She insisted on leaving him at the Junction, and he moodily watched her
climbing into a tram. She waved her hand to him as the tram drove off,
and he waved his in reply. And then she was gone, and he had a sense of
loss and depression. He stared gloomily about him. What should he do
now? He might go to the Opera House or to one of the music-halls or he
might just walk about the streets....
He thought of what Mrs. Bothwell had said earlier in the day. "There's
very little satisfaction in anything!"
"There's a lot in that," he said to himself. "I'll go home," he
continued. "There's no pleasure in mouching round the town by
yourself!"
He got into a tram and was soon at the railway station. On the
platform, a little way in front of him, he saw Willie Logan, flushed
and excited, with two girls, one on either side of him. Willie had an
arm round each girl's waist.
"That fellow's getting plenty of fun anyway," John said, as he climbed
into an empty carriage. He did not wish to join Willie's party. He knew
too well what Willie was like: a noisy, demonstrative fellow,
indiscriminately amorous. "Nearly every girl's worth kissing," Willie
had said to him on one occasion. "If you can't get your bit of fun with
one woman, sure you can get it with another!"
Willie, in the carriage, would kiss one girl, John knew, and then would
turn and kiss the other, "just to show there's no ill will." He might
even invite John to kiss them in turn ... so that John might not feel
uncomfortable and "out of it." He would lie back in the carriage, his
big face flushed and his eyes bright with pleasure, an arm round each
of his companions, and when he was not kissing them, he would be
bawling out some song, or, at stations, hanging half out of the window
to chaff the porters and the station-master. "Get all you can," he
would say, "and do without the rest!"
But John was not a promiscuist: he was a monopolist. He put the whole
of his strength into his love for one woman, and he demanded a similar
singleness of devotion from her. His mind was full of Maggie, but he
felt that she had cast him out of her mind the moment that the tram
bore her out of his sight.
"I'll make her want me," he said, tightening his fists. "I'll make her
want me 'til she's heartsore with wanting!"