“Damn that swine,” he suddenly shouted, kicking the spindle-legged table into the fireplace. “We wanted the money, you know. We wanted the money badly.”
Shortly before dawn the three of them abandoned the new house in Streatham and occupied rooms in the Kennington Park Road. Monkley and Sylvia’s father resumed the racing that had temporarily been interrupted by ambition. Sylvia wandered about the streets in a suit of Etons that was rapidly showing signs of wear.
One day early in the new year Sylvia was leaning over the parapet of Waterloo Bridge and munching hot chestnuts. The warmth of them in her pockets was grateful. Her pastime of dropping the shells into the river did not lack interest; she was vaguely conscious in the frosty sunshine of life’s bounty, and she offered to the future a welcome from the depths of her being; meanwhile there still remained forty chestnuts to be eaten.
Her meditation was interrupted by a voice from a passerby who had detached himself from the stream of traffic that she had been disregarding in her pensive greed; she looked up and met the glance of a pleasant middle-aged gentleman in a dark-gray coat with collar and cuffs of chinchilla, who was evidently anxious to begin a conversation.
“You’re out of school early,” he observed.
Sylvia replied that she did not go to school.
“Private tutor?” he asked; and, partly to save further questions about her education, partly because she was not quite sure what a private tutor was, she answered in the affirmative.
The stranger looked along the parapet inquisitively.
“I’m out alone this afternoon,” Sylvia said, quickly.
The stranger asked her what amused her most, museums or theaters or listening to bands, and whether she preferred games or country walks. Sylvia would have liked to tell him that she preferred eating chestnuts to anything else on earth at that moment; but, being unwilling to create an impression of trying to snub such a benevolent person, she replied vaguely that she did not know what she liked best. Then because such an answer seemed to imply a lack of intelligence that she did not wish to impute to herself, she informed him that she liked looking at people, which was strictly true, for if she had not been eating chestnuts she would certainly have still been contemplating the traffic across the bridge.