“Why not?” he chuckled.
“Do you think you will go and see your Polish friend to-morrow?” She watched anxiously.
“Yes” he conceded blinking sleepily at the end of a long yawn. “I shall perhaps go.”
“He might be driven to desperation” she muttered. Her accomplished evening was trembling in the balance. Its hours had frittered away the horrible stranger’s chance.
“Ah no” said Mr. Shatov with a little laugh of sincere amusement, “Veslovski will not do foolish things.” She rose to her feet on the tide of her relief, meeting, as she garnered all the hours of her long day and turned with an out-spreading sheaf of questions towards the expanses of evening leisure so safely at her disposal in the oncrowding to-morrows, the rebuke of the brilliantly burning midnight gas.
“But tell me; how has Mrs. Bailey been so good?” He sat conversationally forward as if it were the beginning of the evening.
“Oh well.” She sought about distastefully amongst the phrases she had collected in descriptions given to her friends, conveying nothing. Mr. Shatov knowing the framework, would see the detail alive and enhance her own sense of it. She glanced over the picture. Any single selection would be misleading. There was enough material for days of conversation. He was waiting eagerly, not impatient after all of personal experiences. Yet nothing could be told......
“You see she lets me be amphibious.” Her voice smote her. Mrs. Bailey’s kindliness was in the room. She was squandering Mrs. Bailey’s gas in an effort that was swiftly transforming itself under the influence of her desire to present an adequate picture of her own separate life. His quickening interest drove her on. She turned her eyes from the gas and stared at the carpet, her picture broken up and vanishing before the pathos of its threadbare faded patterns.
“I’m neither a lodger nor a boarder,” she recited hurriedly. “I have all the advantages of a boarder; the use of the whole house. I’ve had this room and the piano to myself for years, on Sunday mornings until dinner time, and when there are interesting people I can go down to dinner. I do for weeks on end sometimes, and it is so convenient to be able to have meals on Sundays.”
“It is really a most admirable arrangement,” he said heartily.