"Really?"

"And they're going to make me a cashier."

"Oh, is that good?"

"Well, there's hardly a fellow of my age in any bank that's got to a responsible position like that, in the time I have. I bet you a shilling there isn't."

"Well, I can't afford to bet a shilling on it."

"No, of course not; I didn't mean that. What I mean—"

"I understand what you mean," said Sally. A sense of humour might have gone far to save him at that moment. She accredited it against him that he had none. "You might just as well have bet ten pounds," she added with a smile, "and I should have known what you meant. Ten pounds always sounds better than a shilling—even in that sort of—of—transaction."

"Ah, you're only joking," said he.

"No, I'm not," she replied. "I'm quite serious. I like the sound of ten pounds better. There's a nice ring of bravado about it. A shilling seems so mean."

For a few moments he was silenced by the weight of her incomprehensibleness. Such a moment comes at all times to every man, whatever his dealings with a woman may be. Mr. Arthur stood leaning on the railing, looking out at the black water and thinking how little she understood of the seriousness of his position, or the meaning that such an uplifting of his financial status conveyed to a man. She did not even know what he was about to propose. It would steady her considerably when she heard that; she would be less flippant then. Out of the corners of his eyes, he watched her face—the little, round, childish face almost perfect in outline—the gentle force, petulance almost, in the shapely chin, and the lips—tantalizing—they looked so innocent. In another few moments he would be kissing those lips; in another few moments he would be feeling the warmth of that hand that lay idly over the railing. He wondered if he were really wise. Was he being carried away by the first flush of triumph which his success had brought him? There was time to draw back yet.

"Well," she said, "was that what you were going to tell me?"

He turned round and met her look; his eyes wandered over her face. Those lips—they were indescribably alluring. It seemed impossible to give up the delight of kissing them; yet, of course, that was foolish, that was weak. He was not going to let the whole of his life hang upon a momentary desire like that. If she did not appeal to him in other ways, if he did not find admiration for her character, respect for her numerous good qualities, he would certainly not be so wanting in control as to let a passing inclination sway him to a momentous decision. He recounted those good qualities to himself reassuringly. Her innocence, her gentleness, her apparent willingness to be led by any one stronger than herself. Mr. Arthur dwelt long on that. That was a distinctly promising characteristic. He would consider that essential in any woman whom he thought to make his wife. Then she was demonstrative. He had often seen her show signs of deep affection to Miss Hallard. At the moment, that seemed a very necessary quality too. He felt just then that a little demonstration of affection on her part—if she put her hand in his, or leant her head up against his shoulder—would make him intensely happy. And those lips! He half closed his eyes and his hand shook.

"No; that wasn't all," he said emotionally. "That was only preliminary to what I'm going to say."

Sally kept her eyes away from him. She did not want to watch his face. She knew he was very good, very honourable, very conscientious in his work; she knew that he would make a reasonably good husband, that he was about to offer her a position in life which it was incumbent upon any girl in her circumstances to consider well before refusing. But she could not look at his face while these things were weighing out their balance in her mind. It seemed hard enough to be compelled to listen to the sound of his voice; the weak, uncertain quality that it possessed, that faint suggestion of commonness which did not exactly admit of dropped aitches, but rang jarringly in her ears.

"I'm listening," she said rigidly. Her eyes were fixed without motion on the quiet water.

"Well, I want you to marry me," he exclaimed impulsively.

She said nothing. She waited.

"After next month, I shall have two hundred pounds a year. We could be very comfortable on that—couldn't we?"

"Do you think so?" she asked.

"Well, I'll bet you a shilling there are a good many men in London—married—who are comfortable enough on less. Besides, next year it'll be two hundred and twenty."

"And you want me to marry you?"

"Yes. I'm offering you a comfortable home of your own. No more pigging it like this in lodgings. You'll have your own house to look after—your own drawing-room. I don't want to boast about it, but don't you think it's a good thing for you?" He felt himself it was a big thing he was offering—and so it was—the biggest he had. "What I mean to say," he continued, "I'm a gentleman, you're earning your own living. I'm going to make you your own mistress—"

"But I don't love you," she said quietly, overlooking with generosity his insinuations about the position she held.

He gazed at her in amazement. "Why not?" he asked.

"Why not? Oh, why should you ask me a hard question like that?"

"'Cause I want to know. What's the matter with me? I bet you—"

"Oh, don't!" she begged, "I don't love you; that's all. I can't say any more."

"Then why did you come out with me this evening?"

"I don't know. Of course, I ought not to—I suppose I ought not to."

"But you haven't said you won't marry me."

"No. But haven't I said enough?"

"No."

"You'd marry me, knowing that I didn't love you?"

She turned her eyes to his. The pathos of that touched her. His senses swam when she looked at him.

"Yes," he said thickly. "You might not love me now—you would."

There, he spoilt it all again. She was so certain of its impossibility; he was so confident of his success. With the sentiment of his humility, the unselfishness of his devotion, he might have won her even then. The pity in a woman is often minister to her heart. But pity left her when he made so sure.

"Oh, it's no good talking like this," she said gently; "I know I shouldn't."

He leant nearer to her, peering into her face. "Well, will you think about it—will you think it over?" He felt certain that when she thought of that home of her own, she would be bound to relent—any woman would. "Let me know some other time."

"If you like. I don't know why you should be so good to me."

Passionately he seized her arm with his hand. "Because I love you—don't you see?"

"Yes; I see. I shouldn't think there's much to love in me though."

"Wouldn't you? My God—I do! Will you give me a kiss?"

One would think he might have known that that was the last thing he should have asked for. One would think he might have realized that passion was the last thing he should have shown her at such a moment as that. But he fancied that any woman might want to be kissed under the circumstances. He had a vague idea that his passion might awaken emotion in her; that with the touch of his lips, she might drop her arms about his neck and swoon into submission. He did not know the fiddle string upon which he was playing; he did not know the fine edge upon which all her thoughts were balancing.

She drew quickly away from him; freed her arm and turned towards the house with lips tight pressed together.

"I'm going in," she said.



CHAPTER VIII

But she had promised to think it over. He kept her to that. Again it was the hunter, the quarry, and the inevitable flight. The thought of her possible escape quickened his pulses. He became infinitely more determined to make her his own. The recollection of her saying that she did not love him was humiliating, but it stirred him to deeper feelings of desire. When he thought of her—as at first—readily accepting him and his prospects, he had not formed so high opinion of her as now, being at her mercy.

She stood before his eyes that night as he lay in bed. One vague dream after another filled his sleep, and Sally took part in them all—kissing him, scorning him. His mental vision was obsessed with the sight of her.

With Sally herself, sleep came late—reluctantly—like a tired man, dragging himself to his journey's end.

Janet was seated up in bed, reading and smoking, when she returned. While she was taking off her clothes, Sally told her all about it—word for word—everything that had passed between them. This is a way of women. They have a marvellous memory for the recounting in detail of such incidents as these.

"Thinking it over means nothing," she said when Sally had finished—"thinking it over'll only fix your mind on refusing him all the more. His one chance was this evening. You know that yourself—don't you? You'll never accept him now."

Sally crept wearily into the bed and pulled the clothes about her.

"Will you?" Janet repeated.

Sally muttered a smothered negative into the pillow, and stared out before her at the discoloured wall-paper.

"Sally"—Janet shut up her book, and threw the end of her cigarette with accurate precision into the tiny fireplace—"Sally—"

"What?"

"Is there anybody else? Some man up in Town—some man who comes into the office—some man in the office—is there?"

Sally turned her pillow over. "No," she replied. She kept her eyes away from Janet's, but her answer was firm and decided.

For a few moments, Miss Hallard sat upright in the bed and watched her. Her mind was keyed with intuition. She was conscious of the presence of some influence in Sally's mind—probably more conscious of it than Sally was herself. You could not have shaken her in that belief. Even a woman cannot act to a woman, and that decided "No" from Sally had only served the more to convince her. When one woman deals in subtleties with another, fine hairs and the splitting of them are merely clumsy operations to perform.

"Are you tired?" asked Janet presently—"or only pretending to be?"

"Why should I pretend? I am tired—frightfully tired."

"You want to go to sleep, then?"

"Well, I don't feel like talking to-night; do you?"

They talked every night, regularly—talked about dresses, about religion, about other people's love affairs, and other women's indiscretions. Sally described hats she had seen on rich women shopping at Knightsbridge; Janet told questionable stories about the lives of models and art students, Sally listening with wondering eyes, needing sometimes to have them explained to her more graphically in order really to understand. So they would continue, in the dark, till one or the other asked a question and, receiving no answer, would turn over on her side, and the next moment be oblivious of everything.

"What's particularly the matter to-night?" persisted Janet. "Sorry you told Mr. Arthur you didn't love him?"

"I don't know."

"I believe you are."

There was no such belief in her mind. She knew it would draw the truth. She used it.

"No, I'm not," said Sally, decidedly. "I'm not sorry."

"Then what are you so depressed about?"

