"I expect she types or something at his place in the City."
"She might be in an A.B.C. shop—no, a Lockhart's."
"Or a barmaid," Kitty hinted.
"Or his vashervoman."
"Oh, I expect he washes his own shirts."
"Perhaps he'll vash her blouses, too, whoever she is."
They both laughed.
Louie, her mask once more a little out of place, turned suddenly away.
Little as she had been inclined to work, she was now, somehow or other, not much more inclined for amusement. She wandered into the shorthand dictation class, but in a few minutes came out again. Then she walked into the lecture-room, where some example or other had been left chalked up on the big blackboard from the last lesson. Thence she went into the typewriting-room, and back to the lecture-room again. Finally she got from the "library"—the little back room where the files and presses and gelatine copiers and a few books were kept—a number of old examination papers, and, finding a chair near the folding door that divided the lecture-room from the general-room, sat down and began to turn them over.
But she thought more of the conversation she had just overheard than she did of the examination papers. It had meant, as far as she had been able to make it out, that Mr. Jeffries had told young Merridew that he was engaged, or hoped to be engaged, to somebody outside the school altogether. That sounded—odd. Of course if Mr. Jeffries said so, Mr. Jeffries ought to know; but it is a difficult matter to disbelieve your own eyes. She supposed she had no choice but to disbelieve them, but—but—there were those two glances he had given at the Polly Ross girl—whom, by the way, she must learn to call by her proper name, Miss Evie Soames.