trant station; but she had had nothing to

say to the Captain.

The Captain, however, had had something to say to her. At first his

mumbling into his moustache had not penetrated to her intelligence;

she had only heard broken repetitions of "Dear old Mops--only for a

week or two--knew you weren't without--meant to write, but dashed

awkward thing to explain by letter, and was coming up in a week in any

case--if she stuck fast he'd see what could be done----"

"Eh?" Louie had said at last. "What's that, Chaff?"

Chaff had repeated his mumblings. At the end of them she had gathered

that the needy Captain had borrowed the quarter's allowance that had

been entrusted to him for despatch. Louie had merely given a little

preoccupied laugh and patted his hand.

"All right, old boy; don't worry," she had said.

A sample or two of her conversation with her mother must answer for

the rest. For quite twenty minutes the Honourable Emily's head had

been buried in the sofa-cushions, and the Trant coal-and-blanket

charitable account had lain where it had fallen from her hand--across

her cheek.

"That's all," Louie had ended with hard composure.

"Oh--oh----" the mother had moaned.

"And as I say, I won't marry him."

"Oh--you must--you must!"

"Why? Because Uncle Augustus will say I must?"

"Oh--you must!"

"I'll go and see Uncle Augustus."

"Oh, you mustn't--you mustn't!"

Then, in an interlude, the reasons why everything must at all costs be

kept from Lord Moone had been brokenly explained. In another interlude

a few minutes later Louie had invented a fictitious name.

"That conveys nothing to me," Mrs. Chaffinger had moaned. "What is

he?"

Louie had invented a station in life to fit the name. Her mother's

face had disappeared behind the coal-and-blanket account again.

"And this--this!--is your study of horticulture!" she had half

faintingly wailed.

"Yes. Yours was art, wasn't it?"

Then Mrs. Chaffinger's querulous despair had shown a weak, vindictive

gleam. Both pronouns had been a little emphasised as she had retorted:

"I married your father!"

It was only a flicker. Her head had gone into the cushions again.

"That didn't last very long," the devilish girl had commented.

"I married your father, I say--for your sake," had come from the

cushions.

"That's one of the differences. There are others. If you're thinking

of wiring to Uncle Augustus I'll wait; if you're not, I'll go."

Lord Moone had been wired for. He had wired back: "Impossible"; but a

second wire had brought him over post-haste the next morning. The

situation had been explained to him; the peer had walked away for a

few moments; Louie had thought she had heard something about "our

damnable women"; then, coming back, Lord Moone had abruptly convened a

Committee of Ways and Means. Words like "Impossible ... once in a

lifetime quite enough ... secrecy ... the Continent for a few months

... institution," had been used; and at one other alternative Louie's

eyes had become hard and chill as ice.

"Thank you," she had come harshly in. "As you say, all these things

may be possible. I decline them all."

Then Lord Moone, whose habit of ordering masses of men probably misled

him into thinking that the ordering of one young woman who says "I

won't" was a comparatively simple matter, had made his pronouncement.

"Very well," he had said. "Then as head of the family I order that

your allowance shall be stopped till you come to your senses. You hear

that, Emily?"

"You mean you'll starve me out?" Louie had said, with dancing eyes.

Like her father, she came up to time as long as she could stand.

"I mean what I've said."

"Then ring the bell, please--and don't light that cigar till I've

gone. I shall be ill if you do."

And Lord Moone himself had ordered the carriage in which she had

turned her back on Trant.

Burnett Minor, when Mrs. Lovenant-Smith had surprised the rebellion in

the box-room, had not made herself more inconspicuous than had Captain

Chaffinger during this scene. Indeed, probably considering that Lord

Moone, his sister and Louie herself formed a quorum, he had presently

been discovered to be not there. But it seemed to be the Captain's lot

to receive and despatch Louie in her comings and goings, and before

the carriage had reached the lodge he had stopped it and climbed in.

Ordinarily, the whites of the Captain's eyes had yellowish marblings;

the yellow had now deepened to the hue of cayenne. He had blown his

nose repeatedly and violently, and Louie, glancing covertly at him,

had suddenly had a pang. All at once he had shown his age. Somehow

Louie resented his doing so. People and things you have never taken

quite seriously have no right to come near the tragic. It was as if

some puppet strutting within a proscenium should suddenly bleed.

"Mops," he had said by-and-by, blowing his nose again, "that was a lie

you told them, wasn't it?"

Louie had tried to shut her eyes to Chaff's bleeding. Her hand had

sought his.

"The name I told them? Of course it was, you clever old Chaff, to see

that."

"You don't tell me that, do you, Mops?"

"You?! No, poor old boy, it isn't worth while telling lies to you."

"I'm glad of that, Mops----"

So, for his private comfort, she had invented for Chaff quite a new

lie, name, station in life and all.

Then: "Oh, Mops, Mops, Mops!----" he had murmured sorrowfully.

Little parties were one thing, but his Mops quite another.

But her anger had stirred again. She had remembered her uncle's

proposals.

"Did you hear what he said--Moone? No; you'd gone out. Listen----"

He had tugged unhappily at his moustache as she had told him, bringing

out the words with vehemence and hate.

"Well, but, Mops----" he had demurred wistfully.

"What, are you going to tell me _you_ think so too?"

"All right, Mops, all right, all right, old girl----"

"Much I care for him and his family name! He could bully mother into

marrying people, but he can't bully me.... Sorry, Chaff, that was

clumsy; we're pals at any rate. Uncle Gus and his Scarisbricks!"

Her exclamations of contempt had occupied the rest of the time to the

station. Chaff had put her into her carriage.

"You'll let me know where you are and what you're doing, won't you,

dear?" he had pleaded. "I can't let you go like this!"

"I hardly know where I shall be myself yet. Very likely I shall go to

a Business School; I shall have to do something, and that's all I know

anything about. Anyway, the bank will find me--no, you poor old thing,

of course I don't mean the money! Of course I'll ask you for that

when I want it. I've quite a lot yet. Good-bye, old thing."

"Good-bye, dear."

And this time he had not warned her not to run away with a student of

book-keeping.

* * * * *

She went to the Business School partly (_bien entendu_) for amusement,

and partly because there would be very little sense in sitting all day

long in Mrs. Leggat's first-floor bed-sitter in Sutherland Place,

Bayswater. Perhaps, too, Lord Moone helped to drive her there. Her

very skin crept when she remembered the lengths to which he would have

gone--he, the corner-stone of orthodoxy when such subjects came up for

(very) full-dress debate--to save that precious thing, the family name

of the Scarisbricks. Louie had had vanities of person, scores of them;

but she had also the sense of the holiness of the body, and she had

had enough of Trants and Mallard Boises and their masters for a time.

The Business School would be as amusing as anywhere else; indeed, she

knew of nowhere else. Here she was at last in a London that was not

the London of shops and dinners and theatres and drives in the Park.

She would have the fun--always the fun--of it. She would go with the

Leggats to see Richenda's sisters and that father of hers who had

apologised to her for having brought her into the world. She would

learn these unfamiliar accents that met her ear, breathe this

invigorating if dusty air. She would know what life meant to that

skimpy woman in the green plaid, would inspect that new specimen, the

jaunty boy who made his good clothes look like an ordinary

"reach-me-down." And she knew, without knowing how she knew, that

before long she would be seeing her father. Sit in Sutherland Place?

Oh no, that wasn't amusing. Besides, she would presently have her

living to earn. She had thought, when Richenda had told her those

dismal tales, that there must be something wrong with Richenda and

that she herself would be able to do better. Well, she would very soon

know.

II

At Chesson's she had taken her proper place among her fellow-students

at once; it was not her fault if here, at the Business School, she did

not at first so much make friends as watch a number of amusing

phenomena. She watched them with wonder; all was so very, very

different. The building itself seemed once to have been some sort of a

dwelling-house, for there were cabbagey wall-papers of a bygone

fashion on the walls, broken ends of bell-wire stuck out from the

mantel-sides and the cornices, and the gas-brackets were old and

ornate and grimy. Louie was conscious of something like a shock the

first time she approached one of the third-floor bay windows and,

looking across the street, saw in the windows opposite men packing

things in brown paper, waitresses carrying trays, and gas-jets burning

in the dark interiors beyond. They seemed so near. The width of

Holborn lay between, but they seemed to crowd on her much more closely

than the yew at Rainham Parva had ever crowded on the inner windows of

the courtyard. The yew, moreover, was thinned at intervals, but there

was no cutting and lopping the forward-thrusting, amusing humanity

across the way. They seemed to be caged there expressly for her

observation. Well, she was there to observe--to observe, and, of

course, to be amused.

Her new companions, too, were unlike anybody she had ever known; they

no more resembled them than the sweet heavy airs of Chesson's

resembled these diverting smells of dust and damp and bad ventilation

and the whiff of the Holborn pavement below. Their accents (amusing,

however) struck her sharply; their faces--alert, sophisticated, highly

entertaining but without candour--no less sharply. They too, like the

buildings across the way, seemed to ignore intervening space and to

press intrusively forward to look at her. She was glad that the first

thing she had done had been to stop Mr. Weston's mouth on the subject

of the Scarisbricks and Lord Moone; half the drollery of her

experience would have gone had these people known who she really was.

And the things these slovenly voices said had no candour. They struck

her as a series of (merry) "scorings-off," a succession of (cheery)

"chippings" of one another. If their reticences seemed all in the

wrong places, and hand in hand with their defensiveness went an eager

volubility about the things Louie would have kept to herself, why, so

much the more laughable the whole joke.

She had been only just in time in extorting her promise from Mr.

Weston. She was sure of this from his manner of speaking to herself.

It was extremely, syllabically distinct. To words that he had been

pronouncing correctly and without thought all his life he gave (as if

he must find something superior for her, and knowing better all the

time) pronunciations marvellously new. He found new words, too; must

look 'em up, Louie thought, in the dictionary. Richenda, who had begun

by being his sweetheart, became his "intended," and once even his

"inamorata." But he was to be trusted. Louie saw that. If he gave

away her identity at all it would be only by the portentousness of his

secrecy. As a matter of fact he never did so.

