It was, perhaps, this attitude of hers towards him that made him tell her of his work, which, in these days, became so magnified in importance to him. When by virtue of The Day he got behind the scenes of any phase of London life, he used to make a point of telling her just how it was done, in a rather cock-a-whoop manner.
"Do you know," she said, "we have in our office thirty men who are doing the same thing, and, in all London, there are hundreds more?"
That crushed him entirely. She thought him vain. They very nearly quarrelled seriously.
One day Jamieson, the dramatic critic of The Day, met him in the office. Jamieson was a tubby little man with a high Shakespearean forehead, who exuded cheeriness. He was a professional optimist. He used to depress the reporters' room with his boisterous happiness: he was so glad that the flowers were blooming, and the grass was green, and that there were children, and the joy of life, and so forth.
He accosted Humphrey with twinkling eyes. "Glorious day, Quain," he said; "makes you feel glad that you're alive, doesn't it? Ah! my boy, it's fine to see the streets on a day like this—full of pretty girls in their spring dresses."
"I don't get time to think about the weather, unless I'm writing about it," said Humphrey, with a laugh.
"Buck up, my boy," said Jamieson, patting him on the back. "You want to look on the bright side of things on a day like this.... By the way, would you like to have two stalls for the Garrick to-morrow. It's the same old play they've had for two hundred nights—they only want a paragraph for The Day. I've got a first night on at His Majesty's."
Humphrey accepted the tickets gladly, for he had a vision of an evening at the theatre with Lilian, and Jamieson went on his way, leaving in his wake a trail of chuckling optimism. It happened to be a Saturday night, when he was quite free, and so he arranged with Lilian to meet her at Victoria—she lived at Battersea Park—and then they would have some dinner before they went to the theatre.
In those days Humphrey had not risen to the luxury of an opera hat; he wore a bowler hat, and his coat-collar buttoned up over the white tie of his evening-dress. He thrust his hands into his pockets and waited at Victoria Station for her. She was to meet him at a quarter to seven, and it was now five minutes to the hour and she had not come. He stood there, absolutely white with the tension of the passing moments. It seemed that he had been waiting an eternity, and he had lived through a thousand moments of disappointed expectation. Others who had been waiting there when he came had long since claimed those whom they had come to meet, and walked them off with smiles and laughter. He was still waiting.