“Very well, Mr. Waters.”
That means another ordeal in the dressing-room, where the ill-ventilated atmosphere will again be set simmering with the unspoken—and the unspeakable. I never did think that this ten pounds a week was going to be exactly easy to earn. But I hadn’t bargained for this—This is outrageous! It makes me hate everybody: Mr. Waters, to begin with, for making the proposal; Jack next, for making it necessary for me to accept it; the girls at the office here, for so hideously misconstruing the position!
My ordinary work, which had for two or three hours pushed my complicated “supernumerary duties” to the back of my mind, has come to an end, and the other thing looms well into the foreground again. I’ve walked nearly all the way back to Battersea, but that hasn’t worked off my simmering indignation even yet.
I shall spend the evening ironing out washing-ribbon and oddments in our tiny kitchen; I can’t stay with Cicely—I should only snap at her, and she would wonder why.
The one relief that I have been able to give to my feelings was when, in crossing the bridge, I tore those glorious crimson carnations (which I wouldn’t leave at the Near Oriental!) out of my coat again, and flung them far, far down into the sluggish brown waters of the river below me. How soon they were out of sight! How I wish that I could put them and everything connected with them, out of mind!
To-day, the day of my second lunch with Mr. Waters, has been one that I don’t think I shall ever forget, even when I’m a white-haired maiden-lady, with no one to lunch with but a parrot or a tabby-cat, and no man’s “appointments” to consult but those of the individual who has to pay me over my Old Age Pension!
Silence—a silence that ought to have rejoiced the heart of Mr. Dundonald, reigned throughout the whole long morning. I knew that the girls meant me to realize that Miss Trant, for outraging the code of the self-respecting business-girl, had been “sent to Coventry.”
This was what helped me to that stiffness of spine, that Suffragette-like defiance of eye, and that unnatural clearness of diction which I felt myself assuming at one o’clock in the dressing-room as I announced, “I think it is at the Savoy that I am lunching with Mr. Waters to-day.” For I flung it down like a gauntlet.
It was Miss Robinson who accepted the challenge with a particularly icy “Gracious!”
The two others stared hard; while Miss Robinson, clearing her throat, fixed her shrewd eyes on me and plucked up courage to add what Smithie and Miss Holt were probably thinking.