The Service would be at eight, and would last, say, till nine. Half past nine was the very earliest hour he could fix for his appointment with Miss Usher.
For he had seen her. She had risen up before him, to his amazement, on that Sunday evening, as he turned out of his own door on his way to supper with Wauchope at Clapham. He had walked with her for five minutes, wheeling his bicycle in the gutter, while they settled how and where they were to meet.
She was living in Wandsworth, lodging in St. Ann's Terrace, near to Winny Dymond, so that Winny could take care of her. She had got another situation at Starker's, in the millinery department.
He proposed that he should meet her at closing-time to-morrow, and she smiled at him and said she didn't mind; but Winny would be there (he had forgotten Winny). Then he suggested next Saturday afternoon or Sunday about three; and she said she really couldn't say. Saturday and Sunday were such a long way off, and things might be different now that she was in the millinery. And she smiled again, and in such a manner that he had a vision, a horrible vision, of other fellows crowding round her on Saturdays and Sundays. He more than suspected that this was "cock-a-tree"; but it made him desperate, so that he said, "Well—how about to-night?"
Well—to-night she'd promised Winny she'd be good and go to church.
If he had been madder, if he'd been more set on it, he would have gone off with her that minute; he would have persuaded her to give up church; he himself would have broken his promise to old Wauchope. But he did none of these things, and his abstention was the sign and measure of his coolness, of his sanity. He only said, as any cool and sane young man might say: How about after church? And if he called when he got back from Clapham? He wouldn't be a minute later than half past nine.
And Violet had said: Oh, well—she didn't know about calling. You see, she only had one room. And he had reckoned with that difficulty; for Winny Dymond only had one room which she shared with Maudie. By calling, he'd meant, of course, on the doorstep, to take her for a walk.
But Violet, for some reason, didn't care about the doorstep. She'd rather, if he didn't mind, that he met her somewhere out of doors.
And so they had been drawn into an assignation at the old elm tree by the Causeway on Wandsworth Plain.
Thus, if it had done nothing else to him, the Service for Men could be held responsible for throwing that meeting with Violet much too late.