“No—frankly, I don’t. You see, in August, ’14, I was a clerk in the office of an auctioneer. If my mother could have had her way I should have been given the education I stand so much in need of now. But my father thought it wouldn’t answer. And in the circumstances and from his own point of view he was right.”
“Surely”—her slow, deep voice seemed to grow more delightful than ever—“when one is the soldier you are, that sort of thing doesn’t matter.”
“I’m afraid it does.” He dissented sadly. “If one is not to be sidetracked by peace requirements one must have every card in the game. You see, there won’t be enough billets to go round and men of my sort will be the first to feel the pinch. I may not be quite up to my job, but somehow”—he drew long and whimsically at his cigarette—“I hardly see myself going back to a stool in an auctioneer’s office.”
She didn’t either, but she didn’t tell him so. There was really no need. He had done so much, and at the back of the curious diffidence which she did not altogether like and which was his involuntary tribute to her strong personality, was the power of will that gets what its possessor wants. And he interested her enormously. At the moment she had seen him first she had felt his attraction. Day by day it had grown. And now as he sat on the schoolroom table talking with the intimacy of a schoolboy she began to feel a little overpowered. He was very simple, very wholesome, very good to look at, and he had proved himself a particularly fine soldier.
It must have been her silence which told him more than she desired he should learn. Certainly her inscrutable eyes gave no information. For quite abruptly, apropos of nothing at all, he said, “I wonder if I might call you Girlie!”
Her odd, sudden laugh sounded a little wild to her own fastidious ear. The sense of the theater, her private curse, was really just a little too much for her just then. Delicious, perfectly delicious situation!
“Mind you”—his frankness was always skirting the indelicate—“it’s not at all the right name for you. In fact, it’s just about the last name you ought to have had. I daresay you got it as a baby, but why it should have stuck to you the dear Lord knows.”
He suddenly moved towards her. But the look of her, the droop of the eyelids, the curved thrust of a strong chin informed him that this was not the time for a wise man to risk too much.
With a sigh he took refuge in his cigarette. More than ever was she an enigma, a mystery. This cool perfection of manner, this almost uncanny power of taking care of oneself seemed to give the lie almost as plainly to the Laxton solicitor’s daughter as it did to the butler and the lady’s maid. What was a girl of this sort doing in this galley? He was not altogether a fool, even if she treated him like one. Her arrogance was boundless, it simply asked for punishment, but at this tantalizing moment he realized ruefully that it called for heavier metal than George Norris to administer it.
His curiosity was horribly piqued. Confound the little vixen!—he began to swing his slippered feet—what wouldn’t he give to bring her down from her pedestal! No girl, at any rate of the wage-earning class, was entitled to bear herself with this sort of devilment.