"Well, somebody's got to look after her."
"And so you——?"
"She's coming to me next week."
"I see," I said slowly....
Again such a silence fell on us as, after prolonged sound, has an importunate quality that even sound has not. As if in a dream, I strove to realise that Evie and Billy Izzard were away over in the Vale of Health, dozing probably, awaiting my return from the Berkeley. I tried to understand the plain fact that I was walking the wet streets in the company of a woman who, judged by ordinary standards, bore a smirched reputation, and that I had permitted that woman to make, though without words, a declaration of her love for me. As this last grew on me a little, I let my mind take that particular bypath of speculation. I almost forgot her presence by my side in my odds and ends of memories of her. Once, at a breaking-up party at the old Business College, she had said to me: "As you don't come to me, I come to you," and at the same party she had asked me for a cup of coffee, which I had brought to her in the crowded room instead of giving it to her in some sequestered corner where we could "sit out." Then other memories came. Memory adding itself to memory until I had all the leading facts of her story—that fatal, insignificant, desperate accident—then, mockingly too late, her love for myself—her so strangely happy life, its fulness now to be turned into a superabundance by her voluntary taking up the care of a weak-minded woman—all, all her happy-unhappy story. And now for us to be thrown together like this! Extraordinary, extraordinary! I fancy we were somewhere in the neighbourhood of Sloane Square by this time—Sloane Square, with Evie and Billy waiting for me in the Vale of Health, and her boy asleep many hours ago!... I smiled, though grimly enough, as my eyes encountered my own trousers. Those expensive garments were soaked to the knees. Louie, broken by her day's arduous sitting, now hung heavily on my arm. Her sleeves lay flat to her arms, and her skirt held pounds' weight of water. And we were still walking down Lower Sloane Street, and approaching the Barracks....
It was in Lower Sloane Street—there is a little naturalist's shop thereabouts—that I stopped, once more facing her. It seemed to me that there was something which, if she didn't know it, she ought to know.
"Louie," I said slowly, putting a hand on her shoulder to turn her face towards mine, "I don't know whether you know what you ought to do?"
I saw that she did know. For the first time I saw a return of her old ironical smile. But "What's that?" she asked.
"What, unless you do to me, I can now equally do to you."
"And what's that?" she smiled.