And for the first night or so, as far as Ransome could remember, that was what he did say.
And he wasn't really clever at collaring her, either. There was something elusive, fugitive, uncatchable about Winny Dymond. It was Booty, driven by love to that extremity, who collared Maudie and walked off with her, with a suddenness and swiftness that left them stranded and amazed. "Fair pace-makin'," Ransome called it.
And Winny struggled and strove with those little legs of hers (jolly little legs he knew they were, too, in their long black stockings), strove and struggled, as if her life depended on it, to overtake them. And it was then that Ransome felt the first pricking of that sense of tenderness and absurdity.
He felt it again after a long silence when, as they were going toward Wandsworth Bridge, Winny suddenly addressed him.
"You know," she said, "you needn't trouble about me."
"I'm not troublin'," he said. "Leastways—that is—" he hesitated and was lost.
"You are," said she, with decision, "if you think you've got to see me home."
He said he thought that, considering the lateness of the hour and the loneliness of the scene, it was better that he should accompany her.
"But I can accompany myself," said she.
He smiled at the vision of Miss Dymond accompanying herself, at eleven o'clock at night, too—the idea! He smiled at it as if he saw in it something tender and absurd. He knew, of course, for he was not absolutely without experience, that girls said these things; they said them to draw fellows on; it was their artfulness. There was a word for it; Ransome thought the word was "cock-a-tree." But Winny Dymond didn't say those things—the least like that. She said them with the utmost gravity and determination. You might almost have thought she was offended but for the absence in her tone of any annoyance or embarrassment. Her tone, indeed, suggested serene sincerity and a sort of sympathy, the serious and compassionate consideration of his painful case. It was as if she had been aware all along of the frightful predicament he had been placed in by Fred Booty; as if she divined and understood his anguish in it and desired to help him out. That was evidently her idea—to help him out.