"Am I depressed?" She sat up again and turned her pillow. "Oh, I haven't said my prayers yet." She began to throw off the bed-clothes.

"Well, you're not going to get out of bed, are you?"

"Yes."

She slid off the bed on to the floor, shuddering as her feet touched the cold linoleum carpet. Habit was strong in her still. She believed in no fixed and certain dogma, but she had never broken the custom of saying her prayers; never even been able to rid herself of the belief that except upon the knees on the hard floor prayers were of little intrinsic value. That she had always been taught; and though the greater lessons—the untangling of the entangled Trinity, the mystery of the bread and wine—had lost their meaning in her mind, ever since her father's predicament, yet she still held fondly to the simple habits of her childhood.

When Janet saw her finally huddled on her knees, her head, with its masses of gold hair, buried in the arms flung out appealingly before her, she turned and blew out the candle. Sally never answered questions when she was saying her prayers, though Janet frequently addressed them to her, and took the answers for granted.

There she knelt in the darkness, while Janet dug the accustomed grove in her pillow and went to sleep.

What does a woman pray for—what does any one pray for—whom do they pray to, when the composition of their mental attitude towards the Highest is a plethora of doubts? Yet they pray.

Instinctively at night, by the side of their beds, their knees bent—or there is some genuflexion in their heart which answers just as well—they drop into the attitude of prayer. And they all begin in the same way—O God— And not one of them has the faintest notion of whom or what or why that God is.

Whoever, whatever, wherever He is, His power must be supreme to make itself felt through the thick veil of doubt and despair that hangs so heavily about His identity.

Sally Bishop, who could not say the Apostles' Creed with unswerving conscience—to whom the story of the Resurrection was fogged, blurred with a thousand inconsistencies—even she could not dispense with that moment in each day, that moment of abandonment—the flinging of one's burden of questions at the feet of a deity whose identity it would be impossible to define.

For many minutes she stayed there on her knees, her arms wound round about her head, her shoulders rising wearily with each breath that she took.

Long after Janet had fallen asleep, and when the cold was numbing in her limbs, she stayed there, pouring forth her importunate questions—the woman begging guidance, when she knows full well what course she is going to adopt.



CHAPTER IX

The life of the Bohemian in London is no brilliantly coloured affair. The most that can be said for it is that it has its moments. The first flush of a full purse and the last despair of an empty pocket are always sensations that are worth while. With the one you can gauge the shallow depth of pleasure and find the world full of friends; with the other you can learn how superfluous are the things you called necessities and you may count upon the fingers of your hand the number of friends whom really you possess. In their way, these moments are true values—both of them.

But the life of the Bohemian, wherever it may be, has one advantage that no other life possesses. It is a series of contrasts. With his last sovereign, he may have supper at the Savoy, rubbing shoulders with the best and with the worst; the next night, he may be dining off a maquereau grille in a Greek Street restaurant, jogging elbows with the worst and with the best. It is only the steady possession of wealth that makes a groove; but steady possession is an unknown condition in the life of the Bohemian. And so, drifting in this sporadic way through the wild journeys of existence, he comes truly to learn the definite, certain uncertainty of human things. This he learns; but it is no sure guarantee that he will follow the teaching of the lesson.

For in the heart of human nature is a common need of bondage. To this, no matter what movement may be afoot, a woman still yields herself willingly. To this, in deep reluctance, with dragging steps, but none the less inevitably, man yields as well. The desire for companionship, the desire to give, albeit there may be no giving in return, the shuddering sense of the empty room and the silent night come to all of us, however much we may wish for the former conditions of solitude when once they are ours.

It was this common need of bondage, this hatred of the silent emptiness of life that caught the mind of Jack Traill, arrested and held it in the interest of Sally Bishop.

You are never really to know why a man, passing through life, meeting this woman, meeting that, some intimately, some in the vapid chance of acquaintanceship, will in one moment be held by the sight of a certain face. The table of affinities is the only attempt at regulating the matter, and in these changing times one cannot look even upon that with confidence.

There is a law, however, whatever it may be, and in unconscious obedience to it, Traill kept the face of Sally Bishop persistently before him. After she had left him at Knightsbridge, he too descended from the 'bus and walked slowly back to Piccadilly Circus.

Casting his eyes round the circle of houses with their brilliant illuminations, he decided, with no anticipation of entertainment, where to dine. A meal is a ceremony of boredom when it has no pleasurable prospect. Indeed, the gratification of any appetite becomes a sordid affair when the mind is stagnant and the body merely asking for its food. But in the last three years, Traill had gone through this same performance a thousand times; a thousand times he had looked out of the little circular window on the top floor of the house in Lower Regent Street where he lived; a thousand times he had taken a coin out of his pocket and let the head or the tail decide between the two restaurants which he most usually frequented.

On this night there was no tossing of a coin. He had not even so much interest in the meal as that. Making his way across the Circus, he entered a restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue, and passed down the stairs to the grill-room.

The music, the lights, the haze of smoke and the scent of food were depressing. The whole atmosphere rolled forward to meet him as he came through the doors. He had no subtle temperament. It did not offend his imagination, but it sickened his senses, even though he knew that in five minutes he would be eating with the rest and the atmosphere would have taken upon itself a false semblance of normality.

All the tables had one occupant or another. He was forced to seat himself at the same table with some man and a girl, who were already half through their meal. He did so with apologies, quite aware of the annoyance he was causing. But he was not sensitive. He had the right to a seat at the table. The rules of the restaurant offered no restrictions. With it all, he was British.

"Hope you'll excuse my intrusion," he said shortly.

The man, a clerk, with slavery written legibly across his face, offered some mumbled acceptance of the inevitable. Traill himself would not have borne with any such intrusion. He would have called the manager—insisted upon having the table to himself; but he intruded his presence with only a momentary consciousness of being in the way.

His manner with waiters was peremptory. He gave them the recognition of the position which they occupied, but beyond that, scarcely looked upon them as human.

"Look here," he began, "I want so and so—" he named a dish that was unknown to the companion of the young clerk. She felt a certain respect of him for that. Her friend had ordered the most ordinary of food and had tried to do it in a lordly manner. There was no lordliness about Traill. He wasted no time with a waiter; he had never met a German waiter who was worth it. All this gave the impression of brusqueness. The girl liked it. She looked at her friend and wished she was dining with Traill. But Traill took no notice of her. Except an occasional glance, he ignored them both. As soon as he could, he ordered an evening paper and sat concealed behind it—truly British in every outline. The music in the place was good, but no music appealed to him. It came as a confused wreckage of sounds to his ears as he read through the news of the evening; and when the girl rattled her spoon on the coffee cup and the young man clapped his hands vigorously at the conclusion of a selection, he looked over the top of his paper with annoyance. What music had ever penetrated his understanding of the art, had come in the form of chants of psalms and old hymn tunes, which a constant attendance at church in his youth had dinned into him—the driving of soft iron nails into the stern oak. He sang these laboriously with numberless crescendos as he dressed in the mornings.

He finished dinner as quickly as he could. The young people opposite him were insufferably dull. Apparently they had never met each other before and were at a loss to make conversation to suit the occasion. Accordingly, they listened intently to the string band while the young man smoked a long cigar, and in the natural course of things, they applauded after each piece to show that they had heard it. Traill bolted his meal, glad to leave them.

He came out of the restaurant and thanked God—filling his lungs with it—for the clean air. Then he stood on the pavement contemplating the next move. Should he go back to his rooms, read—smoke—fall asleep? Should he turn into a music-hall? When you live alone, the greatest issues of life sometimes resolve themselves into such questions as these.

Finally, scarcely conscious of arriving at any definite decision, he walked slowly back across the Circus in the direction of Lower Regent Street.

Over by the Criterion he heard the sound of footsteps behind him, hurrying; then his Christian name in a woman's voice. He turned.

"I was up nearly at the Prince of Wales's," she said out of breath, "when I saw you crossing the Circus. My—I ran!"

"What for?" he asked laconically.

"Why to talk to you, of course—what else? Where are you going?"

He looked at her coloured lips, at the tired eyes with their blackened lashes, at the flush of rouge that adorned her cheeks. Involuntarily, he remembered when she was charming, pretty—a time when she required none of these things.

"Where are you going anyway?" she repeated. "You haven't been to see me these months. Where are you going now?"

"I'm going back to my rooms."

A look of resigned disappointment passed like a shadow across her face. The first realization in a woman of her failure to attract is the beginning of every woman's tragedy.

"Never seen my rooms, have you?" he added.

"No; never expected to."

"Come in and see them now and have a talk."

"You don't mean that?" Eagerness dragged it out of her.

"Come along," he said; "they're just down here—in Regent Street."

She followed him silently—silently, but in that moment her spirits had lifted. There was a wider swing in her walk. But he took no notice of that; he was not observant.

She hummed a tune with a rather pretty voice as she walked up the flights of stairs behind him.

"Gosh! it's dark," she exclaimed.

