And the next moment she was gone.
Half-an-hour later I met her on the stairs.
"Oh," she announced, without preface, "Phyllis isn't very well, and I think I shall spend the night in the nursery with her."
She has done so.
I have had a wretched night. I turned and turned, but found no sleep. By dint of turning, I found something else, though—a new meaning in those words Louie Causton had said to me: "If I could say that Miriam Levey and Kitty Windus had been chattering, which I can't——" I tossed and tossed.
At half-past ten this morning I went round to the offices of the Women's Emancipation League in Gray's Inn. I can't say, even when I found myself there, asking for Miss Levey, that I was very clear in my own mind as to why I had gone, but if anybody had been tampering with Evie, it was as likely to be the Jewess as anybody else.
She kept me waiting: a thing, I may say, that few people do nowadays. I waited in a matchboarded anteroom, among emancipated flappers and middle-aged disciples of Schmerveloff. Then Miss Levey herself came in as if by accident, and gushed out into apologies. She had had no idea it was I, she said; she did so beg my pardon.... She showed me into an inner room in which a hairy man, the single male-bird of the run, was expounding from a Blue Book to three or four more women; one of them was the lady who had participated in the intellectual courtship on the night of Aunt Angela's party. I turned to Miss Levey.
"I should like, if I may, to speak to you in private," I said.
She asked if Mr Boris's room was empty. The hairy man, looking up from his Blue Book for a moment, said that he thought so. She led the way into Mr Boris's room.
At the sight of her all my old dislike revived, and I found myself able to go straight to the point. I did so, without wasting a word.