“Oh yes; and co-educate their offspring; and by and by I suppose we shall have evolved a sort of intermediate sex, half women who make a hash of doing men’s work, and half men who put flowers in their hair and talk about music. It always seems to me that these girls ought to be sewing or baking, and the men drinking beer and singing limericks in a canteen.—There’s a girl, now——”
The small creature dressed as a shepherdess had just run past. The eyes of both men followed her. Jowett continued.
“Miss Amory Towers. She’s the pick of ’em; one of the clever ones, I mean; and as far as my experience takes me, that means she’s just a little too clever for a woman and not nearly clever enough to make a really satisfactory man. But, of course, she’s young, and I may be wrong.... I put her straight into the Life when she came here, but what she really needs is somebody to put her into Life in another sense. But I doubt if anybody here’ll do it. These fellows don’t see other men enough; too much squiring these young women about.—Eh? Harm in it? Not a ha’porth; they’re too dashed blameless altogether. Sometimes it’s positively unnatural; it seems to me to raise the very questions it’s supposed to suppress. Probably these youngsters will grow up to be fifty, and then discover all the follies they’ve had the chance to commit and haven’t committed, and then they’ll go about preaching doctrines about it all. Really, they scare me sometimes. I’m not naturally gross, but they do drive a fellow——”
But here the other interrupted him.... “Hallo, your little shepherdess seems to be going early.”
Amory Towers, her tiny figure wrapped in a hood and cloak and her young heart one unhappy ache to know the meaning of these two first kisses of her life, was hurrying away.
I
CHEYNE WALK
In Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, there used to stand, and may stand yet, a tenement of which the ground floor was a small “lock-up” greengrocer’s shop, and the remaining portions either dwelling-rooms or else rooms that, like the shop, were left at night and returned to again the next morning. The narrow entry to the right of the shop had once been white-washed, but was now so discoloured that the street boys had ceased to scribble on its walls the names of horses and other matters. It was full of the smell of apples and oranges and of the more suspect odour of earth and bruised rinds and decaying outer leaves, and there was usually a cat or two about, licking up the last splash left by the milkman’s can. When a new milkman took the round he was lucky if he did not come down all-fours at the bottom of the narrow winding staircase that turned off sharp to the right. The staircase itself was as black as the inside of a pair of bellows, and a piece of paper at the foot of it bore two names:
Miss Dorothy Lennard
Miss Amory Towers
These were followed by the words: “First Floor: if Out, leave Parcels at Shop.”