It was the skimpy woman in the green plaid, Miss Windus, who answered

most of Louie's questions about her new companions. She too was a

delightful novelty to Louie. As if to make her own position quite

clear at the outset, she had confided to Louie at once that she

herself was "partly independent." Seeing Louie's slightly puzzled

look, she had gone on to explain that by this she meant that she

enjoyed an income of perhaps a pound a week "on her own." With this

title to consideration thoroughly understood, she went ahead. When

Louie asked a question about the high-heeled little Cockney Jewess,

Miss Levey, Miss Windus answered it in terms of her own pound a week.

"Miss Levey?" she said. Oh, she'd nothing; she lived at home and had

her fees paid for her, of course, and wouldn't stick fast, being a

Jewess, not she; but Kitty didn't suppose Miriam Levey had one

shilling to rub against another; not, that was, "on her own." Louie,

finding other questions answered from this same standpoint, took her

cue and framed her questions accordingly. Had the other female student

(there were only four women), Miss Soames, anything? Well, Kitty

didn't know; she fancied her aunt must have a tidy bit coming in; they

lived together in a boarding-house in Woburn Place, and as the aunt

did nothing all day perhaps she too was partly independent, or even

wholly so. Had Mr. Merridew, the swaggering boy who cheapened his

clothes so curiously, a tidy bit coming in? Here Kitty evidently had a

tale to tell. Had Archie Merridew a bit coming in, indeed! Why, his

father was Mr. Merridew of Merridew and Fry's, the fancy stationers

with branches everywhere, so Louie could judge for herself whether

that meant a bit or not! Archie a bit? Why, Mr. Merridew Senior had

retired, and lived at a big place near Guildford, with a tennis-lawn,

if you please. Archie Merridew a bit!--Then what about Mr. Mackie?

(Louie might have been estimating people by what money they had all

her life.)--Mr. Mackie? No, Kitty shouldn't think Mr. Mackie had very

much, but he had a splendid "permanency" offered him when he had

passed his examinations, as an auctioneer's clerk, four pounds a week

to start with--to start with, mind you--and a "rise" every year. Yes;

Mr. Mackie was all right, and, oh dear! _wasn't_ Mr. Mackie funny?

Louie thought this Mr. Mackie more than funny; in her inexperience of

the type she could never believe he was quite true. For Mr. Mackie

sang songs, imitated music-hall artistes, could "gag" for a whole day

on end, and never forget for a moment the immense success he was. He

fascinated Louie. "Ladies and bipeds in trousers!" he would begin,

with rapid gestures and still more rapid speech, "before the applause

I am waiting for has had time to subside--good word, subside--(thank

you, Cuthbert, you can take the bouquet round to the stage-door)--as I

was saying when Fitzclarence interrupted me, ladies and tripeheads in

blouses, whoa, backpedal, never mind--as I was saying, I will now

endeavour to give you my celebrated imitation of Roderigo the

gasfitter at one o'clock on a Saturday with the thirty bob in his

pocket and Hildegarde Ann his wife licking the paint of the lamp-post

at the corner to squench her thirst--_heu_, her thirst!... Chord on,

please, titillate the catgut, Professor, and take firm hold of his

hand, girls----"

Then, while the eyes of Lord Moone's niece would grow bigger and

bigger, would follow the performance.

"_Isn't_ he funny!" Kitty would giggle, faint with laughing; "oh, give

us some more, Mr. Mackie!"

And Kitty, like Saint Paul, died daily at yet another trick of Mr.

Mackie's--the putting of his handkerchief to his nose, and the drawing

of it slowly downwards to the accompaniment of a piercing whistle.

But Louie was only moderately amused by young Merridew. Mr. Mackie had

his own perfection; but vulgarity _with_ a tennis-lawn! "Good

gracious, no," said Louie.

She had entered the School as a day student; but within a week she had

put her name down for the evening classes also. Even then she had the

evenings of Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and the whole of Sunday

quite unamusingly on her hands. She did not want time on her hands. As

much Mr. Mackie as you pleased, but no time on her hands. So she

joined the classes that met on the evenings of Mondays, Wednesdays and

Fridays.

On her very first evening she saw a student whom she had not seen

before.

She had taken a text-book on Elementary Book-keeping from one of the

shelves of the =E= of books in which she had had her first talk

with Mr. Weston (who, by the way, had said that he would like to see

her for a few minutes before she left that evening), and finding a

chair within the recess, had sat down where she was to read it. She

had not looked up when somebody had passed the mouth of her little

compartment and entered the next one. She had heard a book taken down

from a shelf behind her, and, after some minutes, put back again; and

had she not chanced to straighten her back at that moment she would

probably not have seen the man repass. She had no time to notice more

than that he was very big and not very well dressed. She went on with

her reading, wondering, in the intervals of her slack attention to her

book, what Mr. Weston wanted with her.

She saw the big man again at the close of the class. This time he was

standing at the head of the stairs, waiting for young Merridew. He

really was immensely big, so big that a too prolonged first look at

him seemed unpleasantly like impertinent curiosity. Indeed, he seemed

already to feel her eyes upon him, for he moved as if to look back at

her in turn; but young Merridew came up at that moment and they went

out together. The big man's head and shoulders were to be seen beyond

the handrail for quite an appreciable moment of time after young

Merridew's had disappeared. But she had been wrong in thinking that he

wore a shabby suit. His suit might be shabby also, but it could not be

seen. He wore, and had apparently worn in class also, a tawny old

ulster of yellow and black check. In spite of its age it seemed

somehow a better garment than did the more expensive clothes of his

companion. He did not, however, strike her as very amusing.

She turned away to seek the Secretary Bird--Mr. Weston.

For the moment Mr. Weston was engaged. He was standing near the

lecture-room blackboard, talking to the girl who lived with her partly

independent aunt at the boarding-house in Woburn Place. Louie had

already remarked the likeness of this girl, who might have been twenty

but looked younger, to Polly Ross, the pretty daughter of the tipsy

veterinary surgeon at Trant. Polly too had sported that running of

pale blue ribbon beneath the openwork of what Kitty Windus called her

"pneumonia blouse," and the clumps of dark hair on her nape too was

like Polly's, and she had Polly's dark and sidelong glance, and highly

conscious air of unconsciousness when that glance had attracted what

it had probably been meant to attract, attention to herself. She had a

copy of the Pansy Library in her hand, and Louie smiled as she

remembered Burnett Minor and her spoutings. She waited until Weston

should be at liberty.

As she waited, Kitty Windus, wearing an Inverness cape and a

boat-shaped hat, came up. Miss Windus lived in a street off Tottenham

Court Road, and already once or twice Louie had walked with her as far

as the Oxford corner. She was waiting for the Polly Ross girl now,

whose direction was the same. She asked Louie whether she intended to

walk or to "hop on a bus." She always spoke in these rather sprightly

terms, just as she always stiffened the line of her back a little the

moment a man, any man, entered the room; and she referred, brightly

and hopefully, to proposals of marriage as "chances." Louie was

already learning when she might expect any given one of Kitty's

innumerable _cliches_, and had several times (humorously) given them

back to Kitty again with complete success. As they waited for the

Polly Ross girl (whose name was Evie Soames) Louie asked Kitty who the

big man who had gone out with Mr. Merridew was.

"Oh, the Mandrill!" said Kitty, laughing even before Louie had got out

the word "big." "That's Mr. Jeffries. Isn't he a caution? But he only

comes in the evenings."

She meant that Mr. Jeffries had not a pound a week on his own.

Students who only came in the evenings were of a slightly inferior

order to those who came during the day.

"I suppose he had his brown paper parcel with him?" Kitty said, with

more mirth in her peering little eyes.

Louie remembered that Mr. Jeffries had carried a brown paper parcel.

Kitty twittered.

"Bet you can't guess what was in it--that is, if you haven't heard

it?"

She said "it" as if it had been a riddle or some sort of a joke. Louie

admitted that she could not guess what had been in Mr. Jeffries'

parcel.

"Good old brown paper parcel!" Kitty chuckled. "You'll get to know it

by-and-by! You see," she explained, "he goes to Archie's for a bath.

Isn't it killing?"

"I--I don't quite see what you mean," said Louie. She honestly did

not.

"Why, for a bath--you know, a common or garden bath, with hot water. I

peeped into it once (the parcel, I mean; for shame, you dreadful

girl!) and it had a clean shirt and a pair of socks in it. I suppose

he wraps those he takes off up when he's done."

Louie's eyes had opened very wide indeed. A man to have to ask another

man for a bath! Well, that was something learned about London! A

bath--a thing so necessary that its existence was assumed--how

extremely amusing! She knew that entertaining word, "poor," but what

was this other, this new and side-splitting word that meant that a man

had to ask another man for a bath? She had never heard of anything

so--so--there was no adjective that quite fitted the humour of it.

The next moment she had wasted an irony on Kitty.

"Hasn't he--a tidy bit?" she asked.

But it took far more than this to get through Kitty's hide. She gave

another little laugh and drew her gloves more smoothly over her thin

hands.

"Him? The Mandrill? (I always call him the Mandrill, my dear.) Not a

penny to bless himself with; look at him!"

"Nor a permanency?" Louie asked.

"What, with those clothes? I ask you, now: it isn't a cold night

to-night, is it? Well, why does he keep that heavy old coat on all the

evening? Enough said, my dear. He works somewhere in the City, I

believe--'something in the City'--sounds most prosperous, doesn't it?

And Archie's awful kind to him, I think, but of course he is

frightfully clever, and does help Archie with his work sometimes, so

Archie gives him a bath (I don't mean what you mean, I mean lets him

have one). Here's Evie. Are you coming along?"

But Louie, besides being tickled, smarted a little too. To have to beg

for a bath--and then to have the gift made a matter of common

knowledge and a joke!--

Well, if these people were different, differences, after all, were

what she was here to see.

She turned to Mr. Weston.

What Mr. Weston wanted to say to her she could not guess; but he had

hardly spoken twenty words before she was smiling at herself for not

guessing. The examinations were to be held just before Christmas, and

unless Louie could be ready for her Elementary by that time she would

have a good many months to wait before she could enter for the

examination again. What Mr. Weston had to propose was, in a word, that

he should coach her privately.

She knew what that meant. It meant that he would come to Sutherland

Place on Sundays and talk about Richenda.

Well, even talk about Richenda would make shorter that _dies non_.

