"Partner!"
"Well, partner, if you like. Would you take it?"
"Perhaps!" she said, looking at him with a sudden shyness. "What a pity you are not rich. Can't you get a post that would bring you in about £200 a year for a start? I believe you really want something to stimulate you, to make you work in grim earnest—then you would succeed. There's grit in you—I love grit—but at present it's latent, it wants bringing out."
"You are very kind," Shiel said, "but I'm afraid I'm a hopeless case, and, being such, have no business to be in your company. Will you come to the theatre with me?"
"The theatre! When you've no business to be in my company, and when it is as much as you can do to pay the rent of a back attic!"
"Oh, never mind that. I've had tickets given me. I've been doing odd bits of journalism lately, and a dramatic critic I know has given me two stalls at the Imperial!"
"The Imperial!" Lilian Rosenberg ejaculated. "That's where Gladys Martin is acting, surely! I can't bear her!"
"She's not the only person in the cast," Shiel observed drily, "and the play's a good one! Do come!"
With a little more persuasion Shiel gained her consent; and both he and she enjoyed the play, or more correctly speaking, the occasion, immensely. So long as Gladys was on the stage Shiel's eyes never once left her; whilst throughout the performance Lilian Rosenberg saw only Shiel, thought only of Shiel. The interest she had taken in him, the interest she had so confidently asserted was only interest, had grown apace—had grown out of all recognition. It needed only a fillip now to convert that interest into something warmer; and the fillip was not long in coming.
Shiel was seeing Lilian home to her lodgings in Margaret Terrace, a turning off Oakley Street, when a man knocked a woman down right in front of them. He was just the ordinary type of street ruffian—the whitewashed English labourer—and the woman, having without doubt been served by him in the same manner fifty times before, was probably well used to such treatment. But it was more than Shiel, who had spent so much of his life where they treat women differently, could stand, and before Lilian Rosenberg had time to remonstrate, he had rushed up to the prostrate woman, and was holding the man at bay. A scuffle now began, in which the woman, whom Shiel had helped to regain her feet, joined. Both man and woman now attacked Shiel, who, placing himself with his back against the railings, defended himself as best he could.