“Don’t be silly. I don’t mean personally. I am looking upon you as a type. Well, supposing you did take me on, your wife would call down at the office in a few days, look at me and call you to one side. I can hear her whispering in your ear—‘You must get rid of that girl.’”
“And just why?” he asked.
“I suppose you think that I am very plainly dressed?”
“You look very nice,” he declared, glancing at her neat black and white check tailormade suit, the smart hat, and remembering his glimpse of her silk stockings and shapely black patent shoes as she had come down the stairs; “very nice indeed, but you are dressed quite plainly.”
“The ignorance of men!” she sighed. “This costume I have on cost forty guineas and came from one of the best places in London. My hat cost twelve, and everything else I have on is in proportion. These are the last remnants of my glory. Well, when I went down to the city, I had to wear a blue serge costume I had bought ready-made, sort of hybrid stockings which I hated, a hat of the neat variety, which means no shape and no style, fabric gloves, and shoes from a ready-made shop. I felt, day by day, just as though I were trying to play a hopeless part in some private theatricals. I couldn’t breathe. You see, I am not in the least a heroine. I want the things I’ve been used to, somehow or other.”
“There is another alternative,” Jacob ventured.
“You refer, I suppose, to marriage or its equivalent? As it happens, however, I have peculiar views about sacrificing my liberty. I would sooner give everything I have to a person I cared for than sell myself to a person whom I disliked. Isn’t that your bill?”
Jacob’s fingers trembled a little as he drew out a note and laid it upon the plate.
“I wonder why you dislike me so much,” he speculated, as they waited for his change.
She contemplated him indifferently.