"It really would be a great furtherance of your aims, Miss Causton,"

Weston said wistfully.

Louie smiled at the periphrasis, and then considered.

"It might be the best thing to do," she said; "but of course I should

accept it only on one condition."

"May I venture to inquire what that condition is?" Weston inquired

deferentially.

"That you let me pay you for it," said Louie promptly.

But Weston put up a peremptory hand. "Oh no--no, no, no--I should be

ashamed after all your kindnesses----"

Louie laughed again. "Good gracious, what kindnesses?"

"Ah, you once shielded an individual very dear to me and took the

blame upon yourself, Miss Causton----" His tone was reverential, his

eyes did her homage. Louie had forgotten all about the box-room

rebellion and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. She laughed once more.

"Well, just as you like. But no pay, no coaching, that's all."

Weston sighed. No doubt his acquiescence cost him a pang. If he took

money for giving lessons, lessons he must give, and the talk about

Richenda must go.

"Do you dwell on the point with insistence?" he asked.

"Very much."

"I am far from denying that it would be of some assistance in the

furnishing of our future nest, if I may use the expression----"

"Of course it would. So that's agreed?"

"So be it," said Weston.

Louie half expected him to add: "Amen."

She was in the habit of dispensing money a little largely, and for the

present she could quite well afford to do this. For Chaff had done

more than pay his debt. That very day she had had a letter from him,

forwarded by the bank. He had paid one hundred pounds into her

account, asking her to regard the extra twenty-five pounds as interest

on his unceremonious borrowing. But she did not for a moment believe

his cheerful tale that "things were all right again now"; poor old

boy, ten to one he had borrowed pretty ruinously elsewhere in order to

pay her. At all events, Weston should not give up his Sundays for

nothing, and she might, after all, allow him an outpouring about

Richenda and the future nest once in a while. It was only half-a-crown

a week.

But as she left Weston she was thinking of something else that

half-a-crown a week had power to buy. Half-a-crown a week would have

bought this big shabby student a bath almost every day.

To have to carry a change of underclothing in a brown paper parcel to

another man's place----

And to have that parcel peeped into----

How damnable--no, how funny, she meant!

In the light of her knowledge of this extraordinary economy Mr.

Jeffries had to practise she felt--she didn't know why--almost shy in

his presence the next time she saw him. She felt that she possessed

something of his--namely, this knowledge--which she ought not to have

possessed. She wondered whether he knew how he had been given away.

Something about him almost suggested that he might.

Perhaps it was his mouth. It looked, except when he deliberately

opened it, as if it might very well not have opened during the whole

of the twenty-eight or twenty-nine years Louie guessed him to have had

a mouth at all. The rest of his face, which would have been too large

for any man less huge, was an unrelenting slab. It was in the mouth if

anywhere that sensitiveness must be looked for. Certainly there was none

in the eyes. These Louie found (it was on a Wednesday night that she

noticed these things; she had seen him first on a Monday) remarkable.

They were the eyes of a lion--clear amber, sherry-coloured. They were

made more than ever to resemble the eyes of a lion by that tawny

ulster he never removed, and she remembered Kitty's sinister and

mirthful suggestion. Did his keeping on of that ulster mean something

hardly less stark and laughable than the circumstance of the bath

itself? (Louie felt that she was learning.) Then she noticed his

hands. She always noticed hands. He stopped in passing to pick up a

pen for her. The hand that returned it was not only a magnificent

engine of sinew and bone and muscle, powerful and heroic; it was also

(this was not so funny) exquisitely kept. Her own hand, pale and

slender as the leaf of a willow by contrast with his, was not in its

different way more perfect. He might cadge for a bath, but his hands

he could look after himself for nothing. And that was true of his hair

also. It was tawny, close-cut, and took the light as cleanly as a new

silk-hat; hair-brushing was evidently cheap also. The man did what he

could. She would have liked to hear his voice, but he handed her the

pen in silence and passed on.

"Well, he looks forbidding," was her comment on him as the great

church-door of his back disappeared into the typewriting-room, "and

he has got too big a face and a rather frightening jaw; but he does

shave it properly, and I don't see where the 'Mandrill' comes

in--wretched little creature with her pound a week! And he is like a

lion, with those eyes and that ulster----"

And merely because he seemed to be a person to be scored off and given

meanly away, she was already prepared, had she been challenged, to vow

that he was handsome--in his heavy and unhumorous way. As a matter of

fact, if Roy Lovenant-Smith resembled the little terra-cotta head in

the Tanagra Gallery of the Museum, this Mr. Jeffries suggested

something from the Assyrian Gallery downstairs--something in black

basalt, that might carry the doorway of a temple on its head. In any

case, with the ulster, the eyes, and the silky tawny hair, he was as

like a lion as needs be.

When she had seen him twice only she took it upon herself to snub

young Merridew on his behalf.

She and Kitty were leaving the School at four o'clock on the Thursday

afternoon when the son of the fancy stationer joined them, and, taking

it quite for granted that his tidy bit and his tennis-lawn made him as

desirable to Louie as they evidently exalted him in Kitty's eyes,

walked westwards along Holborn with them. He wore a new red waistcoat

with brass buttons, and perhaps it was in order to live up to his

splendour that he made Louie an offer which she curtly declined. They

were passing a confectioner's shop; perhaps he noticed--for he seemed

a sharp enough little bounder--Louie's glance at the window; he turned

to her.

"Like some chocs?" he said.

Had Louie not already detested him, this would have been quite

enough. Priddy would have had less appalling manners. As it happened,

she would have liked some chocolates; lately she had craved for

chocolates as much as she had hated the smell of tobacco; but she

wanted no chocolates of this young man's buying.

"No, thank you," she replied; and presently she contrived to put Kitty

(the straight-backed Kitty whom a man accompanied) between Mr.

Merridew and herself.

She had the outside berth of the pavement, and she was wondering

whether she would not cross the road and hop on a bus, leaving Kitty

and the heir to the tennis-lawn together, when something Kitty said

detained her. It was something about Mr. Jeffries. Hitherto Louie had

hardly been listening.

"--oh, Jeff!" Merridew was saying. "He'll have to go till we come

back. Anyway I shall save half-a-cake of soap."

"There's such a lot _of_ him," Kitty giggled. "How big's your bath?"

"Well, he's an awfully useful coach for the Method exam., I will say

that for him; so we'll call it a fair swap. You know Evie's aunt,

don't you?"

"No."

"Thought you did. Good old Aunt Angela! (She always gets ratty when I

call her that.) I didn't know she was an old friend of the pater's

till we saw 'em at the Zoo that Sunday. So that's why they're coming."

"Oh, perhaps, perhaps not," said Kitty archly. "Perhaps it isn't the

aunt they want to see----"

A passer-by elbowed Louie off the pavement; all she caught of what

followed was Kitty's laugh.

"So that accounts for the new blouse! You never think of asking _me_

down to Guildford, Archie!" she said reproachfully.

"You must get a chaperon," Archie replied gallantly; "can't be did

without, Kitt-oh. The mater don't allow running after yours truly."

Then of another light passage Louie heard only the concluding laugh.

"Well, what of it?" Archie was saying knowingly; and Louie heard

something else about apron-strings. "Pale blue baby ribbon ones, eh

what?" Archie added, with a grin.

"Archie!" Kitty reproved him.

"Oh, come off it!" replied the fancy stationer's son. "As if a fellow

hadn't eyes! If you girls _will_ wear pneumonia blouses----"

"Archie, you're dreadful!" said Kitty, deliciously shocked.

"Well, it's a tannersworth at the Holborn Public Baths for Jeff next

week-end----"

Here Louie interposed. Even amusement can be too rich. "Good-bye," she

said, "there's my bus."

She heard Kitty call after her something about the penny stage, but by

that time she was half-way across the road.

Brass-buttoned little beast!

She got on her bus.

But a quarter of a mile farther on she descended from it again. She

wanted to buy chocolates for herself. She bought them, walked to the

Marble Arch, and there turned into the Park. She ate the chocolates as

she walked.

Little animal! He appeared to keep the whole School posted about Mr.

Jeffries' personal habits. He could not go down to his home for the

week-end, taking the Polly Ross girl and her aunt with him

apparently, but Mr. Jeffries and half-a-cake of soap must be dragged

in. And that pathetic, pathetic care the man took of his hair and

hands! For all that, as she strode along, crunching her chocolates,

she became almost angry with him too. Was soap so frightfully dear,

and was there no water anywhere but at Mr. Merridew's rooms? She could

not understand a man who had any sensitiveness at all suffering his

mind to be turned over and inspected and thumb-marked by these people

in this way.

Still, she must not forget that these things were diverting.

There was no class that night: Louie forced herself to apply herself

to her book-keeping until half-past nine, and then went to bed. That,

as has been said, was on a Thursday. On the following evening, feeling

indisposed to work, she moved about the School, amusing herself to her

heart's content. She was getting adept in the sport of it. She bandied

back to Kitty Windus, with whom she found herself in talk,

half-a-score of her own expressions: "Beg yours," "Granted," "As the

poet says," and the like; and she all but openly stalked Mr. Mackie

for the sake of the pearls that rippled from his lips. If Mr. Mackie

had offered to take her for a walk or to a shilling hop at the Holborn

Town Hall on the next blank evening, Lord Moone's niece, who must

allow no chance of amusement to slip her, would have let him. Indeed,

she was in two minds whether or not to go to this last place of

entertainment alone.

It was not for another week that her amusement at the School in

general and at Mr. Jeffries in particular became almost painfully

ecstatic.

III

On that Friday afternoon she did not go home as usual to Sutherland

Place to tea. She went instead to the tea-shop across the street the

waitresses of which seemed to crowd upon her as if the width of

Holborn did not exist. As she sat down at her little marble table she

glanced involuntarily across to the windows of the Business School and

for a moment dropped the mask to herself. "Dingy place!" she thought;

"well, we're a dingy crew inside it." Then, after a long, long walk

down Chancery Lane and along the Embankment almost as far as the

ship-breakers' yard at Millbank, she returned to evening class.

