"Where are you going to? It's not one o'clock yet," asked Millicent in the small room as Lilian silently unhooked her hat and jacket from the clothes-cupboard.
"Out."
"What for?"
"For Miss G., if you want to know."
And she left. Except her clothes, not a thing in the office belonged to her. She had no lien, no attachment. The departure was as simple and complete as leaving a Tube train. No word! No good-bye! Merely a disappearance.
VI
The Invitation
She walked a mile eastwards along Oxford Street before entering a teashop, in order to avoid meeting any of the girls, all of whom, except the very youngest and the very stingiest, distributed themselves among the neighbouring establishments for the absurdly insufficient snack called lunch. Every place was full just after one o'clock, and crammed at one-fifteen. She asked for a whole meat pie instead of a half, for she felt quite unusually hungry. A plot! That was what it was! A plot against her, matured by Miss G. in a few minutes out of Milly's innuendoes written to Gertie and spoken to Miss G. herself. And the reason of the plot was Miss G.'s spinsterish, passionate fear of a friendship between Felix Grig and Lilian! Lilian was ready to believe that Miss G. had engineered the absence of both her brother and Gertie so as to be free to work her will without the possibility of complications. If Miss G. hated her, she hated Miss G. with at least an equal fierceness--the fierceness of an unarmed victim. The injustice of the world staggered her. She thought that something ought to be done about it. Even Lord Mackworth was gravely to blame, for not having paid his bill. Still, that detail had not much importance, because Miss G., deprived of one pretext, would soon have found another. After all that she, Lilian, had done for the office, to be turned off at a moment's notice, and without a character--for Miss G. would never give a reference, and Lilian would never ask for a reference! Never! Nor would she nor could she approach Felix Grig; nor Gertie either. Perhaps Felix Grig might communicate with her. He certainly ought to do so. But then, he was very casual, forgetful and unconsciously cruel.
All the men and girls in the packed tea-shop had work behind them and work in front of them. They knew where they were; they had a function on the earth. She, Lilian, had nothing, save a couple of weeks' wages and perhaps a hundred pounds in the Post Office Savings Bank. Resentment against her father flickered up anew from its ashes in her heart.
How could she occupy herself after lunch? Unthinkable for her to go to her lodging until the customary hour, unless she could pretend to be ill; and if she feigned illness the well-disposed slavey would be after her and would see through the trick at once, and it would be all over the house that something had happened to Miss Share. The afternoon was an enormous trackless expanse which had to be somehow traversed by a weary and terribly discouraged wayfarer. Her father had been in the habit of conducting his family on ceremonial visits to the public art galleries. She went to the Wallace Collection, and saw how millionaires lived in the 'seventies, and how the unchaste and lovely ladies were dressed for whom entire populations were sacrificed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thence to a cinema near the Marble Arch, and saw how virtue infallibly wins after all.