Then a cap was lifted. I saw the fair hair, brushed sleek as satin, and the keen, blonde face of my employer.
Several people on the platform were glancing at him as if he were almost as well known down here in the country as in Leadenhall Street.
Then eagerly inquisitive glances were turned to me. I caught a whisper of “Mr. William Waters’ young lady!” I wondered if the speaker—a prosperous-looking sort of butcher—expected to overhear some tender greeting? How “sold” he’d have been!
“Ah, there you are, Miss Trant!”—briskly as ever. “Good afternoon. What luggage have you? Porter, bring these things across to the car. I’m motoring you up to the house myself,” added Mr. Waters to me, as we left the station, “because there’s a little supplementary detail I wanted to ‘put you on to,’ so to speak, before you meet my people.”
“Oh, yes?” I said inquiringly, and I mentally reached for my pencil and pad.
But as I sat beside him on the comfortably padded seat with a lovely rug drawn up over my knees, and with a thick glass screen keeping my chic little new hat from getting blown about, I felt the pad-and-pencil side of my life slipping away from me as swiftly and steadily as the green hawthorn hedges that lined the road seemed slipping past this gliding car.
I had had a brute of a time just lately—now came the reaction. I suppose it was partly the entirely feminine sensation, thrilling every scrap of my body, that it was once more decently dressed! Partly, too, it was the influence of skimming over a country road again, breathing in untainted breezes under a blue sky with rolling white cauliflower clouds; having a whole smiling landscape to myself again!—for the moment I lost count of how this had happened. The thoughts of the last hour were left behind with those of the last two years—with the mean streets and the City smells and noises, and those Battersea rooms, and that utter lack of space and privacy, and that crushing sense of being just one unit out of millions that didn’t matter!
Before I’d experienced these things, I’d lived for nineteen years, another sort of life; and this seemed almost like coming home to it. I felt as if I were the fish that, having been left stranded on the proverbial gravel path, has somehow succeeded in flopping back to his native element.
I gave myself up to the luxury of the feeling—to the exhilarating rush through the clear air.