"No, you didn't mean that," said Millie. "What you meant was unless I marry. Well, you can make your mind easy—I'm never going to marry. Never! I'm going to die an old maid."
"And you so beautiful!" cried Victoria. "I don't think so," and she threw her arms round Millie's neck and gave her one of those soft and soapy kisses that Millie so especially detested.
But on her way home she forgot the newly-engaged. The full tide of her own personal wretchedness swept up and swallowed her in dark and blinding waters. She had noticed that it was always like that. She seemed free—coldly, indifferently free—independent of the world, standing and watching with scorn humanity, and then of a sudden the waters caught, at her feet, the tide drew her, the foam was in her eyes and with agony she drowned in the flood of recollection, of vanished tenderness, of frustrated hope.
It was so now: she did not see the people with her in the Tube nor hear their voices. Only she saw Bunny and heard his voice and felt his cheek against hers.
Then there followed, as there always followed, the fight to return to him, not now reasoning nor recalling any definite fact or argument, but only, as it had been that first night, the impulse to return, to find him again, to be with him and near him at all possible cost or sacrifice.
She was fighting her own misery, staring in front of her, her hands clenched on her lap, when she heard her name called. At first the voice seemed to call from far away: "Millie! Millie!" Then quite close to her. Some one, sitting almost opposite to her was leaning forward and speaking to her. She raised her head out of her own troubles and looked and saw that it was Peter.
Peter! The very sight of his square shoulders and thick, resolute figure reassured her. Peter! Strangely she had not actually thought of him in all this recent trouble, but the consciousness of him had nevertheless been there behind her. She smiled, her face breaking into light, and then, with that swift sympathy that trouble gives, she realized that he himself was unhappy. Something had happened to him, and how tired he was! His eyes were pinched with grey lines, his head hung forward a little as though it was tumbling to sleep.
Just then Baker Street Station arrived and they got out together. He caught her arm and they went up in the lift together. They came out to a lovely autumn evening, the sky dotted with silver stars and the wall of Tussaud's pearl-grey against the faint jade of the fading light. "What's the matter, Millie?" he asked. "I haven't seen you for a fortnight. I was watching you before I spoke to you. You looked too tragic before I spoke to you. What's up?"
"I was going to ask you the same question," she said.