"Lucy, dear—How could you? What were you about? The train...."
"Oh, it was a friend! I had to say good-bye. He didn't know I was going so soon."
She felt that her happiness would stifle her. She flung open the other window. She looked at them both and felt the tenderest pity because they seemed so old, so cross, so dead.
She bent over and kissed her aunt.
"Here we are," said that lady, with an air of intense relief. "Now you'll be all right, Lucy darling. You'll just have Mr. Laud to look after you."
"Yes!" cried Lucy. "Now I'm all right.... Come along, Simon, or we'll miss the train."
[VII]
MRS. PORTER AND MISS ALLEN
One of the largest flats on the fourth floor of Hortons was taken in March, 1919, by a Mrs. Porter, a widow. The flat was seen, and all business in connection with it was done, by a Miss Allen, her lady companion. Mr. Nix, who considered himself a sound and trenchant judge of human nature, liked Miss Allen from the first; and then when he saw Mrs. Porter he liked her too. These were just the tenants for Hortons—modest, gentle ladies with ample means and no extravagant demands on human nature. Mrs. Porter was one of those old ladies, now, alas, in our turbulent times, less and less easy to discover—"something straight out of a book," Mr. Nix called her. She was little and fragile, dressed in silver grey, forehead puckered a little with a sort of anticipation of being a trial to others, her voice cultured, soft, a little remote like the chime of a distant clock. She moved with gestures a little deprecatory, a little resigned, extremely modest—she would not disturb anyone for the world....
Miss Allen was, of course, another type—a woman of perhaps forty years of age, refined, quiet, efficient, her dark hair, turning now a little grey, waved decorously from her high white forehead, pince-nez, eyes of a grave, considering brown, a woman resigned, after, it might be, abandoning young ambitions for a place of modest and decent labour in the world—one might still see, in the rather humorous smile that she bestowed once and again upon men and things, the hint of defiance at the necessity that forced abnegation.