“I shouldn’t like to go through life with a name like that,” she said derisively, with a not over-clean forefinger on that short word PRAY.
Murphy was pouring sherry into her glass. The waiter—we had ordered the dinner from across the way—came in.
“Like what?” asked Murphy, smiling at her paternally.
“Pray!” She tossed her head and giggled again, and then she read the notice aloud.
You should have seen Murphy’s face! A strange silence like a pall settled over the table; to me the news seemed to creep round those silent walls which had reflected Adeline’s shadow so often. It was the effect of Murphy’s frozen expression.
But a man cannot live with a dead woman, especially when she belonged to someone else. I touched Carrie’s foot under the table. She was too young and pretty for a fossil like Murphy. He had snatched the paper from her and was reading the notice for himself.
“Who was she?” demanded the girl, with the freedom of her class toward a chance admirer.
“A lady I knew,” Murphy told her curtly.
Carrie flushed. She resented the word—in these days of universal ladyhood. She was affronted. She was wishing that she had gone straight home from the shop to Battersea as usual, instead of being taken in Murphy’s toils at the corner of the Circus. Her round, childish face grew sulky. The evening was quite spoiled by this stupid dead woman.
Murphy began to eat savagely, talking to me in a jerky way as he did so.