It was the evening before the day when Polly Ross--she begged her

pardon, Miss Evie Soames--was to go with her aunt to the house with

the tennis-lawn at Guildford. Young Merridew was not at the School

that evening; indeed, he had only been once in the evening all the

week, and then, Louie had thought (dropping the mask for another

moment) he had better have stopped away. In a word, she had not been

sure that he had been entirely sober. But perhaps in that she had been

wrong. It didn't matter. She set a wide difference between the

gaieties of the sons of fancy stationers with a tidy bit coming in and

such diversions as that to which her stepfather had once taken her,

pigtail and all. Besides, if people didn't drink liquor she supposed

her father would not be able to sell it.

On two occasions already during the past week that mask of her

amusement had not so much fallen off as been twitched off before she

herself had been aware. Very remarkably, both times the big leonine

student, Mr. Jeffries, had been the twitcher. In both cases the actual

incident had been the same--a glance, nothing more. But those two

glances had set Louie very curiously indeed waiting to see whether a

third surprise of the same funny kind would follow them.

The glances had been given by Mr. Jeffries, and they had been directed

towards the Soames girl. There had seemed to Louie to be an

extraordinary unfitness about them. Had the red-waistcoated boy stolen

those glances Louie would have thought no more about it; he and Polly

Ross were pretty much a pair; but they had surprised her coming from

the other. Louie had been sure that on the first occasion Mr. Jeffries

had fancied himself to be unobserved, for he had looked stealthily

round about him, had waited for a moment, and then, moving his eyes

only, had given that long, slow, daring, masterful look. This had been

on the previous Monday evening, in the general room. A few minutes

later Mr. Jeffries had gathered up his papers and had stridden past

Evie Soames as if he had been unaware of her existence.

Even had something very similar not occurred again on the Wednesday

evening, Louie would hardly have forgotten that look; but it had been

repeated. But this time, finding Louie's eyes on him, he had seemed to

guard himself, to busy himself quite fussily with his papers, and a

little to overdo his sudden affectation of indifference. Louie

admitted that it would be at her own risk that she put any

interpretation that was not amusing on these trifles; but about the

glances, their surreptitiousness and the man's deliberate attempt at

concealment, there had been no doubt whatever. Polly herself, Louie

had to admit, had been quite unconscious of either look. To all

appearances, she had been thinking of nothing but of the new

novelette in the Pansy Library, or else wondering whether the new

pair of shoes she was to go down to Guildford in would come home in

time.

On that Friday evening Louie again found herself a little less

inclined for amusement than she knew to be good for her. She supposed

she ought to work, for if book-keeping and typewriting and so forth

were to be her living they might just as well be taken seriously; but

she preferred to work where gossip was going on. So she began the

evening in one of the days in the =E= of reference books, where

Miss Windus and the thick-lipped Miss Levey were sitting on the short

library-ladder, whispering and tittering. Louie opened one of the

windows, for she found the place airless, and then idled towards her

two fellow-students.

She had gathered that Miss Levey did not like her. Miriam Levey was

far less stupid than Kitty Windus, and it was not safe to hand her

_cliches_ back to her. Indeed, she had given Louie a far too

intelligent look when Louie had gratified this hunger for humour of

hers at the unconscious Kitty's expense; and Louie had told herself

that it might be as well to be a little more careful. They looked up

as Louie joined them, but did not exclude her from their talk.

"I _vill_ find out who she is!" Miss Levey was saying--her W's did

sometimes become V's. "I shall plague him till I do!"

"He won't tell you, my dear--not if he wouldn't tell Archie."

"But did Archie actually say 'engaged'?"

"Well, a person's either engaged or not, I suppose."

"Oh no, my dear, not by long chalks! Vy, you might as well say that

Archie and Evie are either engaged or not!"

"Well, they aren't--yet."

"'Yet'--there you are!"

"Well, I'll bet they aren't, even after this week-end. Why, they're no

age! _I_ don't believe in getting yourself engaged and done for before

you've had a good look round!" Kitty tossed her head.

"Vill you bet they aren't engaged in three months?" said Miriam Levey.

No, Kitty wouldn't bet that. She returned to the original subject,

whatever that had been.

"It's all very well to say you'll find out, Miriam, but--how?"

Miss Levey tittered, and then suddenly said: "Ssss--I'll show you now!

Just you watch me----"

She slipped noiselessly round to the cords of the window Louie had

opened a few moments before.

No doubt her sharp eyes had seen Mr. Jeffries approach. She gave him a

helpless look, and he took the cords from her fumbling hands and

closed the window for her. It was the more cleverly done that she

detained Mr. Jeffries and managed to get closed the window which Louie

wanted open at one and the same time. She turned her prominent brown

eyes in gratitude to Mr. Jeffries.

"Oh, thank you so much! You see, I've got rather a cold, and I'm going

to a dance and don't vant to make it any vorse," she explained. "You

don't dance, do you, Mr. Jeffries?"

But Mr. Jeffries merely replied "No," and turned away at once. Miss

Levey turned to Kitty again.

"He needn't think he's put me off!" she said. "I _vill_ find out! I

shall offer him some tickets now, for self and lady. And I bet if she

dances I'll make him buy them!"

Kitty tossed her head. "_I_ should expect the gentleman _I_ was

engaged to to take _me_ to dances," she said.

"But Archie didn't say 'engaged.' Just after somebody, I should

say--and don't I just vish her joy!"

"It's evidently nobody at the School," mused Kitty Windus. "Archie was

almost certain about that."

"Vell, it isn't _me_, if you're thinking of suspecting me!" said Miss

Levey merrily. "_I_ vouldn't touch him with the end of a long pole."

"Chance is a fine thing, my dear," remarked Miss Windus.

"Opportunity's another." (This reply, Louie had noted, was _de

rigueur_.)

"I expect she types or something at his place in the City."

"She might be in an A.B.C. shop--no, a Lockhart's."

"Or a barmaid," Kitty hinted.

"Or his vashervoman."

"Oh, I expect he washes his own shirts."

"Perhaps he'll vash her blouses, too, whoever she is."

They both laughed.

Louie, her mask once more a little out of place, turned suddenly away.

Little as she had been inclined to work, she was now, somehow or

other, not much more inclined for amusement. She wandered into the

shorthand dictation class, but in a few minutes came out again. Then

she walked into the lecture-room, where some example or other had been

left chalked up on the big blackboard from the last lesson. Thence she

went into the typewriting-room, and back to the lecture-room again.

Finally she got from the "library"--the little back room where the

files and presses and gelatine copiers and a few books were kept--a

number of old examination papers, and, finding a chair near the

folding door that divided the lecture-room from the general-room, sat

down and began to turn them over.

But she thought more of the conversation she had just overheard than

she did of the examination papers. It had meant, as far as she had

been able to make it out, that Mr. Jeffries had told young Merridew

that he was engaged, or hoped to be engaged, to somebody outside the

school altogether. That sounded--odd. Of course if Mr. Jeffries said

so, Mr. Jeffries ought to know; but it is a difficult matter to

disbelieve your own eyes. She supposed she had no choice but to

disbelieve them, but--but--there _were_ those two glances he had given

at the Polly Ross girl--whom, by the way, she must learn to call by

her proper name, Miss Evie Soames.

Louie was perfectly certain that she had not been mistaken in the

nature of those two glances. Her reason for certitude was quite

unassailable. She had known what they meant for the simple reason that

she had never received such looks from a man herself.

Suddenly she dropped this mask of fevered amusement entirely. As she

had once sat on the stile between Rainham Parva and the sea, so Louie

now sat by the folding door--relaxed, thinking of nothing, or, if of

anything, certainly neither of her late resolute pose nor yet of

study. Her mind was what she had determined it should not be if she

could help it--an empty chamber for unknown devils to enter.

Students passed and repassed. Weston had been through several times,

and twice Evie Soames had come and gone again. This so-much-talked-of

Mr. Jeffries went into the library for a book and walked past with it

again. He still wore that concealing ulster; the Soames girl had on a

brown tailor-made and a cap of knitted white wool. Louie was hardly

conscious that she noticed these things. She still sat, all slack and

unbraced, with the examination papers on her knee.

All at once she came to herself. Why she should do so at that

particular moment she did not know, but, doing so, she found herself

completely awake again. To all intents and purposes she had come out

of one of those naps which, lasting perhaps only a minute, have all

the effect of a refreshing sleep. She could reassume her mask now.

Evie Soames was talking to Weston by the blackboard; opposite her, a

pale student called Richardson was copying down an exercise from a

sheet on the wall; and she supposed Mr. Jeffries would be bringing his

book back presently. Louie was as alive to her surroundings now as she

had been oblivious to them a few moments before.

A minute later Mr. Jeffries, returning with his book, passed into the

library. A few seconds later still Evie Soames had left Mr. Weston and

had followed him.

"Now," thought Louie, "for a little more amusement."

The library had only one communicating door; its other door led only

to a small room called the old ledger-room, a dusty cubby-hole, seldom

entered, that had no outlet save the small pivoted window, high up,

that gave on the head of the stairs. Mr. Jeffries and Miss Soames

would have to come out by the same way they had entered, and Louie

rather wanted to see them come out. It was no business of hers, but

she had remembered those two glances and the conversation between

Kitty Windus and Miriam Levey, and she had a perfect right to sit by

the folding door and to use her eyes if she wished. She was now almost

preternaturally awake. No jot of the jest, whatever it was, should

escape her.

Evie came out first, after four or five minutes; but Louie was not

interested in Evie. She was merely a dull tale: Louie wanted to see

him.

Then, a moment later, he came.

But no amusement came with him. Instead, Louie knew not what sudden

private ache stirred deep at her own heart. It was not a question of

those two furtive, possessive glances now. Unmistakable enough those

had been; you do not mistake the kind of glance for which you yourself

have hungered when you see it given to another; but not only had Louie

never seen--she had never, not even in her own rapt dreamings as a

half-grown girl in her teens, thought it possible that a man's look at

a woman could change his face as this man's face was changed now. It

was irradiated, transfigured. He took no pains now to hide it. He

could see clear down the room before him--could see (or so he

evidently thought) any who saw him----

And since he did not see Louie by the folding door, Louie knew that in

his former passings and repassings he could not have seen her either.

He disappeared. The Soames girl was waiting by the door, evidently for

him. No doubt he was going to see her home. Probably she would have

preferred the other, the little cad with the red waistcoat, but she

had the lion----

He returned, with his hat on, and they left together.

