She began to question the honesty which in Letty’s presence had convinced her. It was probably not 204 honesty at all. She had known girls in the Bleary Street Settlement who could persuade her that black was white, but who had proved on further knowledge to be lying all round the compass. When it wasn’t lying it was bluff. It was possible that Letty was only bluffing, that in her pretense at magnanimity she was simply scheming for a bigger price. In that case she, Barbara, had called the bluff very skilfully. She had put her in a position in which she could be taken at her word. Since she was ready to go, she could go. Since she was ready to go to the bad....
Miss Walbrook was not prim. She knew too much of the world to be easily shocked, in the old conventional sense. Besides, her Bleary Street work had brought her into contact with girls who had gone to the bad, and she had not found them different from other girls. If she hadn’t known....
She could contemplate without horror, therefore, Letty’s taking desperate steps—if indeed she hadn’t taken them long ago—and yet she herself didn’t want to be involved in the proceeding. It was one thing to view an unfortunate situation from which you stood detached, and another to be in a certain sense the cause of it. She would not really be the cause of it, whatever the girl did, since she, the girl, was a free agent, and of an age to know her own mind. Moreover, the secret of the door was one which she couldn’t help finding out in any case. She, Miss Walbrook, could dismiss these scruples; and yet there was that uncomfortable sing-song humming through her brain: “Noblesse oblige! Noblesse oblige!”
“I must get rid of it,” she said to herself, as Wildgoose 205 admitted her. “I’ve got to be on the safe side. I can’t have it on my mind.”
Going to the telephone before she had so much as taken off her gloves she was answered by Steptoe. “This is Miss Walbrook again, Steptoe. I should like to speak to—to the young woman.”
Steptoe who had found Letty crying after Miss Walbrook’s departure answered with resentful politeness. “I’ll speak to Mrs. Allerton, miss. She may be aible to come to the telephone.”
“Ye-es?” came later, in a feeble, teary voice.
“This is Miss Walbrook again. I’m sorry to trouble you the second time.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter.”
“I merely wanted to say, what perhaps I should have said before I left, that I hope you won’t—won’t use the information I gave you as I was leaving—at any rate not at once.”