Miss Smithson admitted this regrettable truth with a doleful sigh. Polly took another pull at the brew of hot spiced beer which they had concocted for their comfort this cold December night, and proceeded:
“Thursday, if Mr. Stafford doesn’t bring him along all innocent! He, with his handsome lady on his arm, up from Windsor for the day, to buy her a stylish head for a Christmas present. And, ‘What are you doing, looking in at a hat-shop window, Bellairs,’ says he, laughing and joking (’tis his way, my dear, a very agreeable gentleman!) ‘Gad,’ says he, ‘you’ve not got a wife to run you up bills! Your chinkers goes hopping out on hosses and dice and cards, and what not! Selfish fellows you bachelors are!’ And Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, bowing to Mr. Stafford and declaring he only wished he had other people’s luck—and indeed, Miss Smithson, Mrs. Stafford is a real beauty!—but all the while, my dear, who is he looking at and ogling and taking occasion to whisper to—but Miss Pounce, if you please! And if I didn’t see the way her kerchief lace was quivering with the palpitation of her heart, and her hands shaking as she took down heads for Mrs. Stafford and held them up for her—well, my name’s not Popple.”
Miss Smithson leant over the sulky coal fire and lifted the saucepan from the hob to refill her glass. Her own hands shook. That Pamela was a disgrace and would bring discredit on the whole house of Mirabel! She felt it in her bones.
“You may say so, dear.” As her friend drank, Polly Popple tendered her own tumbler for replenishment, murmuring parenthetically, however: (“Not a drop more, love. I never did hold with stimulants, only you were so pressing and it is a foggy night, I won’t deny, and a drop of cordial, a mere medical precaution, so to speak)—you may say so,” the slighted young lady of the bonnet department took up her theme with fresh gusto. “And you’d say so a million times more if you had seen them to-day. For Mr. Jocelyn comes in with my Lady Kilcroney—and oh! the bold brazenness of it!—there he stands behind my Lady’s chair and Pounce—La! I declare I’d have been sorry for her if she wasn’t what she is, the baggage—red and white and not knowing where to put her eyes with him signalling to her. Yes, and if he did not thrust a letter into her hand as I went out, you may set me down a liar. And her stuffing it into her kerchief under my very nose!”
“Don’t, dear, don’t,” moaned Miss Smithson, beating the air with her bony hand. Then, after a long pause, during which she seemed to be painfully bringing her virginal mind to confront the awful pictures just presented to it, she went on acridly: “There’ll be a bust up. When a girl comes to that pint of disreputableness things is bound to happen. It can’t go on like this—you mark my words.”
Now, strangely enough, barring the inexactitude of the premise, such a conclusion had just formed itself in Pamela’s own mind.
It could not go on. Something was bound to happen. She had saved the life of Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs; and he had demonstrated his gratitude by promptly falling head over heels in love with her. So far, so good; or rather, so far, so bad, where a dashing young gentleman of expensive habits, small principle and remarkable fascination and a young person of the working classes are concerned. For the mischief of it was she had fallen in love with him. Poor Pamela, with her high spirit, her clear brain and her strong courage, to be betrayed by a heart as vulnerable as any silly girl’s of the lot! She was clear-sighted enough to know that, stripped of the golden glamour, the path of her romance led to a very ugly gulf. She despised herself for her weakness. She had no illusions on the quality of the attachment offered to her by Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, but, as the short December days dropped away to Christmas, she found, growing within her, a dangerous new self; a reckless creature who cried: The Devil might take the consequences; a girl was young but once; you found your fate, and had to clasp him or lose him; the one man you could love, and him only, or go wanting to your grave!
“I know it’s death and destruction some time,” said Pamela to herself, sitting hugging her knees in the neat little chamber in Shepherd Street, where she lodged with a most respectable widow woman who had once seen better times, “but isn’t it death and destruction anyhow and at once if I have to give him up?”
She re-read the letter he had slipped into her hand—the audacious fellow—a few hours ago at Madame Mirabel’s.
“It must be yes or no, my darling lovely girl.”