But what had brought that sudden ache into Louie's breast? Mr.

Jeffries was nothing to her. If his face shone, Louie's heart need not

therefore ache. What ailed her?

Unmasked, as alive to things within herself now as she had just been

to things outside herself, she sat, deeply wondering.

Against the wall at her left hand there stood a tall stationery

cupboard. It had glazed doors, and the pale student called Richardson,

coming up a moment ago to put his exercise-book back into its place,

had left one of the doors open. The door moved on its hinges back into

its place. With its motion there swung slowly into Louie's view the

reflection of the grimy chandelier with its three naked gas-jets.

Was it this that reminded her of the night when she had swept out of

Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's French window with the yellow-shaded standard

lamp mirrored in its pane?

It had been on that night----

Suddenly her eyes closed, as if closed eyes could have shut out a

mental picture. Her lips trembled--voicelessly they shaped a name.

It was the name of Roy.

* * * * *

Hitherto she had hardly known what her feelings towards Roy really

were. It had been in order to avoid asking herself that question,

among others, that she had amused herself with Kitty Windus and

welcomed the buffooneries of Mr. Mackie. But it presented itself to

her startlingly now. Her own complete ignorance had just revealed a

shining thing to her, the beautiful thing that had transformed Mr.

Jeffries' face; now--handy-dandy--that very transformation threw her

brutally back on her ignorance again.

She had thought she had sounded a mystery; had she, after all, _not_

sounded any mystery, and was she to pay in labour and pain for

nothing?

Her thoughts had flown back; they remained where they had flown. Good

gracious! What an escapade! Without mercy for herself she examined it.

What had really happened? Anything worth what it was about to cost?

The radiant look of another man at another woman answered her: No.

She had courted him--what a conquest! She had made him say she was

pretty--what a victory! She had schemed, planned, ensured her

kisses--what a triumph!... Why, she now asked herself for the first

time, had she wanted to triumph? Why had she not seen sooner that what

she had really wanted had been to be triumphed over? Triumph?--It came

to her with a strange newness that women didn't triumph by triumphing.

That man with the back like the church door, for example, who had just

gone out with that pretty snippet----

Instantly, and with extraordinary resilience, her mind established a

contrast.

No woman would have to cajole this shabby, lion-eyed man into

admiration of her beauty. Rather she would have to save herself from

his onslaught--and then, in her very flying, she would triumph. Louie

had found a fool invincible; but this other, when he loved, would go

down with the vehemence of his own assault. When Louie had refused to

kiss Roy at their parting she had not known exactly why she had done

so: she had obeyed an instinct; a chapter had been closed, and had

had to be marked as definitely closed; her heart had known no rancour

against him. But now!--she might just as well have kissed him. Now, in

this strange place, two strange people--or rather one, for the girl

mattered nothing--had in a moment, and infinitely, enlarged her sense

of what, at any rate to a man, love might mean. In the light of that

enlargement any kiss she could have given to Roy would have meant

nothing--nothing, nothing. Poor Roy, whom she had had to woo! This

other would do his own wooing. Why, he was doing it now----

Then a startling recollection caused Louie to sit suddenly upright.

This lion, who had given those looks at that girl--this shabby giant,

whose face she had just seen enheavened out of all knowledge--had told

young Merridew, who had told Kitty Windus and Miriam Levey, that his

heart was set on somebody outside this poky little Business School

altogether!

Involuntarily Louie drew a long breath of amazement.

He had told them that!

Then Louie became matter-of-fact. There was one thing and one thing

only to be said. If Mr. Jeffries had told him that, Mr. Jeffries

had--lied.

She turned it over again--she found no flaw in it.

Yes, if he had said that, he had lied.

Louie pondered. The result of her pondering was that she said slowly

to herself: "Ah--this is going to be more than amusing--unless I'm

mistaken it might even become dramatic."

Up to the moment of this astonishing discovery--for Louie knew that

she had made a discovery--Mr. Jeffries had been to her a phenomenon,

different from Mr. Mackie and Kitty Windus, but not to be observed

very differently; now in a twink she placed him in quite another

category. Or, if she still lacked a category in which to place him,

she certainly removed him for ever from the other. He had called

suddenly on her profounder attention, and, as if he had struck upon a

rock, the waters of it gushed forth. Apparently to others he was a

butt, a jest, a pathetic figure; he was not that to Louie Causton now.

They had said, Kitty and the Jewess, that Evie Soames and the

red-waistcoated boy, off to Guildford together to-morrow, would before

long be engaged to be married; but Mr. Jeffries, the third person in

the commonest of dramas, and Mr. Jeffries, the introducer into that

drama of a preposterous, impossible fourth actor, whose name Miriam

Levey was resolved to know, were not one and the same man. Louie sat

astounded again at his lie. It struck her as really in its way

stupendous. Others thought he was below his fellows in this shabby

little hutch of a Business School; not so Louie now! She saw those

clear yellow eyes again. Ruses and machinations lived in them. A butt,

with his brown-paper parcel? A pathetic figure, with his cadged baths?

No--good gracious, no! The faces of butts and pathetic figures were

rather less capable of irradiation. This man's kind made great

somethings--great men, great saints, great lovers--if it came to the

worst great criminals. Had she, Louie, been that jaunty young man in

the red waistcoat, she would have chosen for a rival and enemy anybody

she had ever seen rather than this needy, gigantic Mr. Jeffries, who

made this barefaced attempt to throw dust into people's eyes by means

of apocryphal women he was "after" elsewhere.

And he helped this youngster he must hate with his studies--cadged on

his probably-to-be-successful rival for a bath.

He was masked too, then.

Yes, at this dingy School in Holborn Louie had found something even

more interesting than amusement.

IV

Sec._a_

Louie had not yet allowed herself much time for fear of what was to

happen to herself physically; she had amused herself too heartily. She

bought chocolates and hated the smell of tobacco; and so far that was

all. What hung over her was as inevitable as Death, and for that

reason was, like Death, to be kept at arm's-length as long as

possible.

But she had already seen enough of Richenda's sister to be aware that

in all probability her stay in Sutherland Place would not be a long

one. Mrs. Leggat was formally kind, to Lord Moone's niece rather than

to herself; but for the rest an armed neutrality seemed to exist

between the two women. The Leggats were childless, and for that reason

the less likely to be charitable. Louie had, in fact, found the social

layer that is bounded on the one hand by the wickedness of pugilists

and on the other by the scapes of young gentlemen about to enter the

army. Within these limits Virtue reigned--not always harshly, always

consciously. Not the wives of the Caesars (it seemed to Louie) were

above suspicion, but the Mrs. Leggats; not the saints, who confessed

that they were tempted, but the Westons, who did not know of

temptation's existence. It was as if some unseen, august Mrs.

Lovenant-Smith had decreed that landladies and teachers in business

schools did not do these things. And they did not.

Louie went to the house of Richenda's father, the bookseller--once.

She had no wish to go again. As Richenda had described him there had

been something tragic about him; to Louie he had appeared merely as a

grey-bearded, rheumatic, complaining old man, a picture of pathos

without dignity. And those six other Richendas, of various ages,

struck her as horribly superfluous. She wanted Life's colour, not its

greyness; she greatly preferred the garnish, incredible Mackie.

The weeks passed. Weston came regularly on Sunday mornings, and on

Sunday afternoons she took long walks. On the nights when there was no

class she rode on buses, along Oxford Street, down Regent Street to

the Circus, and back by Park Lane to the Marble Arch and Notting Hill

Gate again; or sometimes she went Paddington way, up the Harrow Road

and out and back through Kilburn. She began to know something of the

streets of London. Her health was far better in London than it had

been at Rainham Parva. It was perfect. She still feared nothing.

* * * * *

The Christmas Examinations drew within sight, and hand in hand with

the preparation for them another and a more lightsome preoccupation

engaged the School. This was the Christmas Social with which the last

term of the year always closed. An Executive had been formed; on it

Louie's name appeared; and it met frequently at the close of afternoon

school. One of the younger students was sent across to the teashop

over the way for scones and cake; a kettle was set on the

general-room fire; and the social was discussed over tea.

Mr. Mackie was the life and soul of these meetings. He was especially

strong on the subject of whether evening-dress was to be obligatory,

permissible or debarred. He declared himself at one of the earlier

meetings as out and out for fancy dress, but was outvoted.

"See me as a Woodbine, girls, beg pardon, miss-cue, a Columbine, I

mean, nearly cold with the kilt, kilt with the cold, I should say,

sixpence in the box for the opera-glasses, Gerald, but don't ogle me

while mother's in the wings, wishing she was twenty-one again--good

old mother--

"'Here's to the happiest hours of my life,

Spent in the arms of another man's wife--

My Mo-the-rr!'"

(The shake on the long note produced by a rapid play of Mr. Mackie's

fingers on Mr. Mackie's Adam's apple.) "Thought I'd have to backpedal,

didn't you, Miss Causton? Nay, fear not, fair damsel, the intentions

of Ferdinando are honourable, as long as you watch him, pip-pip,

phee-ooo!" (The shrill whistle behind the handkerchief closed the

strophe.)

But this was rushing matters. Kitty Windus spoke, no doubt on behalf

of the students who hadn't a pound a week on their own.

"Fancy dress would keep a good many away," she said. "I should love

it, but it really is an expense, you know."

"Weston can buy a penny bottle of gum and come as a foreign stamp."

"Do be serious, Mr. Mackie, now! We want the social to be for

everybody here----"

"_And_ their friends," Miss Levey interpolated, with a look of private

understanding at Kitty Windus. There was a short interlude between the

two women.

"You _won't_ find out, Miriam!"

"I _vill_!"

"Did you offer him tickets for the Holborn?"

"Yes; but he vouldn't buy them."

"Doesn't Mrs. J. as-is-to-be dance?"

"I don't know. He vouldn't buy the tickets."

"I'll bet you another half-crown you don't get him there, let alone

her!"

"Done vith you, Kitty Vindus!" cried Miss Levey excitedly.

Here Mr. Mackie interposed. "Who's that? Jeffries? He can come in his

ulster as Boaz--_heu_, how Ruthless! (Beshrew me, but have I not a

pretty wit?)"

"He's got that new brown suit to come in--or did he get it

second-hand, Archie?" asked Kitty.