"Oh, it's none of your bachelor flats with lifts and attendants and electric lights," he replied.

On the third landing she stopped—out of breath again.

"Tired?" he said.

"There—" she laid a hand on her chest and breathed heavily. Then she moved a step nearer to him.

"Give us a kiss, dearie," she whispered.

He retreated a step. "My dear child—I didn't want you for that. Come up to the next floor when you've got your breath. I'll go on and light the candles."

He left her there in the semi-darkness, the thin light from the landing window just breaking up the heavy shadows. When she heard him open the door upstairs, she moved close to the window, took a small mirror from her little reticule bag and gazed for a moment at her face in its reflection. Then from some pocket of the bag, she produced a powder-puff and a box of powdered rouge, applying them with mechanical precision.

"S'pose he thought I looked tired," she muttered to herself as she mounted the remaining flight of stairs.

The room was a bachelor's, but it showed discrimination. Everything was in good taste—taste that was beyond her comprehension. She stood there in the doorway and stared about her before she entered. She thought the rush matting that covered the floor was cold; she thought the oak furniture sombre. Without realizing the need for tact, she said so.

"You want a woman in here," she said, thinking that she was paving the way for herself—"to warm things up a bit—you know what I mean—make things more cosy."

He put a chair out for her by the fire. It had a rush-bottomed seat to it, and for the first few moments she worried about in it, trying vainly to make herself comfortable.

"What would you do?" he asked quietly, filling a well-burnt pipe from a tobacco-jar.

She took this as encouragement—jumped to it, as an animal to the food above it.

"Do? Well, first of all I'd have a nice thick carpet." There was no need to force the note of interest into her voice. She was already absorbed with it. She confidently thought that she could impress him with the comfort that she could bring into his life. Her eyes, quick to grasp certain facts, had shown her that he lived alone. Long study of men from certain standpoints had made that easy for her to appreciate. This moment to her was as the gap in the wall of riders before him is to the jockey; in that moment she saw clear down the straight to the winning-post. She took it. Ten minutes before she had not known where to turn. The race had seemed impossible. Two or three times she had opened her reticule bag and counted the four coppers that jingled within the pocket. She had had no dinner. No music hall was possible to her with such capital. You know something of life when you have only fourpence in the world and vice is the only trade for which your hand has acquired any deftness.

"I pray God no man 'll offer me ten bob to-night," she had said to another woman.

"Why?"

"Why? Gosh! I'd take it."

Here then, out of nowhere, in the dull impenetrable wall was torn the gap through which she saw the chance, such a chance as she had never been offered by the generosity of circumstance before. She seized it—no hesitation—no lack of inspiring confidence. It did not even cross her mind that she looked tired. She was in no way thwarted by the knowledge that she was not so young, not so pretty as when first she had known him. The opportunity was too great for that. It had fallen so obviously at her feet, that she felt it was meant for her.

She shuffled her feet on the cold clean matting and said again, "I'd have a nice thick carpet—"

"What colour?"

She looked up to the ceiling to think—not at the room around her.

"I don't know—Turkey red, I think—that's warmest. You know my carpet—well, it used to be nice. It's worn a bit now and there's not so much colour in it as when it was new. That was Turkey red."

"And what else?" He sat on the corner of an old table and smoked his pipe—swinging his legs and looking at her.

"Well, I'd have electric lights instead of these candles—you can't expect a woman to see with candles;—'lectric light's twice as cheap and it's much brighter. And they make lovely new fittings now—quite inexpensive—oxidized copper, I think they call it; I like brass best myself."

"You think brass is better?"

"Yes; don't you? Those brass candlesticks that you've got are all right, only they're so plain."

"You like things more ornate?"

"More what?"

"More ornate—more highly finished—more elaborate?"

"Yes; don't you?"

He took no notice of that question. "What else would you do?" he asked. The smoke curled up in clouds from the bowl of his pipe as he sat listening to her.

She looked round the room contemplatively.

"Oh—lots of things," she said. "I'd have a sofa—one of those settee sort of things—"

"Upholstered in red?"

"Yes—to go with the carpet. And a comfortable armchair—really comfortable, I mean—something that you could chuck your legs about it—less like a straight jacket than this thing I'm sitting in."

"Upholstered in red?" he repeated.

"Um—of course."

"Then how about this wall-paper?" he questioned. "It's green—do you think that would go with all the red?"

She looked round the walls, then tried to blur her eyes in an effort to give scope to her imagination. She put her whole heart into it. This was the chance of her life. Thrilling through her, like some warm current that forces its way through cold water, was the consciousness that she was making him seriously consider the benefits of having a woman to live with him, to look after his needs, attend to his comforts, as she pictured herself so well able to do. After due deliberation, she delivered her opinion.

"I don't think the green would go so badly as you'd think," she said slowly—"I suppose it would be expensive to change. But red would look better of course."

He took his pipe out of his mouth and blew a long scroll of smoke from between his lips as he looked at her.

"In fact," he said at last—"you'd like to make this little room of mine look like hell."

It was a brutal thing to have said. Yet he knew her mind no more than she knew his. He knew but little of women. Her knowledge of men was limited to one point of view. When her flat had been newly decorated, newly furnished for her, she had boasted of its comforts to every man she met. Nearly all of them had said that they liked it. It was clean then, and all they had appreciated was the cleanliness. But she had not known that. She thought they had approved of her taste. So, with this narrow knowledge of the sex, she had made her bid for security and failed.

And he, when he saw the drop in her face, when he saw features and expression fall from the lofty height of anticipation as a pile of cards topple in a mass upon the table, he was sorry. Her mouth opened—gaped. She looked as if a flat hand had struck her.

"I don't mean that unkindly," he said—"but it would be hell—red hell—to me."

She sat and stared at him. "Can't understand you," she said at last.

"Why not?"

"What did you let me go on talking for?"

"It was rather amusing to compare your taste with mine."

"Amusing? God!"

She lifted herself to her feet and went across to the mantelpiece, leaning her elbows on it, her head in her hands. All her exhaustion had returned. She felt a thousand times more tired in that moment than when she had rested on the landing. All that afternoon she had been walking the streets—all that evening too. From Regent Street to Oxford Street, from Oxford Street to Bond Street, from Bond Street through the Burlington Arcade into Piccadilly, then over the whole course again, smiling cheerfully at this man, looking knowingly at that—all a forced effort, all a spurious energy; and pain throbbed in her limbs—a dominant note of pain. She could feel a pulse in her brain that kept time to it. These are the ecstatic pleasures of vice—the charms, the allurements of the gay life.

At last she turned round and faced him. "I don't want any of those damned red carpets and things," she said,—"if you'll let me come and live with you—look after you."

She crossed the room and laid her hands heavily on his shoulders; bent towards him to kiss his lips.

"We should be sick to death of each other in a week," he said, meeting her eyes.

"No, we shouldn't."

He gazed steadily at her for a moment. "What makes you think I want any one to live here with me?" he asked curiously.

"I don't know—you do. I saw it the first second I entered the room. I felt it the first moment you asked me to come up here. You know you do yourself. You're sick of this—aren't you?"

"You're right there."

She nodded her head sententiously—proud of her perceptive ability. She wanted to go on saying other things that were just as true, showing how well she understood him; but she could think of nothing. Then she made the fatal mistake. She threw a guess at a hazard.

"And you thought when you saw me that I was just the girl you wanted. I saw that in your face when you turned round."

He smiled. "You've lost the scent," he said, drawing away from her hands. "Lost it utterly. And why do you want to come and live here? You're not fond of me. You don't care a rap for me. Are you hard up?"

Pride—self-respect—they are lost qualities in a lost woman. You must not even look for them. For the moment, she was silent, saying nothing; but there was no moaning of wounded vanity in the heart of her. Two questions were weighing out the issue. If she said she were hard-up, then all opportunity of gaining the chance would be lost. He would give her money—tell her to go. That would be all. If she refused to admit it, the opportunity—slight as it had become—would still be there. Which to do—which course to take? For a perceptible passing of time she rocked—a weary pendulum of doubt—between the two. Then she gave it.

"I'm dead broke," she said thickly.

She saw the last hope vanish with that—looked after it with a curl of bravado on her lip. Lifting her eyes to his, she knew it was gone. There, in the place of it, was the calculation of what he could spare—what he should give.

"How much do you want?" he asked.

The question was ludicrous to her. She wanted all she could get. Now that she had thrown away her chances of the future, her whole mind concentrated with uncontrolled desire upon the present.

"What's the good of asking me that?" she exclaimed bitterly. "I'll take what I can get. Reminds me of a girl—a friend of mine. She's an illegitimate child. Her father's pretty well off. She was down to the bottom of the bag the other day, so she went to her father and asked him for some money. 'My dear child,' he said—'I can't spare you a cent—I've just spent seven hundred and fifty pounds on a motor car—is a sovereign any good to you?'"

There was a bitter sense of humour in the story. She laughed at it—loud, uncontrolled laughter that rang as empty and as hollow as an echo.

