“Oh, yes.”
“They won’t let me, you know. I’ve got my own way to make. In three years you’ll be twenty-one. I shall probably have to stay in Thrigsby because I can make a living there, but I’ll get to London as soon as I can. You wouldn’t like Thrigsby.”
“Anywhere with you.”
“The people there aren’t your sort. My own people won’t like my marrying so young. I’ve got rotten uncles and aunts backing me because they think I’m clever. I should have been in business long ago if it hadn’t been for them. My brother’s in a shipping office——”
“What did your father do?”
He shifted uneasily on that. The formula seemed empty and a little vulgar, somehow grimy, to present to her. He answered:
“He drank whisky and smoked cigarettes.”
“Oh! I’m sorry.”
Almost imperceptibly she shrank away from him, but he saw it.
“You may as well know. We’re no great shakes. My old Aunt Janet talks of the great people she has known, but my mother’s just a Thrigsby ‘widow’ living in a thirty-pound-a-year house in an ex-genteel part of the town. There are lots of women like her in Thrigsby. You live in one of those streets and nothing seems to happen. Then you hear that the lady at No. 53 isn’t married to her husband, or that Mr. Twemlow of 25 has run away from his wife and four children. We lived at 49 Axon Street when my father disappeared. We live at 166 Hog Lane West now. We’ve gone up in the world since my brother began to earn money.”