“After three days they decided to take me to the prison hospital. I shrieked all the way—couldn’t help it. They laughed. So then I laughed. In the hospital, the doctor decided that my left ankle was sprained and my right thigh broken. So I had the best of them, after all. They had to admit they were wrong. It was most awkward for them. Then I thought I might as well begin to eat. But they had to be very careful what they gave me. I hadn’t had anything for nearly six days, you see. They were in a fearful stew. Doctor was there day and night. And it wasn’t his fault. I told him he had all my sympathies. He said he was very sorry I should be lame for life, but it couldn’t be helped, as the thigh had been left too long. I said, ‘Please don’t mention it.’”
“But did they keep you after that?”
“Keep me! They implored my friends to take me away. No man was ever more relieved that the poor dear Governor of Holloway Prison, and the Home Secretary himself, too, when I left in a motor ambulance. The Governor raised his hat to two of my friends. He would have eaten out of my hand if I’d had a few more days to tame him.”
Audrey’s childlike and intense gaze had become extremely noticeable. Jane Foley felt it upon herself, and grew a little self-conscious. Susan Foley noticed it with eager and grim pride, and she made a sharp movement instead of saying: “Yes, you do well to stare. You’ve got something worth staring at.”
Nick noticed it, with moisture in her glittering, hysteric eyes. Miss Ingate noticed it ironically. “You, pretending to be a widow, and so knowing and so superior! Why, you’re a schoolgirl!” said the expressive curve of Miss Ingate’s shut lips.
And, in fact, Audrey was now younger than she had ever been in Paris. She was the girl of six or seven years earlier, who, at night at school, used to insist upon hearing stories of real people, either from a sympathetic teacher or from the other member of the celebrated secret society. But she had never heard any tale to compare with Jane Foley’s. It was incredible that this straightforward, simple girl at the table should be the world-renowned Jane Foley. What most impressed Audrey in Jane was Jane’s happiness. Jane was happy, as Audrey had not imagined that anyone could be happy. She had within her a supply of happiness that was constantly bubbling up. The ridiculousness and the total futility of such matters as motor-cars, fine raiment, beautiful boudoirs and correctness smote Audrey severely. She saw that there was only one thing worth having, and that was the mysterious thing that Jane Foley had. This mysterious thing rendered innocuous cruelty, stupidity and injustice, and reduced them to rather pathetic trifles.
“But I never saw all this in the papers!” Audrey exclaimed.
“No paper—I mean no respectable paper—would print it. Of course, we printed it in our own weekly paper.”
“Why wouldn’t any respectable paper print it?”
“Because it’s not nice. Don’t you see that I ought to have been at home mending stockings instead of gallivanting round with Liberal stewards and policemen and prison governors?”