"Give me what you can," she added. "Anything above a shilling's better than fourpence."

"Is that what you're down to?"

"Um—"

He took three sovereigns out of his pocket, and gave them to her. She let them lie out flat in the palm of her hand—the three of them, all in a row. They glittered—even in the candle-light. They were her own.

"When are you coming to see me?"

She still looked at them.

"I'm not coming."

Her head shot up; her eyes filled with questions.

"Why not?"

He opened his hands expressively. If there were any answer to that question, she learnt that she was not going to get it.

"Are you going to be married?" she asked slowly.

He shook his head—laughing. Then understanding shot into her eyes, and a flash of jealousy came with it.

"I know," she exclaimed between thin lips.

"What do you know?"

"You're going to keep some woman here—some girl you're fond of."

It was the moment of intuition. She had struck deeper into his mind than even he was aware of himself.

"What makes you think that?"

"What you said."

"What did I say?"

"You admitted that you were sick of being here alone."

"Well—?"

She burst out laughing. "Well—?" She turned to the door. "Good Lord! Isn't every blooming man the same!"

She opened her bag and dropped the three gold pieces into a pocket—one after another. You heard the dull sound of the first as it fell, then the clinking of the other two, when the metal touched metal. She shut the bag—the catch snapped sharp! Then she went.



CHAPTER X

You sow an idea—you sow a seed. It grows upwards through a soil of subliminal unconsciousness until it lifts its head into the clear air of realization. There is no limitation of time, no need for watchful dependence upon the season. Only the moment and the husbandry of circumstances are essential. With these, perhaps a single hour is all that may be required for the seed to open, the shoots to sprout, the plant itself to bear the fruit of action in the fierce light of reality.

In Traill's mind the idea was sown when he stood outside the office of Bonsfield & Co. in King Street. The soil was ready then—hungry for the seed. It fell lightly—unnoticed—into the subconscious strata of his mind. He had not even been aware of its existence. Then, with the woman who had accompanied him to his rooms, came the husbandry of circumstance. She fed the seed. She watered it. Before her foot had finished tapping on the wooden staircase, before the street and the thousand lights had swallowed her up again, his mind had grasped the knowledge of the need that was within him.

On Monday morning he went down to the chambers in the Temple where his name as a practising barrister was painted upon the lintel of the door. This was a matter of formality. Numberless barristers do it every day; numberless ones of them find the same as he did—nothing to be done. He had long since overcome the depression which such an announcement had used to bring with it. There should be no disappointment in the expected which invariably happens. The sanguine mind is a weak mind that suffers it. Traill turned away from the Temple, whistling a hymn tune as if it were a popular favourite.

From there he made his way down into the hub of journalism. The descent into hell is easy. He rode there with a free lance—known by all the editors—capable in his way—a man to be relied upon for anything but imagination. From one office to another, he trudged; climbing numberless stairs, filling in numberless slips of paper with his name, saying nothing about his business. They knew his business—the ability to do anything that was going. He had written leaders on the advance of Socialism—criticized a play, reviewed a book. It says little beyond the fact that one is ready and willing to do these things.

So, until the nearing hour of lunch time, he went about—a scavenger of jobs—sweeping up the refuse of the paper's needs, as the boys in Covent Garden search through the barrows of sawdust for the stray, green grapes that have been thrown out with the brushings of the stalls.

If one knew how half the men in London find the way to live, one would stand amazed. Life is not the dreadful thing; it is the living of it. Life in the abstract is a gay pageant, the passing of a show, caparisoned in armour, in ermine, in motley, in what you will. But see that man without his armour, this woman without her ermine, these in the crowd without their motley and the merry, merry jangling of the bells, and you will find how slender are the muscles that the armour lays bare, how shrivelled the breast that the ermine strips, how dragged and weary is that pitiable, naked figure which a few moments before was dancing fantastically, grimacing with its ape.

Traill took it as it came; the man forced to a crude philosophy, as Life, if we get enough of it, will force every soul of us. You must have a philosophy if you are going to accept Life. Even if you refuse it, you must have a philosophy, call it pessimistic, what you wish, it is still a point of view. The "temporary insanity" of the coroner's court is most times a vile hypocrisy, invented to soothe a Christian conscience.

So long as he found enough work to do, his spirits were light. He had a normal contempt for the temperament that is known as artistic, despised the variability of mood, ridiculed its April uncertainty. This is the man who hews his way through Life, making no wide passage perhaps, no definite pathway for the thousands who are looking for the broad and simple track; but cuts down, lops off, with the sheer strength of dogged determination, the hundred obstacles that beset his progress.

When the clock at the Law Courts was striking the half-hour after twelve, he came up out of that depth of journalism which lies like a hidden world below the level of Fleet Street and made his way along towards the Strand. There was a definite intention in his movements. He walked quickly; turned up without hesitation into Southampton Street, and again into King Street. There the speed of his steps lessened and, walking past the premises of Bonsfield & Co., he kept his eyes in the direction of the window at which he had first seen Sally Bishop at work.

She was there, her fingers more lively now than when he had seen them before, in their eternal dance upon the untiring keys. In the lingering glance he took at her as he walked slowly by, there was much that was curiosity, but a greater interest. Thoughts had swept through his mind since the previous Saturday night. He saw her now from a different point of view. He still found her attractive-compellingly so. There was something exquisitely naive about her, an innocence that was precious. In all the sordid side of life that he had seen—that was his daily portion to see, for the journalism of a free lance can be sordid indeed—he found her fresh. That had been the swift impression which he had formed in the few moments that he had seen her, spoken to her, on the top of the 'bus from Piccadilly Circus. At this second sight of her, he was not disillusioned. Even there, in the midst of offices, chained to the machine at which she worked, she seemed cut out from her surroundings—a personality apart.

He walked past the book shop, down the street, until he came within sight of the clock in the post-office in Bedford Street. It was ten minutes to one. He turned back again. It was a practical certainty that she would be going out to lunch at one. The only question that arose as a difficulty in his mind was the possibility of her being accompanied by some other member of Bonsfield's staff. He knew that it would be inconsiderate to approach her then.

Finally he decided to a wait her coming in one of the arches of Covent Garden market, from whence he could survey the entire length of the street. He had scarcely taken up his position when she came out into view. She walked in his direction, She was alone.

Traill felt a sensation in his blood. It was not unaccountable, but it was unexpected. A combination of eagerness and timidity, that he would have ridiculed in any one else, had mastered him for the moment. Years ago, he would have understood it, expected it. Now he was thirty-six. A man who has lived to his age, lived the years moreover in his way, does not look to be moved to school-boy timidity by the sight of a woman. He pulled a cigarette-case out of his pocket, extracted a cigarette and lit it before he was really conscious of this action.

She passed down Southampton Street into the Strand without noticing him. Then for the second time he followed. It was an easy matter to keep the blue feather in her hat in sight in the crowds of people all hurrying to get the most of the hour for their mid-day meal. He let her keep some yards ahead. Then she vanished into a restaurant at the corner of Wellington Street. He smiled. The matter was as good as done now. In another three minutes he would be ten pounds in her debt.

He allowed a couple of minutes to go by before he entered the restaurant; then he pushed open the doors and his eyes took in the room with a swift scrutiny.

Everything was in his favour. She was seated at a table in the corner of the room, herself the only occupant of it. He walked across to her without hesitation—no timidity now. That had vanished with the need for a show of determination. Here he must dominate the situation or fail utterly.

"There's no need to move to another table," he said as he pulled out a chair for himself and sat down opposite to her. "If you really strongly object to my having my lunch opposite to you, I'll move away."

"I do object," she replied.

"But why?"

"I don't know you, I don't know who you are."

"That's not a great difficulty," he said, smiling.

"I think it is."

He laughed lightly. "Not a bit of it. It can easily be overcome. My name's Traill. I'm a barrister—briefless—the type of barrister that populates the Temple and all those places. One of these days I may come into my own; I may be conducting the leading cases at the criminal bar; I may be—but it's not even one of my castles in the air."

She smiled at his inconsequence. "You seem to take it very lightly," she remarked.

"Why not? Do you imagine I sit in chambers all day long, pining for the impossible which no alchemy of fate can apparently ever alter? I'm also a journalist. That's why I've come to see you." He spoke utterly at random.

"To see me?"

"Yes."

The waitress was standing impatiently by the table, tapping her tray with her fingers.

"What are you going to have?" he asked.

Sally snatched a swift glance at him. Was he conscious that he was overruling her objections? She saw no sign of it. He looked up at her questioningly, waiting for her answer.

"I don't mind at all," she replied. She felt too timid to say what she would really like, too ashamed perhaps to say what she usually had for her lunch. The best course was to let him choose. "I'll have whatever you do," she said agreeably.

He gave the order, a meal for which she could never have afforded to pay. Then he turned back with a humorous smile to her.

"The objection, the difficulty's overcome, then," he said.

Sally allowed herself to smile, eyes in a swift moment raised to his.

