Hitherto she had hardly known what her feelings towards Roy really were. It had been in order to avoid asking herself that question, among others, that she had amused herself with Kitty Windus and welcomed the buffooneries of Mr. Mackie. But it presented itself to her startlingly now. Her own complete ignorance had just revealed a shining thing to her, the beautiful thing that had transformed Mr. Jeffries' face; now—handy-dandy—that very transformation threw her brutally back on her ignorance again.
She had thought she had sounded a mystery; had she, after all, not sounded any mystery, and was she to pay in labour and pain for nothing?
Her thoughts had flown back; they remained where they had flown. Good gracious! What an escapade! Without mercy for herself she examined it. What had really happened? Anything worth what it was about to cost?
The radiant look of another man at another woman answered her: No.
She had courted him—what a conquest! She had made him say she was pretty—what a victory! She had schemed, planned, ensured her kisses—what a triumph!... Why, she now asked herself for the first time, had she wanted to triumph? Why had she not seen sooner that what she had really wanted had been to be triumphed over? Triumph?—It came to her with a strange newness that women didn't triumph by triumphing. That man with the back like the church door, for example, who had just gone out with that pretty snippet——
Instantly, and with extraordinary resilience, her mind established a contrast.
No woman would have to cajole this shabby, lion-eyed man into admiration of her beauty. Rather she would have to save herself from his onslaught—and then, in her very flying, she would triumph. Louie had found a fool invincible; but this other, when he loved, would go down with the vehemence of his own assault. When Louie had refused to kiss Roy at their parting she had not known exactly why she had done so: she had obeyed an instinct; a chapter had been closed, and had had to be marked as definitely closed; her heart had known no rancour against him. But now!—she might just as well have kissed him. Now, in this strange place, two strange people—or rather one, for the girl mattered nothing—had in a moment, and infinitely, enlarged her sense of what, at any rate to a man, love might mean. In the light of that enlargement any kiss she could have given to Roy would have meant nothing—nothing, nothing. Poor Roy, whom she had had to woo! This other would do his own wooing. Why, he was doing it now——
Then a startling recollection caused Louie to sit suddenly upright. This lion, who had given those looks at that girl—this shabby giant, whose face she had just seen enheavened out of all knowledge—had told young Merridew, who had told Kitty Windus and Miriam Levey, that his heart was set on somebody outside this poky little Business School altogether!
Involuntarily Louie drew a long breath of amazement.
He had told them that!