"New," quoth Archie authoritatively. "Allworthy's, in Cheapside. Two

ten."

"I nearly died when he turned up without that old ulster!"

"Vasn't it screaming?" simpered Miss Levey. "No, don't, Archie!"

(Young Merridew was pulling out the frill of her jabot.)

"Do tell us exactly what he said when you congratulated him on his

engagement, Evie!" said Kitty Windus, turning to Evie Soames.

The girl coloured a little. In common fairness Louie had to acquit her

of full participation in the joke of Mr. Jeffries and his unknown

_fiancee_. Louie had learned that it had been in order to congratulate

Mr. Jeffries on this supposed engagement that she had followed Mr.

Jeffries into the library on that Friday evening before her departure

for the week-end to Guildford. She thought little more of her on that

account. In being too ready with apologies and congratulations Evie

Soames merely showed the vulgarity of the rest of the place.

"No, do let's get on with business," Kitty Windus broke in. "I vote

for ordinary dress."

"Yes, ordinary dress," came the chorus.

"Vith vite gloves, of course," said Miss Levey.

"Of course."

"Vot do you say, Miss Causton?"

"White gloves, of course," said Louie, with her demurest look. "And

flowers in their buttonholes."

"Some gentlemen don't like to vear flowers," said Miriam Levey

suspiciously.

"Aha, doesn't he?" from Mr. Mackie. "_I_ saw you at the Holborn, Miss

Levey--naughty, naughty----"

"Oh, I don't mean very big ones," said Louie, sipping her tea.

And the discussion went on, and meeting followed meeting; but the

examination was to take place before the social.

The only fear Louie had for her Elementary was whether it would be

worth very much when she had got it. She supposed that as an earnest

preparation for the struggle of life this place was not quite such a

fraud as Chesson's, but that struggle could hardly be as fierce as

Richenda Earle had said if this Elementary took her very far. Indeed

she had wondered more than once lately, especially since she had

ceased to amuse herself quite so desperately, whether it was likely

that typewriting and book-keeping were to be her destiny after all.

She supposed they were, but she couldn't quite realise it. But she was

fully prepared, and hoped Mr. Jeffries was as sure of his Honours

paper as she was of her simple Pass.

For she had gathered that success in the coming examination was of

importance to Mr. Jeffries. She did not know the nature of his

studies; later she surmised that those had been only loosely linked to

the ordinary school curriculum, and that while for his Certificate's

sake he must acquire all that text-books could tell him, his real

broodings had been over matters that are antecedent to text-books.

That was probably the difference between him and Mr. Weston. Mr.

Weston was said to be clever, but his cleverness ended at the point

where real inquiry began. More than this Louie did not know. You

cannot, after all, ask the pioneer what he goes forth for to see. He

goes forth to see whatever there may be to be seen.

The weeks that had intervened since that evening when Louie had seen

that wonderful radiance of his face had done nothing to alter her

conviction that if there was a dark horse in that Holborn stable at

all the name of that horse was Mr. Jeffries.

As it happened, Mr. Jeffries was almost the first person she

encountered when, on the Friday morning of the examination, she

entered the School at half-past ten. He wore the new brown suit that

had been remarked on at the meetings of the Executive of the social,

and he was looking with curiosity about him. They had made quite

extensive preparations for the examination. The whole place had been

divided into compartments with hired yellow-painted screens, and

screens also barricaded the =E= of reference-books near the bay

window of the general-room. New pens and new blotting-paper lay on

the desks, and the little porcelain inkwells had been newly filled.

Then it occurred to Louie that it was more than likely that Mr.

Jeffries had never been in the place in the daytime before. He must

have got the day off from that "somewhere in the City" that Kitty

Windus had said sounded so prosperous. His tawny hair was as flat and

silky as ever, and his chin as cleanly shaved. He passed her with a

curt bow and continued his inspection of the place. The candidates

stood talking in groups, waiting for eleven o'clock.

"Have you discovered your--er--appointed place, Miss Causton?" said

Weston, coming up to Louie. "Good, good! I must now take my departure.

Members of the Staff are not permitted to remain on the premises

during the hours devoted to the examination. I wish you--er--good

luck."

He seemed to change his mind about saying "a happy issue from all your

afflictions."

By eleven o'clock Louie was seated in her little screen-enclosed

compartment. A sort of hired mourner read a formal caution to the

candidates. She noticed that it lacked the _largior ether_ of the

third person indicative, being, indeed, in the second person

imperative; and then she drew her paper to her.

Quiet fell on the examination-rooms.

She found her papers no more difficult than she had anticipated. On

one point only, a matter of indenting in actual practice, was she a

little in doubt, and a minute in the old ledger-room at lunch-time

would tell her whether her answer had been right or wrong. She read

over again what she had written; it seemed, with the possible

exception of that single point, all right; and she tilted her chair,

put her hands behind her head, and leaned back. The candidates had

been warned that they must bring lunch with them. It was half-an-hour

from lunch-time yet.

Her place was by the folding door of the general-room. From it she

could see nothing save the stationery cupboard on her left, and,

beyond it, the next screen-enclosed compartment. She was wondering who

was in it when a foot moved beneath the yellow screen. It was the foot

of Mr. Jeffries. Louie hoped that he was getting on well, and then

dismissed him from her thoughts. She began to wonder about the

practical usefulness of the examination again.

Doubtless it was well enough in its way, but less than ever could she

persuade herself that this kind of thing was to be her destiny. There

were too many other likelihoods--not to speak of the one certainly so

huge that she had sometimes been actually in danger of leaving it out

of the account altogether. Idly she counted them. First, there was the

certainty.... Next, she would probably be leaving Sutherland Place

soon, to go--where? She did not know. At the price of submission to

Uncle Augustus she could go back home; or Chaff would have her looked

after; but both these courses were rather out of the question. They

were out of the question because lately something else had been more

and more in her thoughts--her unknown father. That father might, for

all she knew, be the bugbear her mother had always made him out to be;

but on the other hand he might not. She knew her mother, and the more

she thought of it the more she gave her father the benefit of an

increasing number of doubts. Until she should have seen him it was now

no more than fair that she should do so. Moreover, she could see him

at any time without his being any the wiser of the--inspection. Chaff

knew where he was; Chaff, who was always fetching or taking her

somewhere, would take her there also. She was resolved to go sooner or

later, and later might be--who knew?--too late.

For at last she had admitted a dread.

In any case, her destiny was quite as likely to be determined by a

visit to that public-house up the Thames as by writing, in this stuffy

Holborn third floor, answers to ridiculous questions about _pro forma_

invoices and bills of lading.

She was still turning these things over in her mind when the bell rang

for the close of the first part of the examination.

She ate her lunch in the company of Kitty Windus and Miss Levey, and

then the three women passed out on to the staircase and sat down

half-way down the stairs. But the men had flocked to the staircase for

their noxious smoking, and Louie re-entered the general-room again.

Then she remembered the doubtful point in her paper and walked to the

library. She passed through it into the old ledger-room. Any old

ledger would settle the point on which she was not quite sure.

The room was almost dark, but Louie knew where the musty old books

were. She put out her hand to the nearest of them. But suddenly she

withdrew her hand. The high window that gave on the head of the stairs

afforded no more than a glimmer of light, but Louie thought she had

seen something move. She peered into the twilight, "Is anybody there?"

she said, but she had no answer.

But the room was occupied. The next moment she had seen and fled.

Her irregular lips were pursed as she came out into the light again.

There was a confusion, too, in her eyes, probably as much as there had

been in the eyes of the two she had come upon in there. They must have

seen her come in, and have realised that their only chance of escaping

detection lay in keeping perfectly still.

Polly Ross, cheek to cheek with that horrid little bounder!

There was no question now of whom the girl preferred.

Louie, wondering what right she had to do so, felt nevertheless a

little sick.

But the next moment her fastidiousness had vanished. The door that led

to the stairs had opened; Mr. Mackie's voice sounded loud for a moment

on the landing; and then Mr. Jeffries lurched in, stumbled, and almost

ran to his compartment between the yellow screens.

How he too knew what was going on in the old ledger-room, Louie could

not guess; but she knew that he did know.

She walked slowly to her own place and sat down.

A few minutes later the bell for the second half of the examination

rang, and a new paper was put before Louie. But she neither glanced at

it nor yet heard the voice of the hired mourner repeating his caution.

She sat with her chin in her hands, looking straight before her. She

was wondering what was taking place behind the yellow screen beyond

the stationery cupboard. Amusement was hardly the word for that.

For she had seen Mr. Jeffries' face as he had stumbled in. She

sought words for the expression that had been upon it.

Lost--despairing--devilish----

There was not much doubt about who _he_ was in love with either.

Devilish, despairing, lost----

"Poor--soul!" she thought compassionately....

She wondered why she should be so unaccountably nervous. She was

nervous. She even jumped a little when somebody on the other side of

the folding door allowed a pen to fall to the floor. She could see the

feet beneath the lower edge of the screen in front of her; they did

not move; the examination quietness had fallen on the place again, and

the very quietness grew on her. Strong drama, if not tragedy outright,

was being enacted behind those half-inch yellow boards beyond the

stationery cupboard, but the quietness continued. It was such a

quietness as she had read of in tales when, somebody's ears being

sharpened for an expected scream, their eyes had not at first noticed

the little dark rivulet of blood trickling slowly across the floor.

Involuntarily her eyes went to the yellow screen.

But rubbish; this was morbid.

Morbid or not, however, her lips almost shaped the words, slowly and

deliberately: that boy with the red waistcoat would do well to be

careful. He would do especially well to be careful if, after this,

after the glare on the other's face, he should still have help offered

him with his studies or be asked for a bath. For something would

happen then. Eggshells such as he did not come into collision with

bronze without something happening. And if anything not easily to be

accounted for did happen to that odious little whippersnapper, nothing

would ever persuade Louie that she did not know a likely quarter in

which to look for the reason.

Blind, devilish despair!

And all for an empty-headed little thing who could have been found in

her dozens behind twenty shop counters not a quarter of a mile away!

What on earth, what on, or under, or above the earth, could this

brooding, clever, gigantic, laughed-at creature want with such a doll?

Why could he not leave her in her proper place--cheek by cheek with

the little bounder of her choice in that smelly, unlighted old

ledger-room? The man must be blind, or a fool.

