As soon as Nick had gone, Miss Ingate’s smiling face, nervous, intimidated, audacious, sardonic, and good humoured, moved out of the gloom nearer to Rosamund.
“You knew I played the barrel organ all down Regent Street?” she ventured, blushing.
“Ah!” murmured Rosamund, unmoved. “It was you who played the barrel-organ? So it was.”
“Yes,” said Miss Ingate. “But I’m like you. I don’t care passionately for prison. Eh! Eh! I’m not so vehy, vehy fond of it. I don’t know Miss Burke, but what a pity she has got six weeks, isn’t it? Still, I was vehy much struck by what someone said to me to-day—that you’d be vehy sorry if women did get the vote. I think I should be sorry, too—you know what I mean.”
“Perfectly,” ejaculated Rosamund, with a pleasant smile.
“I hope I’m not skidding,” said Miss Ingate still more timidly, but also with a sardonic giggle, looking round into the gloom. “I do skid sometimes, you know, and we’ve just come away from a——”
She could not finish.
“And Mrs. Moncreiff, if I’ve got the name right, is she with us, too?” asked Rosamund, miraculously urbane. And added: “I hear she has wealth and is the mistress of it.”
Audrey jumped up, smiling, and lifting her veil. She could not help smiling. The studio, the lamp, Rosamund with her miraculous self-complacency, Nick with her soft, mad eyes and wistful voice, the blundering ruthless Miss Ingate, all seemed intensely absurd to her. Everything seemed absurd except dancing and revelry and coloured lights and strange disguises and sensuous contacts. She had the most careless contempt, stiffened by a slight loathing, for political movements and every melancholy effort to reform the world. The world did not need reforming and did not want to be reformed.
“Perhaps you don’t know my story,” Audrey began, not realising how she would continue. “I am a widow. I made an unhappy marriage. My husband on the day after our wedding-day began to eat peas with his knife. In a week I was forced to leave him. And a fortnight later I heard that he was dead of blood-poisoning. He had cut his mouth.”