"Before I asked you to marry me?"
"And me—you've never once taken me to a dance, though I've seen Rachel Levey offer you tickets."
"Perhaps you've seen me look at Miss Levey too?"
"And you never spoke to me, and sat behind the books with Louie."
"Well, there only remains one other suggestion for you to make."
And so on. It was degrading in the extreme. But I was sufficiently punished for it later, when she lay with her head on my breast, sobbing out phrases of contrition for her vindictive temper and supplication for pardon.
All, all gone now was the hour of exaltation in which I had heard the nightingale sing and had felt my glowing girl's breast heaving against my own. I was a hungry, desperate man, living a life against which I knew I should not be able to bear up indefinitely, and already glancing into the public-house as I entered by my side door and beginning to wonder whether they were not wiser than I who made use of the anodyne of drink. Why not drink, and forget for at least an hour? And one night, meeting Mackie again, and having eaten little, I did succumb, and for the first time in my life got drunk. I got drunk at his expense. He had heard the news of Louie Causton, and wanted to talk about it. I, like a cur, let him.... I broke away from him at last, but not until my loosened tongue had said I know not what.
My relation with Evie during this time is difficult to define. She never quite put me back again into the place I had occupied before that Saturday when we had heard the nightingale together, but newer preoccupations overlay this relation. Archie now had money (I never knew quite how much) at his command; but he still showed no sign of putting it to the use Miss Angela, if not I, had expected—that of entering into a formal engagement with Evie. Miss Angela found excuses for this out of her own imagination—that his father had only lately died, and so on; but I could have set her right even then. I knew how things were drifting. From the little I remembered of my talk with Mackie, Archie had found in his coming into money quite another opportunity. What might have facilitated his marriage with Evie actually delayed it. He was getting rid of his money in Leicester Square again.
So Evie's name was associated with his, and yet there was no plighting between them, and Evie swayed, now happy but with a fear, now despairing, but not hopelessly so. There was no trouble she could have brought openly to me even had she wished, but nevertheless she often turned to me significantly full of silence. She, Kitty and I often walked homewards together through the sweltering streets, and when Evie had left us Kitty would speak her mind freely about Archie Merridew.
"He's one of the Jewness Dorey now!" she exclaimed one evening, taking the phrase, I don't doubt, from one of her "better class" novels. "And it's no good saying it's got nothing to do with us! I think you ought to give him a talking-to!"