"What price Gaga on the love path? Whey!"
There was great laughter. Even Sally joined in it. Going home, the other girls in her carriage all insisted upon hearing the song again, and as they all had the quick ear of Cockneys they could sing it in chorus by the time the train reached its journey's end. Sally had become, for a time, the heroine of the occasion. Only Rose, in the other carriage, had made her protest against the song and its singer.
"Love path!" she said, in a warm voice of indignation. "She's nothing but a cocket—a white-faced cocket. That's what she is. She nothing but a white-faced cocket, that Sally Minto!"
From that time onward that was Sally's name among the girls—"Cocket," or "White-faced Cocket." Rose had coined the phrase which would stick. When Sally heard her name the next day, through Muriel's indiscretion, she looked over at Rose with pinched nostrils and a little dry smile. She was flattered. The name was the product of Rose's jealousy and injured vanity; but it was life to Sally, for it was a testimony—the first she had ever had—to her charm and her dangerousness.
iv
She did not tell Toby the next night about her singing. She rather carefully refrained from telling him, not out of considerateness, but from a sort of scorn for his jealousy. To herself she said "Anything for a quiet life." Toby never dreamed that such a person as Gaga existed, any more than he guessed at any of Sally's encounters with young men on the way home. Sally had discretion. Had he been a lover, she might have told him; but as he was more to her than that she saw no reason to arouse his jealousy. And really, if a man spoke to her, and looked all right, where was the harm in letting him walk a little way with her? She never made appointments, and after a time, when they found she could take care of herself, and did not want a non-committed male friend, these fellow-pedestrians soon left her alone. For Sally, each of them was practice. To mention them to Toby would have been to give them all too great importance. And he might have made a fuss, and unnecessarily interrupted her fun. "Where ignorance is bliss," thought Sally, "'tis folly to call out the guard." And, further, "Let sleeping dogs lie until the milk is stolen." And so Toby pursued his own path, and never knew a tenth of what went on in Sally's life and mind. Compared with Sally, he knew nothing at all. She grew each day more rusée, more cunning in knowledge of the world. And Toby blundered where he should have been most astute. It was his fate.
Sally told him about the outing, because she saw he was in a gloomy mood on the day—a Sunday—after the girls' treat. She described it at length as they walked in Waterlow Park, hanging on to his arm, and all the time searching his tell-tale face and guessing at the cause of his manifest depression. She told about the picnic and the woods, and the tea, and the journey home; and she saw his mouth slightly open as he grunted. She could see the tiny points of hair that were beginning to make a perceptible blueness upon his chin, and the moulding of his cheek, and a little patch of fine down upon his cheek bone, and the hair at his temples which she had so often kissed. And she knew by his averted eye that something was the matter with him. She began to try drawing him on the subject—his aunt, had he heard from his mother (who had married again when Toby was a baby, and lived with her husband in the North), what had he been doing at the Works? Ah! That was it. Toby had started, and frowned. It was something at the Works. Oh, he was easy for Sally to read!
"What's the matter?" she suddenly asked. Toby flushed and scowled down at her, very dark and ugly in his irritation, his mouth twisted.
"Matter?" he demanded. "What d'you mean? Nothing's the matter."
"That's why you're so cheerful, I suppose," retorted Sally—"At the Works, I mean." Toby gave her a quick, angry look in which there was an admixture of fear and suspicion.