'It would have been utterly useless, of course. Reason recognises that, but then conscience isn't always reasonable.'
She agreed with a nod as she galloped through her fish, eager to overtake the menu.
'Besides, I have——' He hesitated a moment, smiling apologetically and playing nervously with a knife. 'I have a propensity myself, and that makes me judge him more easily—and myself not so lightly.'
She looked at his pint of ordinaire with eyebrows raised.
'Oh, no, quite another,' he assured her, smiling. 'But it's enough to teach me what propensities are.'
'What is it? Tell me.' She caught eagerly at the strange luxury of intimate talk.
'Never! But, as I say, I've learnt from it. Are you alone here, Mrs. Trevalla?'
'Here and everywhere,' said Trix, with a sigh and a smile.
'Come for a stroll after dinner. I'm an old friend of Vesey's, you know.' The last remark was evidently thrown in as a concession to rules not held in much honour by the speaker. Trix said that she would come; the outing seemed a treat to her after the pensions.
They drank beer together on the boulevards; he heard her story, and he said many things to her, waving (as the evening wore on) a pipe to and fro from his mouth to the length of his arm. It was entirely owing to the things which he said that evening on the boulevards that she sat now in the flat over the river, her mourning doffed, her guaranteed pensions forsaken, London before her, an unknown alluring sea.