"I never said so."

"No, no; but surely this is tacit admission. However, the point is not the saying of it." He saw the look of doubtfulness beginning to show itself in her eyes. "What's the good of talking about it? We're here for the purpose of eating, not discussing social conventions. You know who I am, I shall know who you are in another two or three minutes if you'll be kind enough to tell me. Why, good heavens! life's short enough, without surrounding everything we want with social restrictions. I'm a barrister, I told you that before. In some sort of legal directory you'll find out exactly when I left Oxford and was called to the bar. In Who's Who? you'll find out exactly where I live, though I can tell you that myself—" he mentioned the number of his chambers in Regent Street. "They'll tell you in Who's Who? that my sports are riding, fishing, and shooting—that describes a man in England; it doesn't describe me. I don't ride; I don't fish or shoot; I used to; that's another matter. I only ride an occasional hobby now—fish for work on the papers, and shoot— Lord knows what I shoot! Nothing, I suppose. I belong to the National Liberal Club for the Library, to the Savage where you pass along an editor as you would a christening mug, and to the National Sporting, because there's a beast in every man, thank God!"

He had won her. The rattle of that conversation had driven all thoughts of doubt out of her mind. She would not have denied herself of his company now for any foolish pretext of convention. In that hurried summary of himself and his affairs, proving himself by it, without any pride and conceit, to be a man of very different stamp and interest to Mr. Arthur Montagu, he had marked her in her flight for liberty. Nothing was binding her—no interest in life but to be loved. Had there been any such bond—the prospect of an engagement which was not distasteful to her—he would have found it no easy matter to win her to interest then. But she was free, in the midst of her flight, and he had marked her. She looked into his eyes as the sighted bird blinks before the glittering barrel of the gun, and she knew that he could win her if he chose.

"Well," he said, "I've got nothing more to tell you. How about you?"

She took a little handkerchief out from the folds in her coat, then put it back again, apparently with no purpose.

"I thought you had something to tell me?"

"I?"

"Yes; you said when you came up to the table that you had."

"That? Oh yes, that's business. We'll talk about that later. I want to hear something about yourself first. You're engaged to be married."

He rushed blindly at that—knew nothing about it. A ring on her finger had suggested the thought, but whether it were on the proper finger or not was beyond his knowledge of such little details.

"What makes you think that?" she asked.

"The ring on the finger."

"But that's not the right finger."

"Isn't it?"

"No. My grandmother gave me that."

He held her eyes—forced her to see the comprehension in his.

"Then you won't help me?" he said.

"Help you? How?"

"You don't want to tell me anything about yourself?"

"But I have nothing to tell. I'm a very uninteresting person, I'm afraid."

This was shyness, this dropping into conventional phrases. He led her deftly through them to a greater confidence in his interest, as you steer a boat through shallow, rapid-running water. He wanted to get to the woman beneath it all, knowing that the woman was there. So he made for deep water, guiding her through the shoals. Before they had finished their second course, she was telling him about Mr. Arthur.

"And you don't love him?" he said.

"No."

"Respect him?"

She paused. The pause answered him. The tension of the moment lifted.

"Yes. I respect him. I know he's honourable. He must be reliable. After all he's offering me everything."

You would have thought, to hear her, that the matter was yet in the balance, swaying uncertainly before it recorded the weight. There is the instinct of the woman in that. She felt the shadow of his apprehension; knew that she raised her value in his eyes by the seeming presence of debate. Yet none realized better than she, that Mr. Arthur had been stripped of all possibility now. The fateful comparison had been made—the comparison which most women make in the decision of such momentous issues—one man against another. Their emotions are the agate upon which the scales must swing. In favour of the man before her, they swung with ponderous obviousness.

"Then you'll marry him?" said Traill.

She looked at him questioningly—raised eyebrows—the look of mute appeal. You might have read anything behind her eyes—you might have read nothing. Traill studied them wonderingly.

"You'll marry him—of course," he repeated. He was taking the risk. He might be forcing her to say yes. He prepared himself for it. To take that risk, knowing one way or another, rather than blindly groping to the end, this was typical of him. But he could not force her to the answer that he sought for.

"Do you think I ought to?" she asked.

He drummed his fingers on the table and looked through her.

"Why do you ask me?"

"I'm sorry." She returned sensitively to the food that was before her—"I thought you had seemed interested. I'm sorry—I took too much for granted."

He knew the danger of all this—so did she. But danger of what? That dancing upon the edge of the precipice of emotion is in the normal heart of every woman—and he? He sought it out; to the edge he had brought her, knowing the way—every step of it. She had only followed blindly where he had led. Once there, she knew well the chasm on whose edge she was balancing. Natural instinct alone would have told her that. The height was dizzy. She had known well that if ever she gazed down, it would be that. Her head swam with the giddiness of it. She kept her eyes fixed rigidly on the plate before her, not daring to look up, or meet his glance.

"Suppose you haven't taken too much for granted," he suggested quietly.

"Well?" she raised her head—tried to look with unconcern into his eyes—failed. Then her head dropped again.

"I should say—don't marry him—not yet—wait. The harm that is done by waiting is measurable by inches. Wait. How old are you? Is that rude? No—of course it isn't. It's only rude when a woman's got to answer you with a lie. How old are you? Twenty?"

"Twenty-one."

"Twenty-one! I was fifteen when you first woke up and yelled."

She threw back her head and laughed.

"Why do you laugh?"

"You say such funny things sometimes."

"I remember the first joke I made you thought was bad taste."

She looked at him. There was excitement in her eyes. The rush of the stream had taken her; an impulse for the moment carried her away.

"I repeated that joke afterwards," she said quickly, "the same evening to shock Mr. Arthur."

The moment she had said it, came regret. It was showing him too plainly the impression that he had left upon her. But he seemed not to notice it.

"Was he shocked?" he asked.

"Yes—terribly."

She looked at her watch. That moment's regret had brought her to her senses. The blood came quickly to her face, as she thought how intimately they had talked within so short a time. Reviewing it—as with a searchlight that strides across the sky—she scarcely believed that it was true. In just an hour, she had told him as much—more than she had told Miss Hallard. Had she changed? Was the freedom of the life she lived altering her? She had known Mr. Arthur for a year and a half before he had thought of speaking with any intimacy to her. The thought that she was deteriorating—becoming as other women—passed across her mind with a sensation of nausea. She rose to her feet.

"I must get back," she said.

"But it's only just two," he replied.

"I know, but then I came out five minutes early."

"Are they so fierce as that?"

"Yes, I daren't be late. Mr. Bonsfield gives me his letters directly after lunch. I think he'd tell me I might go, if I was late. You see it's very easy for them to get a secretary, the work's not difficult though there's a lot of it; and there are hundreds of girls who'd be ready to fill my place in a moment."

He watched her considerately. "Thank God, my lance is free," he said. "Well—I suppose you must—if you must. I've enjoyed the talk."

Her eyes lighted, smiling. "So have I—immensely—it is very good of you. Good-bye." She held out her hand.

"Do you think you get off so lightly?" he asked.

"How do you mean?"

"I mean—do you think I'm going to let you go without some chance of seeing you again?"

"But—"

He checked that. He could not guess what had been passing through her mind, yet the note in her voice on that one word was discouraging.

"You are going to come to dinner with me one evening."

She was full of indecision. He gave her no time to think. It was not his intention to do so.

"But how can I?" she began.

"By coming dressed—just as you are. No need to go home and change. I'll be ready to meet you outside the office at six o'clock. You don't get out till a quarter past? Then a quarter past. We go to dinner—we go to a theatre; music-hall if you like—then I drive you down to Waterloo, put you in the last train to Kew Bridge—and that is all."

She laughed in spite of herself.

"I'll write to Strand-on-Green, and let you know what evening. Miss Bishop—what initial?"

"S."

"What's S. for?"

"Sally."

"Miss Sally Bishop, 73 Strand-on-Green, Kew Bridge. And I owe you ten pounds."

For a moment she smiled—then her expression changed.

"That's perfectly ridiculous," she said.

"I wouldn't have you think it anything else," he said; "but, nevertheless, that's a legally contracted debt."



CHAPTER XI

Before she left the office that evening, Sally picked up the volume of Who's Who? kept there mainly because Mr. Bonsfield had a brother whose name figured with some credit upon one of its pages. She turned quickly over the leaves, until the name of Traill leapt out from the print to hold her eye.

"John Hewitt Traill"—she read it with self-conscious interest—"barrister-at-law and journalist. Born 1871; son of late Sir William Hewitt Traill, C.B., of Apsley Manor, near High Wycombe, Bucks. Address: Regent Street. Clubs: National Liberal, and Savage. Recreations: riding, shooting, fishing."

