He could not keep a new meaning out of the glance with which he enforced this assurance. They had strolled round to Ludgate Circus, and come to a halt on the corner, with their backs turned upon a window full of droll phrenological charts and symbols. He consulted his watch once more. “I breakfasted so lightly, and so early,” he said—“it is not luncheon time quite, but that will give us a table to ourselves. You will come across with me, will you not? There are truly important things which have not been said—which I much wish to say.”
After a moment’s reflection she nodded her assent.
CHAPTER XX
Christian and Frances ate their luncheon in an upper chamber, close to a kind of balcony window, which gave upon one of the city’s most crowded thoroughfares. An unceasing and uniform uproar—overridden from time to time by the superior tumult of a passing railway train on a bridge near by—rose from this indefatigable street. They had the room to themselves; the portentous din magnified the effect of the solitude in which they regarded each other, crumbling the bread on the table absent-mindedly, and waiting for the inspiration of speech.
“When I get back,” the girl said at last with a smile, “the racket of my typewriters will seem like the murmur of a gentle breeze down a leafy country lane.”
They laughed—but they had discovered it was not so hard to make oneself heard as they had supposed. Their voices intuitively found a level which served their personal needs, yet did not incommode the waiters yawning at the head of the stairway outside.
“Have you taken to the bicycle?” she was moved in sheer irrelevance to ask him. When he shook his head, she went on: “It is a wonderful thing for women. It has done more for them in three years, than all the progressive intellectual movements of civilization did in three hundred. We all use them, coming to and from the office. We have to store them down in the area, now—but I am going to find a better place.”
Christian rolled his bread crumbs into balls and stared at them in a brown study, from which this topic was powerless to arouse him.