"Yes, Miss Ansley?"
A little breathless, she was, as he had noticed during their previous meeting, oddly grown up for her age, as one who takes responsibilities because there is no one else to bear them. She had the manner and selection of words of a woman of thirty.
"I hope you won't mind my waylaying you like this, but my brother would so much like to see you. You've been so awfully kind that I hope you'll come up. He's in bed, you know."
"When does he want me to come?"
"Well, now, if it isn't troubling you too much. You see, my father and mother are coming home to-night, and he'd like to have a word with you before then. He won't keep you more than a few minutes."
What Tom obscurely felt as an honor to himself she put as a favor he was doing them. It was an honor in that it admitted him a little farther into privacies which to him seemed tapestried with privilege and tradition. His one brief glimpse of their way of living had not made him discontented; it had only appealed to his faculty for awe.
Awe was what he was aware of in following his young guide up the two red staircases to the room where the fat boy lay in bed. It was a mother's-darling's room, amusingly out of keeping with the pudgy, fleshy being whom it housed. Flowered paper on the walls, flowered hangings at the windows, flowered cretonnes on thickly upholstered armchairs, flowered silk on the duvet, garlands of flowers on the headboard and footboard of the virginal white bedstead, made the piggy eyes and piggy cheeks, bolstered up by pillows of which some were trimmed with lace, the more funnily grotesque. Tom Whitelaw saw neither the fun nor the grotesqueness. All he could take in was the fact that beauty could gild the lily of this luxury. He knew nothing of beauty in his own denuded life. The room with two beds which he still shared with Honey at Mrs. Danker's was not so much a sanctuary as a lair.
The fat boy's giggles were those of welcome, and also those of embarrassment.
"After the scrap the other night got sick. Bronchitis. Sit down."
Tom looked round to see what Miss Ansley was doing, but slipping away, she shut the door behind her. He sank into the flowered armchair nearest to the bed. The cracked girlish voice, which now had a wheeze in it, went on.