"Hullo!" said Egerton.
"Hullo!" said Stephen. "Come in," and then, with a sudden urgency—"quick!"
John Egerton came slowly in and stood still in the dark.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
Stephen said, "I'm in a hole," and turned on the light.
It was very badly managed. No doubt he should have hidden Emily away before he opened the door; should have led up gradually to the ultimate revelation; should have carefully prepared a man like Egerton for a sight like the body of Emily Gaunt. For it was a coarse and terrible sight. She lay on her back by the hat-stand, with her dark hair tumbled on the floor, her face mottled and blue, her eyes gaping disgustingly, her throat marked and inflamed with the fingers of her employer. The coat of Cook was crumpled beneath her, and she had torn great rents in her night-dress in her desperate resistance, so that she lay half-naked in the cruel glare of the electric light. Her two plump legs were crossed fantastically like the legs of a crusader, but so that the feet were wide apart. Her pink flesh glistened and smelt powerfully of soap.
It was not the kind of thing to spring upon any man, least of all should it have been sprung upon Egerton. For he was a highly sensitive man and easily shocked. He had not been, like Stephen, to the war—being a Civil Servant and imperfect in the chest—and in an age when the majority of living young men have looked largely on, and become callous about, death, John Egerton had never seen a dead body.
And he was a person of extraordinary modesty, in the sense in which most women but few men possess modesty. He had a real chastity of thought which few men ever achieve. John Egerton was no prig. Only he had this natural purity of outlook which made him actually blush when indelicate things were said on the stage or hinted at in private society.
And now he was suddenly confronted in the house of his best friend with the dead and disgusting body of a half-naked female. He was inexpressibly shocked.
When the light went on and he looked down at the floor, his mouth opened suddenly, but he said no word; he only stared incredulously at the sprawling flesh.