Then a sort of lethargy took Louie. Suddenly she cared for nothing.

Let the fancy-stationer's cub take his risks; let the other eat his

heart out if he would; it was no business of hers. Nor was that absurd

table of questions before her any business of hers. Kitty Windus might

answer that sort of thing; Mackie might answer it; but the

Scarisbricks were not Kittys, with her "part-independency," not

Mackies, to stuff their heads and ink their fingers like this for

their "permanencies." She did not know now why she had ever come to

the place, and she wanted no more of it. What she was going to do she

did not know. She did know, however, that she was not going to answer

that silly paper.

So, by-and-by, she allowed the paper to be collected again, as blank

as when it had been placed before her.

She came upon the perverse Mr. Jeffries once more before she left. He

almost ran her down bodily as they met in the doorway of the

typewriting-room. But this time she did not look at his face. With a

swift intaking of her breath she fell back to save herself. She did

not hear whether he apologised or not; in one moment, without

premeditation, her whole being had become constrained to a new,

protective, instinctive attitude.

Slowly and thoughtfully she left the School.

She alone of the students was unsurprised to hear, four or five days

later, that Mr. Jeffries, who had passed with distinction in the first

part of his paper, had, like herself, failed in the second part.

Sec._b_

For the examination the rooms had been cut up with screens; for the

breaking-up social they were cleared of everything that could be

stowed away into dark corners. Never was such a hoisting and calling

as those with which the hired piano was got up the three flights of

stairs. Most of it came from Mr. Mackie, turned for the nonce into a

shabash-wallah.

"Mind her funnybone--all together--up with her! Oh, pursue me,

wenches, I've got my muscle up, first time since the second housemaid

ran away with the dustman! Don't tickle her parson's nose, Archi-bald,

or she'll sneeze when I sing, key in the usual place--and mind the

stair above the top, it isn't there. This way--excuse my

shirt-sleeves, Miss Windus, I'm in mourning."

And so the piano was trundled to its place in the corner by the big

blackboard.

Mr. Mackie was of service, too, in the French-chalking of the floor,

for the men hauled him about by the arms and legs on a piece of

sacking in order to give it its final polish for dancing. Half the

students, male and female, helped to wind the blackened old brackets

and chandeliers with red and green tissue paper, to set evergreens on

the tops of the cupboards, and to affix the trophies of little

Christmas tree flags on the cabbagey old walls; and Louie helped with

the refreshments. Three women had been got in, one to make coffee and

the others to preside in the cloakrooms, and Miss Levey had won

half-a-crown from Kitty Windus.

For Mr. Jeffries was coming to the party after all. More, it had been

Louie herself who had asked him, though it had been Miss Levey's

cunning that had made her do so. On no grounds at all save that it

appeared to annoy, the Jewess had once or twice twitted Louie that Mr.

Jeffries favoured _her_ and, when Mr. Jeffries had declined her own

invitation, had nudged Louie. "_You_ ask him, and see whether he

doesn't come!" the nudge had meant. Louie entered into no contest with

Miss Levey. She had turned at once to Mr. Jeffries and repeated the

invitation. He had accepted it.

Louie doubted her own wisdom in going to that social at all. Even when

she had reached Sutherland Place and spread out her frocks on her bed

she still doubted. But suddenly she gave a short laugh. Of course she

was going! It was her first "social," and it might be her last; she

was going, and she was going to wear the oyster-grey satin that, ever

since she had had it, had always seemed to "live" so on her shoulders.

She declined Mrs. Leggat's help in getting into it; if Mrs. Leggat

would be so good as to get her a hansom instead----Mrs. Leggat went

out. The oyster-grey was one of the oldest of her frocks; Louie knew

every stitch of it; and she smiled as she thought that for that very

reason she would have chosen it had she deliberately intended to make

a conquest. She surveyed herself in it in the tilted glass. Yes, she

thought she would do.

"It's your last time on, poor old rag," she muttered.

She heard the pulling up of the hansom; she put on a light shawl and

descended; and Mrs. Leggat lingered in the doorway as she drove off.

They had set candles on the floors of the landings of the Holborn

stairs, but they guttered in the draughts, and showed little but the

feet of those who ascended. Louie followed a pair of orange

silk-stockinged ankles and a trammel of orange petticoats (she didn't

know whose) up the stairs, and entered the general-room. The library

had been converted into a ladies' cloakroom, with the old ledger-room

as an annexe; and in this last room Evie Soames, with an elaborate

running of pink ribbons beneath the openwork of her cream net blouse,

was putting on her slippers. She only showed Louie the top of her dark

head; in this and other ways she had displayed reserve since the lunch

interval of the examination day. A woman with a pair of very chapped

hands and a very clean apron took Louie's shawl; and Louie, first

glancing at her hair over the powdered shoulders of the person in

orange, went into the double room that had been prepared for dancing.

Students and their friends had turned up in their best bibs and

tuckers. Most of the men wore swallow-tailed coats; one of the

exceptions was Mr. Jeffries in his brown jacket-suit. He was talking

to Miss Levey, or rather Miss Levey was gasping to him; she had just

given him, or rather hung upon his wrist, one of the violet-written

cards, printed from the gelatine-copier, which served as programmes.

Weston wore a tightly fitting old frock-coat, which Mr. Mackie

humorously likened to the overcoat of sausage that had spent the night

in the coal-hole. Archie Merridew had a white waistcoat. All the men

stroked the wrinkles out of their white gloves without ceasing. The

women, to the reflective eye, had lost little by the foregoing of

out-and-out evening-dress. There was an "I could an' if I would" about

their long sleeves and high necks. Kitty Windus, in her blue foulard,

with a cutlet-frill about her thin neck, graciously consented to the

level of those who had not a pound a week on their own; Miriam Levey,

in a maroon pinafore-frock with broad braces over her shoulders,

instantly put every simple blouse in the room at its ease. One frock

only flouted the modest agreement to which the executive had come;

this was the orange satin one which Louie had followed upstairs. It

partially clothed a friend of Mr. Mackie's. Louie heard the words in

which Mr. Mackie introduced young Merridew to its wearer.

"Mr. Merridew, Miss Dulcie Levine, Miss Levine, Mr. Merridew, two of

the best, seasonable weather for the time of the year, ain't it, what?

Permit me, Dulcibella, a bit of fluff" (here Mr. Mackie cast aside the

bit of fluff, if there was one, which he had taken from Miss Dulcie's

shoulder, and represented the noise of its falling by a loud stamp on

the floor). "Ought to be dancing soon; what time is it by your clocks,

Dulcie? _I_ saw them as you got out of the Black Maria, the cab, I

mean--_heu_, desist, Mr. Mackie, you wag!" (Mr. Mackie smacked his own

wrist in reproof of himself.) "Why am I not in me usual spirits, gin

cold, to-night, Dulcinea? 'Tis thy fatal beauty has undone me; what

ho, a needle and threat, O fairest of thy socks, sex I should say....

Ay, she dances, Archibald, but not with thee, base varlet; she dances

at the Theatre hight Alcazar, nigh unto ye Square called Leicester."

Louie heard Kitty Windus whisper to Evie Soames that Mr. Mackie was

going to be splendid to-night; but her approval did not extend to Mr.

Mackie's friend, who was already too splendid. Kitty's head was held

so high when Miss Levine passed that she appeared to be looking at her

with her nostrils. With her eyes she saw only the orange creature's

back. This was a rather handsome =V=, and that did not improve

matters. Kitty whispered behind her fan about "some people." Miss

Dulcie used Kitty as a quizzing-glass for the inspection of whoever

happened to be behind her.

Mr. Jeffries stood with his back against the thrown-back folding door.

He did not dance, but he had not at all the air of a wet blanket; on

the contrary, his face wore a quite lively smile. He was smiling at

the red and green tissue paper that enswathed the central chandelier.

Louie saw Evie Soames pass him; his eyes rested on her for a moment,

but only as they rested on everybody else, and then went back to the

red and green tissue paper of the chandelier again. He had accepted

the inevitable, then. Indeed, had he not done so, Louie could hardly

imagine that he would have been there. Well, it was the most sensible

thing he could do. Louie would go and speak to him presently.

Louie made a tour of the rooms. The =E= of reference-books had

been turned into a place for sitting out, and in the typewriting-room

the lids of two or three desks had been wedged up to form card-tables.

Into the room beyond, which was the smoking-room, she did not

penetrate. Already a fiddle was tuning up, but Louie had told young

Merridew, who had magnanimously asked her for her card, that she did

not intend to dance. None the less he had taken her card and scrawled

something on it. She had tossed the piece of violet-written pasteboard

into a corner.

At nine o'clock there was a tapping on the top of the piano, and the

music began. Mr. Mackie and the lady in orange glided out over the

French-chalked floor. Two minutes later the room was full of waltzing

couples.

Louie had sat down on the opposite side of the room to Mr. Jeffries.

Through momentarily clear spaces she saw him from time to time. He did

not move from his station by the folding door, where, among the

hoppers and caperers who sped past him, he seemed to have something of

the stability of a monument in some centre of apparently aimless

traffic. Still, he seemed to be enjoying himself, and Louie intended

to go across to him when the waltz was over.

A word she overheard, however, caused her to change her mind and to

rise to her feet at once. Mr. Mackie, passing with his orange partner,

had repeated his jape about the Ruthless Boaz.

Without more ado Louie threaded her way through the dancers and stood

before Mr. Jeffries.

"Won't you try to dance?" she said.

As he turned the amber eyes on her she had the feeling that she slid

all at once into the field of some piece of apparatus with an

object-glass. She was the object. For a moment he forgot his smile; he

looked attentively at her; and then the smile returned. He answered in

an easy, deep voice, the accent of which was neither Cockney nor yet

quite of the mode of the men Louie knew.

"Oh, I--I don't dance," he said.

"Won't you let me teach you?"

His eyes were still on hers. He seemed to give the simple question

weighty consideration. Then his eyes dropped to his hands.

"Hallo," he said, as if to himself. His programme was where Miss Levey

had put it, dangling from his wrist as if from a hook. Apparently he

had not noticed it before. Then, looking at Louie again, he said: "I

mean, my gloves--I've no gloves."

"Gloves!" she said quietly. "Come."

