"Oh?" I replied, with complete calm. "That's good news indeed! Wait here a minute—I'll speak to her—don't go, for I want to see you."
I met Evie returning with her towel and celluloid box of soap. She too was excited, so excited that she would have passed me, but I thought I understood that. I stopped her.
"Well, Evie?" I said, smiling.
She waited, painfully full, I couldn't help thinking, of emotion.
"It was you who congratulated me before," I said. "It's my turn now, I hear."
She looked at me and away again, and again at me and away.
"Thank you, Mr Jeffries," she said, beginning to make little pointings of her foot this way and that on the floor.
I spoke very gently. "Jeff—or Mr Jeffries if you prefer it—wishes you nothing but happiness, Evie," I said.
"Oh, thank you," she said, with increasing perturbation, "thank you very much indeed—thank you really—Jeff."
It was odd in the extreme. She gave me the reluctant "Jeff," and somehow I wished she hadn't, it came with such difficulty. Something, I was convinced, lay behind it. I did not expect her in the circumstances to be quite collected, but her manner was—I don't know how else to describe it—almost that of a child who has pleaded with authority for permission to bestow one final charity on an undesirable associate.... What! I thought, she also ashamed to know a commissionaire!