"Girls don't understand these things," he would say with good-natured obstinacy. "Of course I loathe the beastly hole; any decent chap would. But I may as well stop there. It's not my fault that I was ever born, is it? I get enough to live on, with what my cousin allows me; and I'm not going to grind all I know, to get a rise of five bob a week. It isn't good enough. I'm sure I'm very easily contented, and my wants are few enough. Oh, rats! I must have a frock coat; every decent chap has. And you couldn't possibly call that extravagant, because I sha'n't think of squaring it for a year at least. Of course I don't expect you to understand these things, Kitty; it's impossible for a man to do the cheap, like a woman."
And Katharine, who always wanted to reconstitute society, with a very limited knowledge of its first principles, would strike in with a vigorous denunciation of his comfortable philosophy; and he would listen and laugh at her, and make no effort to support his own opinion which he continued to hold, nevertheless. He was the best companion she could have had just then; he never varied, whatever her mood was, and he kept her from thinking too much about herself, which was a habit she had acquired since she last saw him. Besides, he was a link with her childhood, that period of vague existence which had held no problems to be solved, and had never inspired her with a wish to reform human nature. So they spent many evenings and half-holidays together, and they went frequently to the theatre and sat in the gallery, which often entertained them as much as the play itself; and he loved to pay for her, with a manly air, at the box office, and always made the same kind of weak resistance afterwards, when Katharine insisted on refunding her share, under the lamp at the corner of Queen's Crescent, Marylebone. Sometimes, when they were unusually well off, they would dine at an Italian restaurant first, where they could have many wonderful dishes for two shillings, and a bottle of tenpenny claret. On one occasion—it was Ted's birthday, and his cousin had sent him a five-pound note—they had more than an ordinary jubilation.
"Buck up, and get ready!" he had rushed into the little distempered hall to say. "We'll go to a new place, where the waiters aren't dirty, and the wine isn't like sulphuric acid. And, Kitty, put on that hat with the pink roses, won't you?"
They did their best, on that memorable evening, to reduce the five pound-note, and to behave as though they were millionaires. They drove in a hansom to the restaurant in question, which was a very brilliant little one close to the theatres, where they had a waiter to themselves instead of the fifth part of a very distracted and breathless one. The state of Ted's pockets could always be estimated by the amount of attention he exacted from the waiter; and this evening there was absolutely nothing he would do for himself, from the disposal of his walking stick to the choice of the wine.
"It's a very good tip to start by taking the waiter into your confidence," he assured Kitty, when it had just been settled for them that they were to have bisque soup.
"It's convenient, sometimes, when everything is written in French," observed Katharine. Ted changed the conversation. On his twenty-second birthday he felt inclined, for once in a way, to assert himself.
"I'm rather gone on this place; pretty, isn't it?" he continued. "All the candle-shades are red, white, and blue; mean to say you didn't twig that? You're getting less alive every day, Kit! Awfully up-to-date place, this! I don't suppose there is a single decent woman in the room, bar yourself."
He said this with such pride in the knowledge, that she would not have robbed him of his satisfaction for the world.
"They look much the same as other women to me," she observed, after a quick survey of the little tables.
"That's because you don't know. How should you? Women never do, bless them! Do you like fizz?"