That was all—the registration of a nonentity, it might have seemed—in a wilderness of names. But it meant more than that to her. Each word vibrated in her consciousness. Reading that—slight, uncommunicative as it was—had made her feel a pride in their acquaintance. Her imagination was stirred by the name of the house where his father had lived, where he had probably been brought up. Apsley Manor; she said it half aloud, and the picture was thrust into her mind. She could see red gables, old tiled roofs, latticed windows, overlooking sloping lawns, herbaceous borders with the shadows of yew trees lying lazily across them. She could smell the scent of stocks. The colours of sweet-peas and climbing roses filled her eyes. In that moment, she had fallen into the morass of romance, and through it all, like a gift of God, permeated the sense that it belonged to this man who had dropped like a meteor upon the cold, uncoloured world of her existence.

This is the beginning, the opening of the bud, whose petals wrapped round the heart of Sally Bishop. Romance is the gate through which almost every woman enters into the garden of life. Her first glimpse is the path of flowers that stretches on under the ivied archways, and there for a moment she stands, drugged with delight.

After supper that evening, Mr. Arthur followed her into the sitting-room.

"Can you spare me a few minutes?" he asked.

His method of putting the question reminded her of Mr. Bonsfield's chief clerk—the son of a pawnbroker in Camberwell. He assumed the same attitude of body. Certainly Mr. Arthur did not fold his hands together before him—he did not sniff through his nostrils; but her imagination supplied these deficiencies in the likeness.

She agreed quite willingly. The prospect of what she knew was coming, held no terrors for her. The only real terror is that of doubt. She knew the course she was about to take. There was no hesitation in her mind. The fate of Mr. Arthur in moulding the destiny of Sally's life was weighed out, apportioned, sealed. It had only to be delivered into his hands.

If this is a short time for so much to have happened, it can only be said that Romance is a fairy tale where seven-leagued-boots and magic carpets are essential properties of the mind. In a fairy tale you are here and you are there by the simple turning of a ring. Matter—the body—is a thing of nought. It is the same with Romance; but there you deal with magical translations of the mind. From the grim depths of the valley of despair, you are transported on to the summit of the great mountain of delight; from the tangled forest of doubt, in one moment of time you may be swept on the wings of the genie of love into the sun-lit country of content.

Happening upon this fairy tale—as every woman must—had come Sally Bishop. It would seem a foolish thing to think that Apsley Manor, in the county of Buckinghamshire, should play a part in so great a change in the life of any human being; it would seem strange to believe that out of a two hours' acquaintance could arise the beginning of a whole life's desire; yet in the fairy story of romance, all such things are possible; nay, they are even the circumstances that one expects.

When she walked out along the river-side that evening with Mr. Arthur, there was an unreasoning content in her mind. The lights from the bridge danced for her in the black water, reflecting the lightness of her heart. She was in that pleasant attitude of mind—poised—like a diver on a summer day, before he plunges into the glittering green water. A few more days, another meeting, and she knew that she would be immersed—deeply in love. Now she toyed with it, held the moment at arm's length, and let her eyes feast on the seeming voluptuous certainty of it. And when Mr. Arthur began the long preface to the point towards which his mind was set, it sounded distant, aloof, as the monotonous voice of a priest, chanting dull prayers in an empty church, must sound in the ears of one whose whole soul is struggling to lift to a communion with God Himself.

"I only want to know if you have made up your mind?" he said, when he had finished his preamble.

"Yes, Mr. Arthur, I have."

"You can't?"

He took the note in her voice. It rang there in answer to the apprehension that was already in his mind.

"No, I can't."

"Why not?"

"The same reason I gave you before."

"You don't love me?"

"No; I'm sorry, but I don't."

"That'll come," he tried to say with confidence.

She thought he was really sure of it; but instead of being angry, she felt sorry for him. He hoped for that—he had every right to hope—but oh, he little realized how impossible it was—how utterly, absolutely impossible it was now. There is no rate of exchange for Romance in the heart of a woman; she gives her whole soul for it, and nothing but Romance will she take in return.

"It's no good saying that," she replied; "things don't come when you expect them to. It surely can't be right for people to marry when they are only hoping that one of them may love the other."

"But you seem to forget the position I'm offering you," he said. "Is that no inducement?"

"No; I'm not forgetting it. But do you think position is everything to a woman?"

"No; but she likes a home."

"Then why do you think I gave up mine?"

"I didn't know you had given it up. I thought you had been compelled to earn your living."

"No; not at all. My father was a clergyman down in Kent. He only died last year. My mother still lives there and my two sisters. I could have a home there if I wished to go back to it."

He looked at her in a little amazement. "I suppose I don't understand women," he said genuinely.

She looked up into his uninteresting face—the weak, protruding lower lip, the drooping moustache that hung on to it—then she smiled.

"I suppose, really, you don't," she agreed. "I think we'll go back; I'm getting cold."

They walked back silently together, all the night sounds of the river soothing to her ears, jarring to his. A train rushed by, thundering over the bridge from Gunnersbury way; he looked at it, frowning, waiting for the noise to cease; she watched it contentedly, thinking that it had come from the Temple where Traill was a barrister-at-law.

"Then I suppose it's no good my saying any more," said Mr. Arthur, as he stood at the door with his latch-key ready in the lock. He waited for her answer before he turned it.

"No, no good," she replied gently; "I'm so sorry, but it isn't. I hope it won't be the cause of any unfriendliness; you have been very good to me, and I do really appreciate the honour of it." The same phrases, with but little variation, that every woman uses. It is an understood thing amongst them that a man is conscious of paying them honour when he asks them in marriage, and that it is better to show him that they are sensitive to it. He thinks of nothing of the kind—certainly not at the time. That last appreciation of the honour is the final application of a caustic to the wound that smarts the most of all—though in the end it may heal.

Mr. Arthur turned the key viciously in the lock, and pushed the door open.

"I suppose you have to say that," he exclaimed, "but of course there's no honour about it to you. If your father was a clergyman, you probably look down on me. My father was in the grocery business. He got me into the bank because he had an account there."

He stood by to let her pass him into the hall.

"You're really quite wrong," she began, then she saw that he was not following her. "I thought you were coming in," she said.

"No; I'm not coming in yet. Good night."

He closed the door behind him, and left her abruptly in the darkness of the hall.

She stood there for a moment, listening to the departure of his footsteps as he slouched aimlessly away. He was nobody—nobody in her life—but she felt sorry for him. On the verge of love—in love itself—is a boundless capacity for sympathy. She turned to go upstairs, still feeling pity for him in the pain she had unavoidably caused him. She did not realize that this was simply a reflection, the first shadowing of her love for Traill, that sought any outlet in which to find expression.

In the bedroom, Janet was making a strange costume for a student's fancy dress ball. She did not look up when Sally entered. With her inexperienced needle, the work occupied her whole attention. Sally stood and watched her laborious efforts with a smile of gentle amusement.

"Let me do it for you," she said at last—"those stitches 'll never hold."

In her mood she was willing—anxious to do anything for any one. She felt no fatigue from her day's work. In the everlasting routine, it is the mind that makes the body tired. Her mind was lifted above the ordinary susceptibility to exhaustion.

Janet stuck her needle into the material on her knee, and looked up searchingly.

"What's the matter with you to-night?" she asked.

"Nothing's the matter. Why?"

"You're so officiously agreeable."

Sally laughed.

"You wanted to help Mrs. Hewson to make that mincemeat," Janet continued; "now you want to help me; and you were the soul of good-nature to Mr. Arthur. I'm sure he thinks you're going to accept him."

"No, he doesn't."

"How do you know?"

"I told him after supper. He asked me to come out with him. I told him I couldn't marry him."

Janet looked at her with curiosity, her eyes narrowed, judging the tone of the words rather than the words themselves, as if they were subject for her brush.

"How did he take it?" she asked, gaining time for the maturity of her judgment.

"I feel awfully sorry for him. He went out again when I came in."

"Takes it badly, then?"

"I'm afraid so."

"You're sorry for him?"

"Yes."

"Why? You haven't thrown him over. He's taken his chance—he'll get over it. You're very soft-hearted. It's all in the game. You'll have to take your chance as well, and no one'll be sorry for you if you come worst out of it."

Sally looked at her thoughtfully. "I don't believe you've got a heart, Janet," she said.

"Don't you?"

"Well, have you?"

"It's not a weakness I care to confess to."

"That's as good as admitting it."

Janet was slowly driving to the point. In another moment, she knew that she would have the truth.

"If having a heart means wasting one's sorrows on men like Mr. Arthur, I'm glad I haven't." Janet threw her work over the end of her bed, and looked up at Sally.

"Who is he, Sally?" she asked abruptly. "What's his name? Where does he live?"

"Who?" She tried to lift her eyebrows in surprise, but the blood rushed to her cheeks and burnt them red. "Who?" she repeated.

