Mary was shown into what was called the writing-room while inquiries were made for Number Nineteen, which was as far as Geoffrey's individuality was recognized. In each of the windows of the writing-room there was a frayed aspidistra growing apparently in a compost of cigarette-ends, matches, and old plaster. In one corner of the room a man in a stained check-suit with cuffs that were continually trying to swallow his hands was seated at a spindle-shanked desk working out from a Bradshaw fifteen months old a railway journey across country.
"Number Nineteen's gone out," announced the waiter, who looked like the negative of a photograph, so black were his face and shirt-front, so greasy and begrimed were his clothes.
Mary told him that she would wait and asked him to bring her a cup of tea, which he brought half an hour later in a breakfast cup with blunted lumps of dead-looking sugar lying in the saucer beside it, and a hare-lipped jug of pale blue milk.
"I'll bring the bread and butter in a minute," he promised, and though Mary told him that she did not want anything to eat, he brought her four slices a quarter of an hour later.
It was growing dusk in the writing-room of Hawkins' Hotel; the man in the check-suit, unable to read the figures in the railway-guide, was moping in an arm-chair by the empty grate, before Geoffrey came in followed by the waiter, who lighted the two burners of the gaselier which had been fitted with incandescent mantles and pulled down the blinds.
"We can't talk here," said Mary, glancing across at the man in the check-suit, who as soon as the room was lighted up had returned to his railway-guide. "You'd better walk round with me to Morley's Hotel, where I'm staying for to-night."
"I can't leave Mary alone here," Geoffrey replied.
His mother winced at the name.
"If you want to talk private," said the man with the railway-guide, "I'll leave you to yourselves. I've found what I was looking for."
He pushed his cuffs well up with the aid of the edge of the desk, and, whistling "The Honeysuckle and the Bee," went out of the room, leaving mother and son together.