She took the absurd programme from his wrist, threw it away, and put

her gloved hand into his naked one.

She drew Mr. Jeffries into the current.

Louie had danced with ignoramuses before, but never with a man quite

so awkward as this. She did her best to steer him, but before they had

gone half-way round the room they had collided with Evie Soames,

leaning back in the crook of young Merridew's arm--with Kitty Windus,

tiptoe and leaning forward over her partner--with Mr. Mackie, who had

lighted a cigarette and was singing the refrain of the dance as he

passed. Then Mr. Jeffries begged her, out of consideration for

herself, to stop. But she had no desire to stop. She wondered why,

bumped and trampled so, she should want to go on, but she gave that

riddle up. He did not cease to apologise for his ungainliness.

But the riddle of why she did not wish to stop refused to be given up.

It renewed itself with each of his apologies. Stumbling ludicrously,

she knew that she still wished to go on. What she did not know at

that time of her life was that she had secrets that hitherto she had

kept even from herself.

Then, all in a moment, the strange thing happened. She felt that

colour, that stress and anger never brought there, rise slow and warm

into her cheeks. Her glance had merely rested for a moment on that

hand of hers that lay slender as a willow leaf in his, but the riddle

was a puzzle no longer. Abashed, she _had_ surprised a secret.

She had caught herself wishing--half wishing--she did not quite know

what--that she too had taken off her glove.

Her colour lasted for half-a-minute; then, perhaps because of the

colour, her voice became matter-of-fact. She glanced up at him.

"I'm sorry you failed in your examination," she said.

Louie was tall, but his head was clear and away above hers. He looked

down, earnest, anxious, smiling, all three.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "Why should it?" he added.

Louie had thought that it had mattered a great deal, but she was still

a little bewildered. Even out of the answer to the riddle another

seemed to have sprung already. She laughed a little.

"Oh--only that one doesn't like to be beaten," she said.

This too he seemed to give profound yet (if such a thing may be)

absentminded attention.

"Is anybody ever beaten?" he asked slowly. "I mean, unless they

deserve to be?"

Archie and Evie Soames had just overtaken them again, laughing

together, as, hand in hand, they took a running glide towards the

door. His remark came oddly from a doubly beaten man. What then did he

call a beating?... She looked covertly at the two hands again.

"But--mayn't circumstances be too strong for you?"

This again he considered. "Circumstances are strong," he admitted.

"But then, if one's a fool, so are a good many other people. There's

always that chance, you see."

He spoke as gently as if he had been speaking to a child, but Louie

suddenly found herself wondering whether he had accepted the

inevitable after all. This hardly sounded like it. She spoke quietly.

"Nobody thinks you're a fool just because you failed--at least I

don't."

"Failed?" he repeated, as if puzzled.... "Oh, you mean the

examination! Of course I ought never to have gone in for it. (Oh dear,

another bump--I'm afraid you find me hopeless.)"

"Not have gone in for it? Why?"

The lion's eyes looked at her in surprise.

"Why? Why, because I failed." He seemed to consider it an entirely

conclusive answer.

"But you'll surely try again?" said Louie.

"Eh? 'Try,' did you say?... Oh, the men who have to try are no good.

For that matter it's always the duffers who try the hardest. I admit

they pull it off, but then things are arranged so that the duffers can

pull them off--have to be, I suppose. But the men who aren't

duffers----"

He stopped suddenly.

"What?" she said.

But once more she had the feeling that she had only just swum into

the field of his vision. It was singularly disconcerting. His smile,

which had disappeared, appeared again. He seemed to remember that he

was at a dance.

"I suppose you're coming back after Christmas?" he said.

It was not very likely, but she said: "Very likely. You were saying,

about the men who aren't duffers----"

Again he got her focus. "Was I? Well, there aren't so many of them

that we need bother about them. So you are coming back?"

Louie found him extraordinary, unclassifiable. She could not say that

his answers were not ready; they were instant to the point; but

somehow they weren't answers. Of course, they _were_ answers if you

liked, but they seemed in some way to be private communings as well.

She wondered whether he was in the habit of talking much to himself;

he spoke rather as if he was--as if, his consciousness of her presence

notwithstanding, he considered himself to be as good as alone now.

Louie had heard the expression "second self"--well, this, "second

self" or not, was certainly a curious accord. And then he allowed that

deliberate, altogether discordant smile (that might just as well have

been hooked round his ears like a false beard) to come between, and

asked her if she was coming back after Christmas!

Then--this came suddenly--she knew for a certainty what hitherto had

hung in doubt--that she would not be coming back after Christmas. She

must sit down. Of course, it was to have been expected. She had been

unwise to dance.

She spoke faintly. "Please take me to a seat."

Quite automatically he did so. He led her to the =E= of

reference-books. The waltz closed. So did Louie's eyes.

"Please leave me alone for a few minutes," she murmured.

He bowed, and retired as automatically as he had come.

In a few minutes she felt better, but she still sat in the little

book-lined recess. Her eyes remained closed, but not now altogether

from faintness. She heard Mr. Mackie's voice, apparently a long way

off, shouting, "Come on--let's get the ice broken!" and partners were

being chosen for the Shop-Girl Lancers. More minutes passed. Louie,

her eyes still closed, had begun once more to think of that secret she

had surprised within herself.

She doubted herself profoundly now. For all she now knew her nature

might contain other such secrets as this that had sent the warm blood

into her cheeks at a touch--nay, at the thought of a touch. She might

have, so to speak, a basic, unsuspected layer of them, needing only to

be stirred to provide surprise after surprise. Those surprises might

make all she had hitherto known--all--seem stupid and flat and

commonplace. If so, why must the discovery come now? Secrets from

herself--now? Impossible!

But, as if limned on her closed lids, she saw the two hands again, her

own like a lanceolate leaf, lying within that great masculine engine

of his.

And all at once she felt unutterably lonely.

It was some time before she opened her eyes again. By that time Mr.

Mackie had succeeded in breaking the ice. The floor shook to the

fourth figure of the Shop-Girl Lancers, and Louie saw, beyond the

reference-books, the Alcazar beauty swung clear off the ground, a

goldfish whirling almost horizontally past. Miss Levey's skirts

followed, their owner crying, "Help, help!"... "_For it ain't the

proper way to treat a la-ady!_" Mr. Mackie's jubilant voice sang--and

when the figure ended there were shouts and clapping of hands and

uproarious cries of "Again, again!"

By-and-by Louie rose. She walked up the room again. At the piano Mr.

Mackie, who was to sing, was now confidentially humming the air of his

song into the hired pianist's ear. Mr. Jeffries, once more looking as

if he needed a niche and a plinth, was standing in his original place,

by the folding door. Miss Levine and Archie Merridew were half hidden

behind the piano; and Kitty Windus, radiant, was openly flirting with

the pale student called Richardson. Evie Soames had just spoken to Mr.

Jeffries; she was sulking at Archie's desertion of her. Then Mr.

Weston announced, solemnly and distinctly, that Mr. Mackie was about

to add to the enjoyment of all present by singing a song entitled

"That Gorgonzola Cheese." Applause greeted the announcement, and Mr.

Mackie, who had slipped behind the piano for a moment and returned

with his coat on the wrong side out, began.

Louie found herself once more by the side of Mr. Jeffries.

"I should like some coffee," she said.

The coffee was in an adjoining room. For the first time since she had

been at the School Louie did not want to hear Mr. Mackie.

But the hint was lost on Mr. Jeffries.

"Eh? Certainly," he said, and went away in search of the coffee.

"'Oh--that--Gorgonzola Cheese!'"

Mr. Mackie sang,

"'It must have been unhealthy, I suppose,

For the old Tom Cat fell dead upon the mat

When the niff got up his nose!'"

Kitty was laughing almost hysterically.

"'Talk about the flavour of the crackling of the pork!

I guess it wasn't half so strong

As the delicate effluvia that filled our house

When the Gorgonzola Cheese went wrong!'"

Mr. Jeffries had returned with Louie's coffee, but Louie barely

touched it. Great stupid fellow!

Then he turned to her with some merely banal remark, and Louie, giving

it all the answer it deserved, turned and left him.

That unspeakable loneliness had come upon her again.

Louie made no further attempt to talk to Mr. Jeffries. She watched

another dance, heard Mr. Weston recite "The Raven," and then went to

the cloakroom for her shawl. There she came upon Kitty Windus, who had

found it necessary to do up her hair again.

"You surely aren't going?" Kitty exclaimed. She herself was a-tremble

with flirtation and happiness. "Why, you're as bad as Mr. Jeffries!

Though I will admit that even _he_ came out of his shell for once. I

shall begin to think Miriam's right soon!" She gave Louie an arch

look.

Louie's opinion was that Mr. Jeffries had never been more completely

concealed in his shell than he had been that even, but "Oh, has he

gone?" she said indifferently.

"Yes, a few minutes ago. Isn't everything going splendidly! Why, Mr.

Mackie's a host in himself!"

"Quite," said Louie, passing her shawl over her head.

"I suppose we shall see you in the morning?" said Kitty. "Everybody's

coming to help to clear away."

"Very well," said Louie.

And as the piano broke into the prelude to the waltz cotillion she

left.

But she did not leave that dingy Holborn third floor, never to enter

it again, without a grateful word to Mr. Mackie. She came upon him on

a landing. His trousers were French-chalked almost to the knees with

the vigour of his dancing, and for his next song he had put on a false

nose with blue whiskers attached to it. He was making sure that the

adornment did not interfere with his whistle.

"Good-bye, Mr. Mackie," said Louie, holding out her hand.

Mr. Mackie stopped the whistle. "What, you toddling, Miss Causton?" he

said. "Why, we ain't properly warmed up yet!"

"I must go. And"--she smiled almost fondly at him--"I should like to

thank you."

Mr. Mackie was quite conscious of desert. "Not at all," he said. "You

mean the 'Gorgonzola Cheese,' I suppose? Went all right, didn't it?

Never known that song fail yet: it always gets 'em----"

"Oh, for more than that. If you're ever thinking of setting up a cure

I daresay I could find you a few patients. You're wonderful.

Good-bye."

"Say olive oil, but not good-bye--and Merry Christmas," said Mr.

Mackie.

But Louie knew that it was good-bye.