"The man you're in love with. I asked you before if there was some one in the office; it's silly going on denying it. You'd never have told Mr. Arthur so soon. You'd have hung it on and hung it on for heaven knows how long. No, something's happened, happened to-day. Do you think I can't see? You're bubbling over with it, longing to tell me, and afraid I'll laugh at you." She rose to her feet and stuck her needle into the pincushion, then she put her arm round Sally's waist, and hugged her gently. "Poor, ridiculous, little Sally," she said, the first soft note that had entered her voice. "I wouldn't laugh at you. Don't you know you're made to be loved—not like me. Men hate thin, bony faces and scraggy hair; they want something they can pinch and pet. Lord! Imagine a man pinching my cheeks—it 'ud be like picking up a threepenny bit off a glass counter. Who is he, Sally?"

Sally lifted up her face and kissed the thin cheek.

"Let's get into bed," she whispered.

They undressed in silence. Once, when Sally was not looking, Janet stole a glance at her soft round arms; then gazed contemplatively at her own. They were thin, like the rest of her body—the elbows thick, out of proportion to the arm itself. She bent it, and felt the sharp bone tentatively with her hand. Sally looked up, and she converted the motion of feeling into that of scratching, as though the place had irritated. Then she continued with her undressing.

When once they were in bed and the light was out, Sally told her everything. Janet made no comments. She listened with her eyes glaring out into the darkness, sometimes moistening her lips as they became dry. The unconscious note in Sally's voice thrilled her; it was like that of a lark thanking God for the morning. She felt in it the pulse of the great force of sex—nature rising like a trembling god of power out of the drab realities of everyday existence.

It wakened a sleeping animal in her. She felt as though its stertorous breaths were fanning across her cheeks and she lay there parched under them.

"What's that?" exclaimed Sally under her breath when she had finished her relation.

"What's what?"

"That noise."

They both listened, breaths held waiting between their lips, their heads raised strainingly from their pillows.

On the other side of the wall was Mr. Arthur's room, and from their beds they heard muffled sounds as of a person speaking. They waited to hear the other voice in reply. There was none. He must be speaking to himself. Sometimes the voice would stop. Then came one single sound like a groan, only that it was more exclamatory. For a few moments there was silence; then again a clattering noise. That was recognizable—a boot being thrown on to the floor. It came again—the second boot. Then another single sound of the voice, a sudden violent creaking of springs as a heavy body was thrown on to the bed; then silence.

"That's Mr. Arthur," said Janet. "He's drunk."

And whereas Janet found sympathy for him, Sally lost that which she had.



CHAPTER XII

The dinner was fixed some few days later for seven o'clock in a little restaurant in Soho.

"Don't think because I chose this place," concluded Traill's letter, "that I am considering the fact that we are not dressing, and that, therefore, it ought not to be some ultra-fashionable place. You shall come to those another time if you wish. This particular evening I want to be quiet, and this is the quietest place I know. I leave the theatre to your choosing. Anything will suit me, I have seen them all."

Janet watched her across the breakfast-table as she folded the letter and crumpled it into her pocket. Their eyes met and they smiled.

"I shan't be in to dinner this evening, Mrs. Hewson," Sally said presently.

Mrs. Hewson looked up from a plate of shrimps which had been left over from the last evening's supper. Her sharp little eyes criticized Sally. Janet often stayed out for the evening; that was by no means an uncommon occurrence. Art students are convivial souls; they love the unconventionality of the evenings in each other's company. Sometimes Sally went with her to a small impromptu dance or a musical at-home in the purlieus of Chelsea. But never before had she announced that she was going out by herself. Mrs. Hewson did not profess to have any control over the morals of her lodgers, so long as they did not reflect in any way upon her own respectability; but she could not refrain from that British desire for interference in other people's affairs in the cause of morality itself.

Morality itself, not as any means to an end, but just its bare superficial display of conventional morals, is treasure in heaven to the average English mind. And their morality itself is a poor business—cheap at the best. To be respectable, to do what others expect of you, is the backbone of all their virtue. It has been said, we are a nation of shopkeepers. If that is true, then all the shops are in one street, packed tight, the one against the other. For we are a nation of neighbours too, prone to do what is being done next door, and a lax king upon the throne of England could turn our morals upside down. All things are fashions—even moralities—they take longer to come and longer to go, but they change with the rest of things nevertheless, and we follow, doing what is at the moment the thing to do.

In Mrs. Hewson's eyes, as she looked up at Sally, was a considerate inquiry blent with curiosity, touched with suspicion which she tried in vain to conceal.

"Going out to dinner, Miss Bishop?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Oh—that's nice for you—isn't it?"

"Very."

Though Janet had finished her breakfast, she waited on with amusement concealed behind an expressionless exterior.

"Of course, Mr. Arthur can afford it," Mrs. Hewson went on. Sally made no reply. Mr. Hewson simpered affectedly. "Of course, I'm only supposin' it's Mr. Arthur. P'raps I may be quite wrong." Sally still resorted to silence. "Are you going to a theayter with him?" She shot the last bolt—went as far as decency in such matters and such surroundings would permit, and it succeeded—it forced Sally to retort.

"It's not Mr. Arthur, Mrs. Hewson—there is no need to worry yourself." She snapped the words—broke them crisp and sharp with pardonable irritation and spirit.

"Oh—indeed—I'm not worrying meself. I'm sorry to have made you so offended like—it's no affair of mine. I'm quite aware of that—only that I thought, seeing you've been here nigh on two years and never gone out by yourself before like—I was only just making—whatcher might call—friendly inquiry about it—see?"

She brushed the heads of the shrimps into the slop-basin with her hand and stood up, evidently offended, from the table.

"Of course, it's no business of mine, and I have no cause to complain of anything you do; you give no offence to me, I must say that. I never had better be'aved lodgers than I've got at present."

"But you felt curious?" suggested Janet.

"Me? Curious? Well, I think that's the last thing you could accuse me of. I've got enough affairs of me own without worrying about other people's. Me? Curious?" She laughed at the impossibility of such a thing, and began to clear away the breakfast things with more noise than was actually necessary.

"Well, there's nothing to be excited about, then," said Janet.

Mrs. Hewson laid a cup and saucer with such gentleness upon a pile of plates that the absence of noise was oppressive.

"I'm not excited," she said with crimson cheeks.

"Sorry," said Janet, laconically; "thought you were. If there's a thing more hateful than another, I think it's the vexation of a person who can't satisfy their curiosity about some other body's business. Don't you think so, Mrs. Hewson?"

"I'm sure I don't know. Those abstruse matters don't worry me."

"No? Well, that is so, and it's about the commonest weakness of humanity. If I thought you worried about our affairs—of course, I know you don't, you're most reasonable—I wouldn't stay here another minute."

The colour in Mrs. Hewson's cheeks went from red to white.

"But you said I was curious," she said in a reserved voice.

"Oh yes, that was only fun! Hadn't you better get a key, Sally, if you're going to be late. Can you spare Miss Bishop a key, Mrs. Hewson?"

"Certainly; of course; I'll go and get it."

They both laughed when she had gone out. Sally told Janet that she was wonderful.

"She'll never meddle again," she said. "I couldn't have done it like you did."

"Of course you couldn't."

"But why not? I wouldn't be afraid to, but simply I shouldn't think of things; and why shouldn't I?"

"Because you're not meant to fight, you have to be fought for, like Mr. Arthur fought for you in his own particular way, like this man you're going to meet to-night is fighting for you too."

Sally's eyes looked wonderingly before her. "Do you think things are really like that?" she asked.

"I'm sure of it."

"But why?—why, for instance, are you meant to fight?"

"Do you want me to answer the riddle of the Universe?"

"I don't see why it should be such a riddle."

"Well, it is. I don't know who arranged these things, no more than any one else, though a good many make a comfortable income by telling you that they do. But it's pretty obvious that it is so; that's enough for me."

"I don't see why it's obvious," Sally persisted.

Janet stood away from the table and held out her arms—the thin, fleshless arms—straight, no deviation to the ungainly shoulders. There was unconscious drama in it. Yet she was the last person in the world to act.

"Well, look at me," she said.

Sally only looked at her eyes, and her lips twitched compassionately.

"You may be all wrong," she said. "I may have to fight as well—you don't know—and somebody, you can never tell, may fight for you."

Janet took the round, warm cheeks in her hands and caressed them with the long, sensitive fingers.

"That'll never be," she said quietly—"never—never. I know it right away in here." She laid her hand upon her chest.

"But why?" Sally repeated petulantly, as though wishing it could alter the truth.

"Because I suppose I really want to do the fighting, however much I may think differently, when I see you and hear you talk, when your heart's going and there's all the meaning of it in your eyes. I've got to fight, and away inside me I want to. I suppose that's the compensation."

Then Mrs. Hewson brought the key, saying words over it—an incantation of half-hearted rebuke—and following Sally with her eyes as she walked out of the kitchen.



CHAPTER XIII

There is Bohemianism still—there will always be Bohemianism. But the present will never wear the same air of fantasy as the past. It is the same with all things. Every circumstance take its colour from the immediate surroundings, and you cannot expect to get the same light-hearted Bohemianism in the midst of an orderly, church-going, police-conducted district. What hope is there for a troubadour nowadays with the latest regulations upon street noises? We must dispense with troubadours and get our Romance elsewhere. So everything has to suit itself to its own time—Bohemianism with the rest.

