“So you ought to be. You were indirectly responsible for the accident that gave Kate the swollen knee. It was your wretched old push-bike that she fell over.”
Luke wagged his ears. “Indirectly,” he said. “There are many of us in it indirectly. Dunlop, for instance. Niggers in a rubber plantation. Factories in Coventry. A retail shop in High Holborn. And me. All working together. Combining and elaborating in order to give Dot a nasty one on the knee-cap. It’s rather a great thought when you come to think it out that way.”
“I can’t see why you want to ride that old job-lot of scrap-iron at all. You might just as well go by train, now that the new line is opened. All my friends do it. Why can’t you go by train?”
“I believe I know the answer to that one. Don’t tell me. I’ll go upstairs and think it out.”
He went up to the frowsty study-bedroom, and sat down at his table. Mechanically he drew from his pocket the sheet of thirty stamps with which, after a few disparaging remarks, the lady at the post-office had supplied him. He spread them out before him. Thirty stamps. Thirty letters to Jona. He felt inclined to kiss every one of them.
He did not do so. He reflected that in the ordinary course of affixing them to the envelope he would put them to his lips in any case. It was not sense to do the same piece of work twice over.
Jona.
Should he, or shouldn’t he? He knew that he shouldn’t. Mabel would not like it. He ought to put Jona out of his mind, and to burn those stamps. But that was not economical. It was possible to have thirty stamps, and yet to avoid writing thirty love-letters to Jona. He folded them up and put them back in his pocket.
What was it he had come up to do? He remembered. Mabel had asked him a question. He ran downstairs and rejoined her.
“Because of the season ticket,” he said.