She never knew afterwards quite what she had done to settle it, and at
the time she only knew that they presently moved, with vagueness, yet
with continuity, away from the picture of the lighted vestibule and the
quiet stairs and well up the street together. This also must have been
in the absence of a definite permission, of anything vulgarly
articulate, for that matter, on the part of either; and it was to be,
later on, a thing of remembrance and reflexion for her that the limit
of what just here for a longish minute passed between them was his
taking in her thoroughly successful deprecation, though conveyed
without pride or sound or touch, of the idea that she might be, out of
the cage, the very shop-girl at large that she hugged the theory she
wasn’t. Yes, it was strange, she afterwards thought, that so much could
have come and gone and yet not disfigured the dear little intense
crisis either with impertinence or with resentment, with any of the
horrid notes of that kind of acquaintance. He had taken no liberty, as
she would have so called it; and, through not having to betray the
sense of one, she herself had, still more charmingly, taken none. On
the spot, nevertheless, she could speculate as to what it meant that,
if his relation with Lady Bradeen continued to be what her mind had
built it up to, he should feel free to proceed with marked
independence. This was one of the questions he was to leave her to deal
with—the question whether people of his sort still asked girls up to
their rooms when they were so awfully in love with other women. Could
people of his sort do that without what people of _her_ sort would call
being “false to their love”? She had already a vision of how the true
answer was that people of her sort didn’t, in such cases, matter—didn’t
count as infidelity, counted only as something else: she might have
been curious, since it came to that, to see exactly what.
Strolling together slowly in their summer twilight and their empty
corner of Mayfair, they found themselves emerge at last opposite to one
of the smaller gates of the Park; upon which, without any particular
word about it—they were talking so of other things—they crossed the
street and went in and sat down on a bench. She had gathered by this
time one magnificent hope about him—the hope he would say nothing
vulgar. She knew thoroughly what she meant by that; she meant something
quite apart from any matter of his being “false.” Their bench was not
far within; it was near the Park Lane paling and the patchy lamplight
and the rumbling cabs and ‘buses. A strange emotion had come to her,
and she felt indeed excitement within excitement; above all a conscious
joy in testing him with chances he didn’t take. She had an intense
desire he should know the type she really conformed to without her
doing anything so low as tell him, and he had surely begun to know it
from the moment he didn’t seize the opportunities into which a common
man would promptly have blundered. These were on the mere awkward
surface, and _their_ relation was beautiful behind and below them. She
had questioned so little on the way what they might be doing that as
soon as they were seated she took straight hold of it. Her hours, her
confinement, the many conditions of service in the post-office,
had—with a glance at his own postal resources and alternatives—formed,
up to this stage, the subject of their talk. “Well, here we are, and it
may be right enough; but this isn’t the least, you know, where I was
going.”
“You were going home?”
“Yes, and I was already rather late. I was going to my supper.”
“You haven’t had it?”
“No indeed!”
“Then you haven’t eaten—?”
He looked of a sudden so extravagantly concerned that she laughed out.
“All day? Yes, we do feed once. But that was long ago. So I must
presently say good-bye.”
“Oh deary _me_!” he exclaimed with an intonation so droll and yet a
touch so light and a distress so marked—a confession of helplessness
for such a case, in short, so unrelieved—that she at once felt sure she
had made the great difference plain. He looked at her with the kindest
eyes and still without saying what she had known he wouldn’t. She had
known he wouldn’t say “Then sup with _me_!” but the proof of it made
her feel as if she had feasted.
“I’m not a bit hungry,” she went on.
“Ah you _must_ be, awfully!” he made answer, but settling himself on
the bench as if, after all, that needn’t interfere with his spending
his evening. “I’ve always quite wanted the chance to thank you for the
trouble you so often take for me.”
“Yes, I know,” she replied; uttering the words with a sense of the
situation far deeper than any pretence of not fitting his allusion. She
immediately felt him surprised and even a little puzzled at her frank
assent; but for herself the trouble she had taken could only, in these
fleeting minutes—they would probably never come back—be all there like
a little hoard of gold in her lap. Certainly he might look at it,
handle it, take up the pieces. Yet if he understood anything he must
understand all. “I consider you’ve already immensely thanked me.” The
horror was back upon her of having seemed to hang about for some
reward. “It’s awfully odd you should have been there just the one
time—!”
“The one time you’ve passed my place?”
“Yes; you can fancy I haven’t many minutes to waste. There was a place
to-night I had to stop at.”
“I see, I see—” he knew already so much about her work. “It must be an
awful grind—for a lady.”
“It is, but I don’t think I groan over it any more than my
companions—and you’ve seen _they’re_ not ladies!” She mildly jested,
but with an intention. “One gets used to things, and there are
employments I should have hated much more.” She had the finest
conception of the beauty of not at least boring him. To whine, to count
up her wrongs, was what a barmaid or a shop-girl would do, and it was
quite enough to sit there like one of these.
“If you had had another employment,” he remarked after a moment, “we
might never have become acquainted.”
“It’s highly probable—and certainly not in the same way.” Then, still
with her heap of gold in her lap and something of the pride of it in
her manner of holding her head, she continued not to move—she only
smiled at him. The evening had thickened now; the scattered lamps were
red; the Park, all before them, was full of obscure and ambiguous life;
there were other couples on other benches whom it was impossible not to
see, yet at whom it was impossible to look. “But I’ve walked so much
out of my way with you only just to show you that—that”—with this she
paused; it was not after all so easy to express—“that anything you may
have thought is perfectly true.”
“Oh I’ve thought a tremendous lot!” her companion laughed. “Do you mind
my smoking?”
“Why should I? You always smoke _there_.”
“At your place? Oh yes, but here it’s different.”
“No,” she said as he lighted a cigarette, “that’s just what it isn’t.
It’s quite the same.”
“Well, then, that’s because ‘there’ it’s so wonderful!”
“Then you’re conscious of how wonderful it is?” she returned.
He jerked his handsome head in literal protest at a doubt. “Why that’s
exactly what I mean by my gratitude for all your trouble. It has been
just as if you took a particular interest.” She only looked at him by
way of answer in such sudden headlong embarrassment, as she was quite
aware, that while she remained silent he showed himself checked by her
expression. “You _have_—haven’t you?—taken a particular interest?”
“Oh a particular interest!” she quavered out, feeling the whole
thing—her headlong embarrassment—get terribly the better of her, and
wishing, with a sudden scare, all the more to keep her emotion down.
She maintained her fixed smile a moment and turned her eyes over the
peopled darkness, unconfused now, because there was something much more
confusing. This, with a fatal great rush, was simply the fact that they
were thus together. They were near, near, and all she had imagined of
that had only become more true, more dreadful and overwhelming. She
stared straight away in silence till she felt she looked an idiot;
then, to say something, to say nothing, she attempted a sound which
ended in a flood of tears.