"I suppose she's prettier than ever?" she said. "Such a lovely girl I used to think her! I'm sure you're very lucky, Mr Jeffries, if you don't mind my saying so!"
I did rather mind her saying anything about it at all, but I answered quite conventionally that I considered myself very lucky indeed.
"Those were jolly days!" she passed on into reminiscence. "I loved that poky little old place in Holborn!... Do you remember the Secretary Bird, Mr Jeffries?"
I did remember Weston, the wan, middle-aged "professor."
"Poor old soul! I wonder if he's going with them to the new place? Of course you know they're pulling the old one down?"
"Yes."
"Such a huge one, that one in Kingsway! All the latest improvements—everything! But it won't ever be the same to me.... 'Not room to turn round'?... No, I suppose there wasn't, but I suppose I'm rather faithful to old places and old faces. You aren't, Mr Jeffries?"
"Not just because they're old," I fancied.
"Oh, I think I am, just because they're old!" she replied brightly.
From faces and places she passed to names, though—this was quite marked—only to certain ones; and I became rather obstinately silent except when she actually paused for a remark. For far more significant were the names she omitted than those she pronounced. These, indeed, she positively had the effect of shouting at me, and I suppose it was some heavy-handed delicacy that led her to speak of Weston but not of Archie Merridew, of Evie, but not of Kitty Windus and others she had known far better. I supposed her to be merely gratifying her racial greed for general (including personal) information, on the chance, so to speak, of turning up in the dustheap something she might later sell for twopence; and, noting one of her marked omissions, it occurred to me to wonder whether she might not have seen Kitty Windus, and, failing to get anything out of her, was now pumping myself and looking for an opening to pump Evie also. My eyes rested from time to time on her prominent-featured face and wide, high shoulders; and she did not know that I was wondering whether she was so deeply in Pepper's secrets that we should not be able to dispense with her services when he and I cleared out of the F.B.C. together.