My Mary kept the pressure of pride upon her throat. There was no dribble of emotion. Only the facts popped out—hard and dry, and to Miss Ram intensely illuminative. Mary did not mention George's name. She concluded her narrative with jerky facts relative to the scene in the Park. “Then I ran away,” she said, “and a friend of mine came up. He had seen. And he thrashed him. When I got back to Mrs. Chater's her son had arrived—battered. He told his mother that he had seen me with a man and had interfered. That the man assaulted him. That's all.”
“The miserable hound!” pronounced Miss Ram with extraordinary ferocity.
From a drawer in her desk she took a manuscript book, bound in limp leather, tied with blue ribbon. Herein were contained the remarkable thoughts which from time to time had come to this woman during her seventeen years' occupancy of the chair in which she sat. Upon the flyleaf was inscribed “Aphorisms: by Eugenie Ram.” It was her intent to publish this darling work when beneath each letter of the alphabet twelve aphorisms were written.
“The miserable hound!” cried she, when the full tale of Mr. Bob Chater's vileness was told; drew “Aphorisms” towards her and wrote in hot blood.
Then looked at Mary. “L,” she read, “L. Lust. Lust is the sound meat of natural instinct gone to carrion. Men eat meat, wolves eat carrion. Some men are wolf-men—Hand me the dictionary, Miss Humfray. Two r's in carrion. I thought so. Thank you.”
She replaced “Aphorisms.” “My dear, I will do what I can for you,” she told Mary. “I do believe you. Go into the interview room. I hear a step.”
III.
That step was George's. Abashed in this home of women he shuffled uneasily in the passage, then put a hesitating knuckle upon “Enquiries.”
From within a violent movement was followed by a strange guttural sound. George entered.
With scarlet face and watery eyes, Miss Porter—the stout young woman who presided over this department, and whose habit it was to suck sweets the better to beguile the tedium of her duties—gazed at him; made guttural sounds. The start of George's knock had caused this girl to swallow a particularly large sweet, and its downward passage was inflicting upon her considerable pain.