One essential quality there is, however, in this Vie de Boheme that will never alter. It demands that those who live it, shall be careless of the morrow; it expects an absolute liberty of soul, let manners and conditions be what they may. You will still find that; you will always find it. Certain souls must be free and they always seek out the spots of the earth where social restrictions, social exigencies, are least of all in force. They live where life is freest; they eat their meals where it is not compulsory for them to be on their best behaviour. You cannot expect the Bohemian to be a slave, and to customs least of all. The only well-ruled line that he can follow is the customary prompting of his own instinct.

Such a spot—an ideal corner of all unconventionality—is Soho. They say that Greek Street is the worst street in London. You must say something is the worst, to show how bad and good things are. Then why not Greek Street? But for no definite reason. It is really no worse than many another and, with a few more lamps to light its darkened pathways, it might earn that reputation for respectability which would endear it to the most exacting of British matrons. All the doubtful deeds are only done in dark streets. Light is the sole remedy; you will see crime retreating before it like some crawling vermin that dares not show its face. Therefore, why blame Greek Street and those who live there? The county council are to blame that they do not cleanse the place with light.

Bad or good, though—whatever it may be—it is part of Soho; the refuge of Bohemianism to which district Traill brought Sally Bishop on that Thursday evening.

Outside the restaurant in Old Compton Street with its latticed windows, and its almost spotless white lintels and the low-roofed doorway, a barrel-organ was twirling tunes to which two or three girls danced a clumsy step. In the doorway itself, at the top of the precipitous flight of stairs that led immediately to the room below, stood Madame, the proprietor's wife—ready to welcome all who came. Her round, French, good-natured face beamed when she saw Traill, and her little brown eyes gleamed with genuine approval as they swept over Sally.

"Bon soir, Monsieur; bon soir, Madame."

Every lady is Madame, however many during the week Monsieur may choose to bring, and she makes a romance of every single one of them. Her own days are memories, but, being French, she still lives in the romance of others.

"Good evening," said Traill; "how's the business—good?"

"Mais, oui, Monsieur; les affaires vont assez bien."

They climbed down the narrow little staircase, made narrower and almost impassable by the pots of evergreens placed for decoration upon some of the steps. There, in the flood of light, the little room papered in gold, hung with pictures advertising the place, all done by needy customers—mostly French—who had given them to the establishment for a few francs, or out of the fullness of their hearts, they were greeted in welcome again by Berthe, the little waitress.

"Bon soir, Monsieur; bon soir, Madame."

It was like the cuckoo hopping from the clock to sing his note at every quarter.

There were little tables in every corner, all covered with virgin-white cloths and, in the centre of each, a vase full of chrysanthemums. It was all in order—all spick and span—French, every touch of it.

"Ou voulez-vous asseoir, Monsieur? Sous l'escalier?"

Under the staircase by which they had just descended, two tiny tables had been placed—babies, thrust into the corner, looking plaintively for company. An Englishman would probably have made a cupboard of the place for odds and ends.

Traill consulted Sally. She did not mind. Anything in her mood would have pleased her. The atmosphere of all that was foreign in everything around her had lifted her above ordinary considerations. Under the stairs, then, they sat, Traill's head almost touching the sloping roof above him.

"Well, what do you think you'd like to have?" he asked. And Berthe stood by, patiently waiting, content to study the little details that made up Madame's costume; her eyes were lit with the same romantic interest which the proprietress had shown on their arrival.

"I don't mind."

"Well, will you have escargots?"

"What's that?"

"Snails."

Sally shook her head with a grimace and smiled. Berthe tittered with laughter.

"Monsieur is funning, he would not eat escargots himself." She smiled at Sally, the smile that opens confidence and invites you within; no grudging of it between the teeth, ill-favoured and starved, as we do the thing in this country.

"However did you find this lovely little place?" asked Sally, when the girl had gone with Traill's order.

"Deux consommes, deux!" shouted Berthe through a door at the end of the room. "Deux consommes, deux!" came the distant echo from the kitchen.

Traill leant his elbow on the table and looked at her—let his eyes rest on every feature, last of all her eyes, and held them.

"By not looking for it," he said. "By passing it one evening at about the time for dinner, seeing the new-old bottle-panes in the leaded windows, looking down these stairs and getting a rough-drawn impression that the place was cosy, a rough-drawn impression in which the bottle-panes suggested that they had some sort of ideas in their heads, these people—and the little pots of evergreen down the stairs with the ugly red frilled paper round them that made you think that they had known the country—lived in it. All that blurred together in a mazy idea that it was sure to be cosy. Then I came downstairs, saw all these little tables with their vases of flowers, the spotless serviettes sticking up like white horns out of the wine-glasses, saw the beaming face of Berthe over there; was greeted with, 'Bon soir, Monsieur;' and so I dined. That's a year and a half ago. I've had my dinner, on an average, three times a week here ever since."

"It must be nice to be a man," said Sally.

"Why?"

"Oh, I don't know; to dine where you like, find out these quaint little places, never to have to think of the impression you give by what you do."

He leaned back in his chair, and smiled at her. "We have to think just as much as you do, in most of the things we really want to do. I didn't want particularly to dine in such a place as this, that evening I came here. It seemed no liberty to me. There are things I might give the world to be able to do, yet haven't the liberty. What do you want with liberty—the liberty to come and go wherever you please?" He smiled at her again. "What good would it do you?"

Sally wondered what Miss Hallard would say if she were to hear this. She wondered what she would have said herself, had the expression of such ideas come from Mr. Arthur. There was no doubt that she would have repudiated them with vehement denial. With Traill she said nothing—felt that he was right. Why was that? She could not tell. It was beyond her power to analyze the situation as closely as it required. It was beyond her ability to realize that a man may say he is the son of God, if it be that he has behind the words the power of the personality of a Jesus Christ. Traill had the personality—the dominance behind him in what he said—that was all. He might have told her that women were only the chattels of men, born to slavery, the property of their masters, and she would not have denied it to him.

"What in the name of God are women?" he had said more than once in his life—"Is one of them ever worth all the while?" And he thought he had meant it. To a great extent, he acted up to it as well. These are the questions that men of the type put to themselves over and over again—but there are Cleopatras to mate with Antonys, Helens of Troy and Lady Hamiltons who can snap their fingers in the face of such odds and win. But Sally was not of this blood. She is the lamb that goes willing to the slaughter, the woman, whom a man like Traill, when once he holds the trembling threads of her affection, can drive to the uttermost.

"Then you give no liberty to a woman?" she said.

"No—not the liberty she talks about. Not the idea of liberty that she gets from these suffragist pamphleteers."

"I'd like you to meet my friend, Miss Hallard," said Sally.

"Why? Who's Miss Hallard? What is she?"

"She's an artist—I share rooms with her."

"Why would you like me to meet her?"

"I'd like to hear you two argue. She thinks just the opposite. She thinks—"

"I never argue with a woman," Traill interrupted.

"You think so poorly of us?" She tried to say it with spirit—struck the flint in her eyes, contracted her lips to the hard, thin line.

"As women? No—the very best." Her looks did not worry him. Water pouring over marble runs off as smoothly. "You want to be judged as men—you never will be till you can cut your hair short and dress the part. Clothes have the deuce of a lot to do with it. I can love a woman, but, my God, I can't argue with her."

He leant back to let Berthe put the plates of soup before them, and Sally watched his face. It was very hard—high cheek-bones from which the flesh drooped in hollows to the jaws, the grey eyes well set, neither deep nor prominent, but flinching at nothing. There was no great show of intellectuality in the forehead—it was broad, smooth, but not high; yet none of the features were small. The jaw was square, the upper lip long. At one end the mouth seemed to bend upwards in a twist of irony, rather than humour, and the lips themselves were thin—lips that could cut each word to a point if they chose, before they uttered it, a mouth by no means sensitive to the hard things it could speak.

To Sally it both feared and fascinated. Whenever he was not looking, she could not take her eyes away. In the pictures in her mind, it showed itself most often in ironic rage; yet he could look at her with an expression that wooed the softest of thoughts in her heart. Then she felt a slave, and would have given him the world, held in her fingers, the gift would have seemed so small.

He looked up quickly from his plate—all motions of his head were alert. "Why don't you begin your soup?" he asked.

She laughed quietly, and commenced at once with childlike obedience.

"Has Mr. Arthur said anything to you since?" he inquired presently.

For a short moment she hesitated—then she admitted it.

"When?"

"Monday evening."

"Oh—the day you had lunch with me."

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

Again she hesitated.

"What right have I to ask—eh?" he interrupted before she could frame the words to reply. "Isn't that what you're sticking over? Of course I've no right but interest. You brought me the interest, you know—but I apologize for it all the same. Berthe!"

"Oui—Monsieur."

"Maquereaux grilles; and I want something to drink."

Berthe went to the bottom of the stairs, leaning on the third step with her hand and calling up to the room above.