‘Yes.’
‘Did he know?’
‘Yes. There was a kind of engagement. It was while I was at St. Margaret’s.’
‘Do you mean it’s over now?’
Sheila began trying to explain everything. The effort took her away for a moment to the first dim beginnings of love, four or five years back, and then brought her swiftly to the greater glory and deeper pain of the year just gone. Hypatia listened with quiet attention to the rambling, shy, and inadequate narration.
‘It was at a Band of Hope that I first saw him,’ began Sheila.
‘Whatever made you go to a Band of Hope?’ asked Hypatia.
‘I had a friend, Sophie Dewick. She used to go. And they used to have lantern lectures and concerts and things. It wasn’t bad.’
The lantern slides had been a disappointment, being concerned almost entirely with graphical statistics about alcohol. The only picture worth while was that of a flea, magnified some thousandfold, happily reminiscent of the New Geology Reader and of Poe’s stories. This was an inadequate sugar coating to the pill of chemical analysis. But Mr. Beak made everything worth while—Mr. Beak, with spare figure, polished pate, and black bushy eyebrows. When he rose, lifting his hand for silence in order that he might announce ‘Hymn Number twenty-thwee—the twenty-third hymn,’ he seemed like a military commander admitting defeat but determined not to surrender; he seemed, to himself perhaps as to his sympathizers, the last champion of sobriety in a drunken world. This sense of desperate purpose pervaded the whole proceedings of which Mr. Beak had the conducting: the religious service had always this invincible air of being held round an open grave—the open grave of one who, without doubt, had sipped claret-cup at some festival in his youth and in riper years had taken to wife-beating, smoking, swearing, and the other vices incidental to dipsomania. Mrs. Beak, plump, rosy, and smiling, chatted pleasantly to every one and made optimistic secretarial announcements.
‘And that was where I met him,’ Sheila told Hypatia.