It was queer, Penderel thought, how simple she became as soon as she talked directly to him, almost childish, whereas every time she spoke about anything else she surprised him. ‘You must go on. I want to be terrified, and I only wish Porterhouse could hear this. It would open his eyes, though he’s by no means a complacent fool about himself, judging from that little anecdote he told at the supper table. Tell me some more about him. Blow the masculine gaff.’
‘Another thing about him is this. I fancy it’s true about a lot of men too. When he asks me to go out with him or to go away with him, it’s not so much that he really wants me there.’ She stopped for a moment to think it out. ‘What he really wants is not to be wanting somebody, d’you see? And that’s not the same thing, is it?’
‘Not by a thundering long chalk,’ he told her. ‘There’s all the difference in the world between ’em.’
‘Well, that’s how it is, mostly, with him. He wants everything, you see, or thinks he does; and if he was by himself, knocking about town or staying at some swell seaside hotel, and he saw a lot of smart and pretty girls drifting round, he’d be as mad as blazes because he hadn’t one. He wouldn’t be able to eat his dinner for thinking about it. But if he has one too, there with him, staring him in the face if he cares to look across, it’s all right then. And he’s got somebody to show off and somebody to explain himself to and boast to, later on. That’s where I come in, then. You see he happens to think I’m rather smart and fairly pretty. Probably you don’t.’
‘My dear Gladys, I think you’re astonishingly pretty, a staggerer.’ He didn’t though; and it suddenly occurred to him that he had met quite a number of prettier girls—belonging to his own class, as people still said—who hadn’t interested him at all, whereas this girl was most curiously attractive and exciting. Like a jolly good music-hall, he told himself. Well, whatever it was that drew him, it wasn’t the mere look of her, though that was agreeable enough.
‘You’d have to say that, wouldn’t you? Well, I don’t think I am very pretty, so there,’ she said, quite earnestly. ‘There’s honesty for you.’
‘Why, what’s the trouble?’
‘Oh, my face is too broad, to begin with, and my nose isn’t right. My figure isn’t either, not for these days when you ought to be very long and slender or a kind of boy.’
‘They’re all wrong. Don’t you worry about them,’ he remarked easily. ‘I detest these death’s head and crossbones women you see everywhere now.’ He remembered, with pleasure, her fine sturdiness, now so much neighbouring warmth. But he was still wondering what it was that attracted him. All her obvious characteristics, of course, her courage and common sense and jolly impudence, floated on a deep rich stream, a Thames itself, of feminine vitality. She made Margaret Waverton seem nothing but a faintly freshened and animated mummy. And the Thames must have come into his mind, because, in some queer fashion, she was mixed up with his feeling about London. It was as if his thought of her danced all the time before a backcloth of the London scene, the roaringly human streets of Cockneydom—of buses and evening papers and oyster-bars and teashops and barrel organs and music-halls. That in itself, on such a night, might explain it all. But he had a feeling that it didn’t.
She was asking him if he was listening. ‘I’ve been hearing it some time,’ she added.