"If I hadn't been very firm," she laughed as they were shaking hands in the passage, "uncle would have stood talking to you in the street for goodness knows how long, and forgotten all about his bronchitis. Oh, you authors, I believe you are every one like babies." Richard smiled his gratification.
"Mr. Larch, Mr. Larch!" The roguish summons came after him when he was half-way up the street. He ran back and found her at the gate with her hands behind her.
"What have you forgotten?" she questioned. He could see her face but dimly in the twilight of the gas-lamps.
"I know—my umbrella," he answered.
"Didn't I say you were all like—little children!" she said, as she whipped out the umbrella and gave it to him over the gate.
Anxious at once to add something original to the sum of Mr. Aked's observations, he purposely chose a round-about route home, through the western parts of Fulham and past the Salisbury hotel. It seemed to him that the latent poetry of the suburbs arose like a beautiful vapour and filled these monotonous and squalid vistas with the scent and the colour of violets, leaving nothing common, nothing ignoble. In the upturned eyes of a shop-girl who went by on the arm of her lover he divined a passion as pure as that of Eugénie Grandet; on the wrinkled countenance of an older woman he beheld only the nobility of suffering; a youth who walked alone, smoking a cigarette, was a pathetic figure perhaps condemned to years of solitude in London. When there was no one else to see, he saw Adeline,—Adeline with her finger on her lips, Adeline angry with her uncle, Adeline pouring out tea, Adeline reaching down his hat from the peg, Adeline laughing at the gate. There was something about Adeline that.... How the name suited her!... Her past life, judging from the hints she had given, must have been interesting. Perhaps that accounted for the charm which....
Then he returned to the book. He half regretted that Mr. Aked should have a hand in it at all. He could do it himself. Just as plainly as if the idea had been his own, he saw the volume complete, felt the texture of the paper, admired the disposition of the titlepage, and the blue buckram binding; he scanned the table of contents, and carelessly eyed the brief introduction, which was, however, pregnant with meaning; chapter followed chapter in orderly, scientific fashion, and the last summoned up the whole business in a few masterly and dignified sentences. Already, before a single idea had been reduced to words, "The Psychology of the Suburbs" was finished! A unique work! Other authors had taken an isolated spot here or there in the suburbs and dissected it, but none had viewed them in their complex entirety; none had attempted to extract from their incoherence a coherent philosophy, to deal with them sympathetically as Mr. Aked and himself had done—or rather were to do. None had suspected that the suburbs were a riddle, the answer to which was not undiscoverable. Ah, that secret, that key to the cipher! He saw it as it might be behind a succession of veils, flimsy obstructions which just then baffled his straining sight, but which he would rip and rend when the moment for effort came.
The same lofty sentiments occupied his brain the next morning. He paused in the knotting of his necktie, to look out of the window, seeking even in Raphael Street some fragment of that psychology of environment invented by Mr. Aked. Nor did he search quite in vain. All the phenomena of humble life, hitherto witnessed daily without a second thought, now appeared to carry some mysterious meaning which was on the point of declaring itself. Friday, when the first formal conference was to occur, seemed distressingly distant. But he remembered that a very hard day's work, the casting and completing of a gigantic bill of costs, awaited him at the office, and he decided to throw himself into it without reserve; the time would pass more quickly.