He didn’t choose his music-hall with any regard for her. He took her somewhere—she didn’t know or care exactly where. She only knew that it wasn’t in one of the big streets. She sat with him in the box, staring and smiling through the performance. Nothing smote her modesty that night. She had suddenly turned numb. Sometimes, as she stared and smiled at the stage, she saw, not a kicking, painted woman, but a demure, savagely respectable figure in brown. Once a dancer suddenly changed into a big woman, mostly jacket-buttons and red-lined petticoat, who extravagantly popped out a very long tongue, and said, “Yer never knows nothin’, do yer?”
As the evening wore on, and she endured without flinching the risky songs and patter, Sutton’s attitude grew more free. In the cab on the way home he sat beside her, seeming to press her uncomfortably into the corner.
When he unlocked the door of the flat her instinct told her at once that Edred had not returned. Sensation came back. She suddenly felt ill at ease. She wished from her heart that she had not gone out for the evening with Sutton, a man she detested and despised. She looked down at him contemptuously—a middle-aged, vacuous, little-minded, vulgar, cunning creature: a very good example of the played-out mercantile clerk.
“Good-night,” she said curtly.
It seemed an almost superfluous thing to say, jammed in together and alone as they were in the flat, where a whisper almost passed through the walls.
“Good-night,” she repeated, with sudden constraint.
“Wait a bit”—he opened the drawing-room door—“I want to talk to you.”
“I’m tired.”
She marveled at the remarkable change in him. He had become an impressive figure. He absolutely commanded her, as he stood by the open door, in his iron-gray suit. It was baggy at the knees and elbows. It was perfectly true that he had plenty of money now; but he could not shake off the careful habits of twenty years. He only had two new suits a year, and he scrupulously changed his coat whenever he came indoors.