and she could play the simple accompaniment to it with very few mistakes. She remembered Mrs. Perce's words. What if she could do something with her voice? Did she sing well? She allowed herself to glimpse another glorious future.
In the middle of the walk Sally stopped dead.
"Oh, doesn't it...." she said aloud. "Well, we'll just see. We'll just see about it. That's all." And having as it were made her formal protest she resumed the journey, and arrived home tired out, ready for bed; and before she had been in bed more than two minutes she was fast asleep, dreaming of motor cars and footmen standing on the pavement with fur rugs in their hands. In her dream she was alone in the cars. Even the chauffeur had no smallest resemblance to Toby. And yet she still loved him with all her heart, and when she was with him she felt that she extraordinarily belonged to him. Love had again at last encountered ambition, and battle was joined.
iii
Dreams of luxurious motor-cars, and footmen with fur capes and long fawn-coloured overcoats, holding fur rugs to cover her knees, were now constant in Sally's mind. She saw such things occasionally in Regent Street, and loved to look in at the windows of motor broughams upholstered in fawn-coloured corduroy, with arm straps and little hanging vases of fresh flowers. The freshness of these cars was her delight. She had no notion of the income it was necessary to have in order to possess such cars, with their attendant footman and chauffeur; but that income, whatever it was, became her ideal. Money! Lots of money! With money you could have comfort. When she said that, and was warned by conventional wiseacres that money did not produce happiness, she sneered at the timid ones. "Bet I'd be happy," she said. "What's happiness?" She wondered what it was. For her it had been oblivion in Toby's arms. It was so no longer. That was not all she desired. It was not by any means all. And she shrank more and more strongly from a life of squalid toil such as her mother had had—such as she would still have had if Mr. Minto had been a sober man. All her life she had slaved and slaved, and now she was worn out with it. Not for Sally! She had other plans. She had gone to the West End, and the West End was in her blood. She was looking round at life with some of her old calculating determination to exploit it. The death of her father, the passion for Toby,—these had distracted her. With increasing confidence in her position at Madam's, and a new sense of what money could actually do in the way of procuring food and clothes and ordinary or extraordinary physical comforts, Sally had returned to her old faith. She began to have a little money to buy things for herself. Once or twice Miss Summers gave her quite good-sized pieces of material, and there were always scraps to be gathered and utilized. And Sally was enabled to dress carefully. She became the smartest of the girls in the room, for she had a natural sense of smartness. The other girls did not like her, but they all envied her and admired her. It was not that she was unpopular; but that they felt in her the hard determination to get on, and were resentful of her manifest ability to achieve what she meant to do.
The other girls were all sorted out in Sally's mind. There was not one of them into whose nature she had not some biting insight. She had become so practised that she knew all their dresses (as of course all the others did, so that a new one was an event), and knew what everything they owned had cost. She could recognise anything that had been dyed, any brooch or adornment, any stockings. She would have made a good house-detective. But she never told tales. If she knew, she knew, and that was all. It was not for Sally to play the policeman. All knowledge went into her memory. It would be devastatingly produced on the occasion of a row, but Sally rarely quarrelled. With her, nothing ever came to a quarrel. There was no need for it to do so. She was neither jealous nor censorious. One does not quarrel with one who neither loves nor blames nor is stupid or too anxious to show cleverness. Sally merely "was," and the other girls knew it. For this reason she was not liked, but neither was she feared or unpopular. They did not hide things from her, but they did not show them eagerly. Sally was Sally. She enjoyed being Sally. She meant always to be Sally.
And at last there came into Sally's life, when she had been at Madame Gala's for about six months, a new interest, and a singular one. One day, when they were all working very hard, and the electric light was on, Madame came into the workroom with another person. And this person was a young man with a grey, thin face, rather tall and stooping, with a hesitating manner, and a general air of weakness. He followed Madame Gala round the room in an idle way, nodding to several of the girls; and Sally thought he had a very attractive smile. She found him looking at herself with a pair of large soft brown eyes, like chocolate which has been in a warm place. It was a rather dumb look. A little nick came between Sally's brows. She was busy making an inventory of the young man visitor's traits, his features, his clothes. He dressed well, and he was not bad-looking. With more stamina he might have been almost handsome; but he was obviously not in good health. The stoop, the vagueness of all his movements, his soft eye, all betokened as much. Sally turned to Muriel Barrett, who worked next to her.
"Who's he?" she asked, indicating the stranger.
"That's Bertram ... Madame's son. Mr. Merrick, his real name is. But we call him Gaga."
"Wodjer call him that for?" asked Sally. "Isn't he right in his head?"