Julian thought of his own inward verdict on a beauty that had probably been very much too subtle and unvivid for universal recognition, and said nothing.
"I was five years working in London," Miss Marchrose told him simply, "and I have never in my life been spoken to or followed in the street. And no one has ever tried to make love to me."
Julian noted with a flash of appreciation that she did not add, "against my will."
"All the difficulties and all the miseries were quite different. Things I'd never thought of, or realised at all...."
"Tell me about them."
"I was ashamed of minding it so much—but the difference between being a girl living at home, however poor, and a girl going out every day to earn her own living. There were such a lot of things I didn't know. For instance, I had to be told, at that first office I went to, about calling the manager 'sir' when I spoke to him, and his son was 'Mr. Percy' to the clerks and typists, always.
"And then I'd never lived in London, and at first I used to go to Slater's Restaurant for lunch, and think how economical I was, and all the time the other typists were laughing at me and thinking I was giving myself airs because, of course, I ought to have gone to Lyons or an A.B.C. or bought sandwiches and eaten them in the office. And another thing I hadn't realised beforehand was the deadly monotony of it—day after day, sitting in the clatter of all those machines, and typing as hard as one could go. Nothing to look forward to, except Saturday afternoon and Sunday, and then I was dead tired, and I hated my rooms, because they were cheap and ugly and uncomfortable. They weren't really, you know—I had a bedroom and a sitting-room, that first year, and a fire whenever I wanted it—most people have a bed-sitting-room and go to bed when they want to keep warm—but I'd come straight from my home."
She paused.
"How long did you stand it?"
"Eight months. And then I knew I'd been a fool, and I thought that if my mother would forgive me and let me come home, I'd try again. She had a small business and I could have helped her—she always wanted me to. But of course my pride didn't like giving in, and after I'd once made up my mind that I was going back, it seemed easier to bear it all, and so I kept on putting off writing the letter, thinking I'd at least have done a year of it before collapsing. And then my mother died, quite suddenly, and so I never went home at all, except just to settle everything up—it wasn't even our own house. And there was not much more money than before, so when I'd sold the business, which was luckily quite easy, I took another post."