“Well—yes,” said Lucinda. “But one of us must earn some money, you see. Even if I were that sort of person—and I don’t think I am—I couldn’t afford to do anything useful or heroic. The pay for that isn’t high enough.”
I walked to her house with her, according to our custom—now of three days’ standing. As we went, I was summoning up courage for a venture. When we reached the door I said, “May I let you know from time to time—whenever it’s possible—where I am? So that, if you were in—if real occasion arose, you could write to me and——?”
“Yes, I shall like to hear from you. But I probably shan’t answer—unless I’ve something different to tell you—different from Madame Chose—and better.”
“But if it were—worse?”
“I couldn’t take money from you, if that’s what you mean. Oh, it’s not your fault, it’s nothing in you yourself. But you’re a Rillington.”
“Isn’t that, again, rather fanciful?”
“You seem to call all my deepest instincts fanciful!” she protested, smiling. “But that one’s very deep. Goodness, I could almost as soon conceive of myself accepting Nina Frost’s cast-off frocks!”
We smiled together over that monstrous freak of the imagination. And so, still smiling, we parted—she to go back to Madame Chose and her lingerie, I to my wanderings and nosing about. I did from time to time send her an address that would probably find me; but, as her words had foreshadowed, I got no answers. So it was still Madame Chose—or worse? I had to suppose that; and I was sorrowful. She had been much to blame, but somewhat to be pitied; the root feeling under which she had in the end acted—fidelity to the man to whom she had first belonged—might be primitive, as she herself suggested; it did not seem to me ignoble. At all events, she had not in the end been worldly; she had not sold herself. No, not yet.
For a while I thought a good deal about her; she had made a vivid impression on me in those three days; her face haunted my eyes sometimes. But—well, we were all very busy; there was a lot to think about—plenty of food both for thought and for emotion, immediate interests too strong for memories and speculations to fight against. The echo of her voice was drowned by the clamor of war. The vision of her face faded.