On that Friday afternoon she did not go home as usual to Sutherland Place to tea. She went instead to the tea-shop across the street the waitresses of which seemed to crowd upon her as if the width of Holborn did not exist. As she sat down at her little marble table she glanced involuntarily across to the windows of the Business School and for a moment dropped the mask to herself. "Dingy place!" she thought; "well, we're a dingy crew inside it." Then, after a long, long walk down Chancery Lane and along the Embankment almost as far as the ship-breakers' yard at Millbank, she returned to evening class.
It was the evening before the day when Polly Ross—she begged her pardon, Miss Evie Soames—was to go with her aunt to the house with the tennis-lawn at Guildford. Young Merridew was not at the School that evening; indeed, he had only been once in the evening all the week, and then, Louie had thought (dropping the mask for another moment) he had better have stopped away. In a word, she had not been sure that he had been entirely sober. But perhaps in that she had been wrong. It didn't matter. She set a wide difference between the gaieties of the sons of fancy stationers with a tidy bit coming in and such diversions as that to which her stepfather had once taken her, pigtail and all. Besides, if people didn't drink liquor she supposed her father would not be able to sell it.
On two occasions already during the past week that mask of her amusement had not so much fallen off as been twitched off before she herself had been aware. Very remarkably, both times the big leonine student, Mr. Jeffries, had been the twitcher. In both cases the actual incident had been the same—a glance, nothing more. But those two glances had set Louie very curiously indeed waiting to see whether a third surprise of the same funny kind would follow them.
The glances had been given by Mr. Jeffries, and they had been directed towards the Soames girl. There had seemed to Louie to be an extraordinary unfitness about them. Had the red-waistcoated boy stolen those glances Louie would have thought no more about it; he and Polly Ross were pretty much a pair; but they had surprised her coming from the other. Louie had been sure that on the first occasion Mr. Jeffries had fancied himself to be unobserved, for he had looked stealthily round about him, had waited for a moment, and then, moving his eyes only, had given that long, slow, daring, masterful look. This had been on the previous Monday evening, in the general room. A few minutes later Mr. Jeffries had gathered up his papers and had stridden past Evie Soames as if he had been unaware of her existence.
Even had something very similar not occurred again on the Wednesday evening, Louie would hardly have forgotten that look; but it had been repeated. But this time, finding Louie's eyes on him, he had seemed to guard himself, to busy himself quite fussily with his papers, and a little to overdo his sudden affectation of indifference. Louie admitted that it would be at her own risk that she put any interpretation that was not amusing on these trifles; but about the glances, their surreptitiousness and the man's deliberate attempt at concealment, there had been no doubt whatever. Polly herself, Louie had to admit, had been quite unconscious of either look. To all appearances, she had been thinking of nothing but of the new novelette in the Pansy Library, or else wondering whether the new pair of shoes she was to go down to Guildford in would come home in time.
On that Friday evening Louie again found herself a little less inclined for amusement than she knew to be good for her. She supposed she ought to work, for if book-keeping and typewriting and so forth were to be her living they might just as well be taken seriously; but she preferred to work where gossip was going on. So she began the evening in one of the days in the E of reference books, where Miss Windus and the thick-lipped Miss Levey were sitting on the short library-ladder, whispering and tittering. Louie opened one of the windows, for she found the place airless, and then idled towards her two fellow-students.
She had gathered that Miss Levey did not like her. Miriam Levey was far less stupid than Kitty Windus, and it was not safe to hand her clichés back to her. Indeed, she had given Louie a far too intelligent look when Louie had gratified this hunger for humour of hers at the unconscious Kitty's expense; and Louie had told herself that it might be as well to be a little more careful. They looked up as Louie joined them, but did not exclude her from their talk.
"I vill find out who she is!" Miss Levey was saying—her W's did sometimes become V's. "I shall plague him till I do!"
"He won't tell you, my dear—not if he wouldn't tell Archie."
"But did Archie actually say 'engaged'?"