“Yes; you can fancy I haven’t many minutes to waste. There was a place to-night I had to stop at.”
“I see, I see—” he knew already so much about her work. “It must be an awful grind—for a lady.”
“It is, but I don’t think I groan over it any more than my companions—and you’ve seen they’re not ladies!” She mildly jested, but with an intention. “One gets used to things, and there are employments I should have hated much more.” She had the finest conception of the beauty of not at least boring him. To whine, to count up her wrongs, was what a barmaid or a shop-girl would do, and it was quite enough to sit there like one of these.
“If you had had another employment,” he remarked after a moment, “we might never have become acquainted.”
“It’s highly probable—and certainly not in the same way.” Then, still with her heap of gold in her lap and something of the pride of it in her manner of holding her head, she continued not to move—she only smiled at him. The evening had thickened now; the scattered lamps were red; the Park, all before them, was full of obscure and ambiguous life; there were other couples on other benches whom it was impossible not to see, yet at whom it was impossible to look. “But I’ve walked so much out of my way with you only just to show you that—that”—with this she paused; it was not after all so easy to express—“that anything you may have thought is perfectly true.”
“Oh I’ve thought a tremendous lot!” her companion laughed. “Do you mind my smoking?”
“Why should I? You always smoke there.”
“At your place? Oh yes, but here it’s different.”
“No,” she said as he lighted a cigarette, “that’s just what it isn’t. It’s quite the same.”
“Well, then, that’s because ‘there’ it’s so wonderful!”