She was in the habit of dispensing money a little largely, and for the present she could quite well afford to do this. For Chaff had done more than pay his debt. That very day she had had a letter from him, forwarded by the bank. He had paid one hundred pounds into her account, asking her to regard the extra twenty-five pounds as interest on his unceremonious borrowing. But she did not for a moment believe his cheerful tale that "things were all right again now"; poor old boy, ten to one he had borrowed pretty ruinously elsewhere in order to pay her. At all events, Weston should not give up his Sundays for nothing, and she might, after all, allow him an outpouring about Richenda and the future nest once in a while. It was only half-a-crown a week.
But as she left Weston she was thinking of something else that half-a-crown a week had power to buy. Half-a-crown a week would have bought this big shabby student a bath almost every day.
To have to carry a change of underclothing in a brown paper parcel to another man's place——
And to have that parcel peeped into——
How damnable—no, how funny, she meant!
In the light of her knowledge of this extraordinary economy Mr. Jeffries had to practise she felt—she didn't know why—almost shy in his presence the next time she saw him. She felt that she possessed something of his—namely, this knowledge—which she ought not to have possessed. She wondered whether he knew how he had been given away. Something about him almost suggested that he might.
Perhaps it was his mouth. It looked, except when he deliberately opened it, as if it might very well not have opened during the whole of the twenty-eight or twenty-nine years Louie guessed him to have had a mouth at all. The rest of his face, which would have been too large for any man less huge, was an unrelenting slab. It was in the mouth if anywhere that sensitiveness must be looked for. Certainly there was none in the eyes. These Louie found (it was on a Wednesday night that she noticed these things; she had seen him first on a Monday) remarkable. They were the eyes of a lion—clear amber, sherry-coloured. They were made more than ever to resemble the eyes of a lion by that tawny ulster he never removed, and she remembered Kitty's sinister and mirthful suggestion. Did his keeping on of that ulster mean something hardly less stark and laughable than the circumstance of the bath itself? (Louie felt that she was learning.) Then she noticed his hands. She always noticed hands. He stopped in passing to pick up a pen for her. The hand that returned it was not only a magnificent engine of sinew and bone and muscle, powerful and heroic; it was also (this was not so funny) exquisitely kept. Her own hand, pale and slender as the leaf of a willow by contrast with his, was not in its different way more perfect. He might cadge for a bath, but his hands he could look after himself for nothing. And that was true of his hair also. It was tawny, close-cut, and took the light as cleanly as a new silk-hat; hair-brushing was evidently cheap also. The man did what he could. She would have liked to hear his voice, but he handed her the pen in silence and passed on.
"Well, he looks forbidding," was her comment on him as the great church-door of his back disappeared into the typewriting-room, "and he has got too big a face and a rather frightening jaw; but he does shave it properly, and I don't see where the 'Mandrill' comes in—wretched little creature with her pound a week! And he is like a lion, with those eyes and that ulster——"
And merely because he seemed to be a person to be scored off and given meanly away, she was already prepared, had she been challenged, to vow that he was handsome—in his heavy and unhumorous way. As a matter of fact, if Roy Lovenant-Smith resembled the little terra-cotta head in the Tanagra Gallery of the Museum, this Mr. Jeffries suggested something from the Assyrian Gallery downstairs—something in black basalt, that might carry the doorway of a temple on its head. In any case, with the ulster, the eyes, and the silky tawny hair, he was as like a lion as needs be.
When she had seen him twice only she took it upon herself to snub young Merridew on his behalf.