"Why, for a bath—you know, a common or garden bath, with hot water. I peeped into it once (the parcel, I mean; for shame, you dreadful girl!) and it had a clean shirt and a pair of socks in it. I suppose he wraps those he takes off up when he's done."
Louie's eyes had opened very wide indeed. A man to have to ask another man for a bath! Well, that was something learned about London! A bath—a thing so necessary that its existence was assumed—how extremely amusing! She knew that entertaining word, "poor," but what was this other, this new and side-splitting word that meant that a man had to ask another man for a bath? She had never heard of anything so—so—there was no adjective that quite fitted the humour of it.
The next moment she had wasted an irony on Kitty.
"Hasn't he—a tidy bit?" she asked.
But it took far more than this to get through Kitty's hide. She gave another little laugh and drew her gloves more smoothly over her thin hands.
"Him? The Mandrill? (I always call him the Mandrill, my dear.) Not a penny to bless himself with; look at him!"
"Nor a permanency?" Louie asked.
"What, with those clothes? I ask you, now: it isn't a cold night to-night, is it? Well, why does he keep that heavy old coat on all the evening? Enough said, my dear. He works somewhere in the City, I believe—'something in the City'—sounds most prosperous, doesn't it? And Archie's awful kind to him, I think, but of course he is frightfully clever, and does help Archie with his work sometimes, so Archie gives him a bath (I don't mean what you mean, I mean lets him have one). Here's Evie. Are you coming along?"
But Louie, besides being tickled, smarted a little too. To have to beg for a bath—and then to have the gift made a matter of common knowledge and a joke!—
Well, if these people were different, differences, after all, were what she was here to see.