Grace loved the play, and was in high spirits, making an extra toilette for the occasion. She was not half through it when her husband, who had hurried over his dressing, left her and went downstairs. He had heard Auntie, who was always too early for everything, and made a merit of it, leave her room. He found her in the drawing-room, pulling a pair of long white gloves over her large hands and arms.
"I have been stupid enough to leave myself short of cash," Mellish said, beginning lightly at once, almost before he had closed the door behind him. "I wonder if you could oblige me, Auntie, with a few pounds for a couple of days? Say ten or fifteen? Just to carry me on till my money-ship comes in."
Auntie, working on her tight gloves, looked at him; his tone was carefully careless, but his face, which she had called chalk-white, was surely whiter yet. His question being asked, his lips still moved.
"How Grace can bear to sit opposite to him at meals every day, I don't know!" Auntie said to herself. "He gives me the creeps."
She drew in her lower lip loosely beneath her teeth, her gaze grew blanker; never a clever-looking woman, now she looked a fool. Slowly she shook her head.
"No. I am afraid I can't," she said. "I'm afraid I can't spare it. I only brought as much as I should want to get me back home again."
There was a minute's unbroken silence. Gussie's smile, always so pronounced, spread across his gums till his face looked as if it were cut in two.
"I can let you have half a sovereign," Aunty suggested.
"Oh, thank you; it's of no consequence," Gussie said, making a gesture of refusal. He walked about the room as if hurriedly seeking for something he never found.
Auntie, with her unintelligent gaze divided between his movements and the glove which so reluctantly covered her arm, offered a tardy explanation.