Then Louie became matter-of-fact. There was one thing and one thing only to be said. If Mr. Jeffries had told him that, Mr. Jeffries had—lied.
She turned it over again—she found no flaw in it.
Yes, if he had said that, he had lied.
Louie pondered. The result of her pondering was that she said slowly to herself: "Ah—this is going to be more than amusing—unless I'm mistaken it might even become dramatic."
Up to the moment of this astonishing discovery—for Louie knew that she had made a discovery—Mr. Jeffries had been to her a phenomenon, different from Mr. Mackie and Kitty Windus, but not to be observed very differently; now in a twink she placed him in quite another category. Or, if she still lacked a category in which to place him, she certainly removed him for ever from the other. He had called suddenly on her profounder attention, and, as if he had struck upon a rock, the waters of it gushed forth. Apparently to others he was a butt, a jest, a pathetic figure; he was not that to Louie Causton now. They had said, Kitty and the Jewess, that Evie Soames and the red-waistcoated boy, off to Guildford together to-morrow, would before long be engaged to be married; but Mr. Jeffries, the third person in the commonest of dramas, and Mr. Jeffries, the introducer into that drama of a preposterous, impossible fourth actor, whose name Miriam Levey was resolved to know, were not one and the same man. Louie sat astounded again at his lie. It struck her as really in its way stupendous. Others thought he was below his fellows in this shabby little hutch of a Business School; not so Louie now! She saw those clear yellow eyes again. Ruses and machinations lived in them. A butt, with his brown-paper parcel? A pathetic figure, with his cadged baths? No—good gracious, no! The faces of butts and pathetic figures were rather less capable of irradiation. This man's kind made great somethings—great men, great saints, great lovers—if it came to the worst great criminals. Had she, Louie, been that jaunty young man in the red waistcoat, she would have chosen for a rival and enemy anybody she had ever seen rather than this needy, gigantic Mr. Jeffries, who made this barefaced attempt to throw dust into people's eyes by means of apocryphal women he was "after" elsewhere.
And he helped this youngster he must hate with his studies—cadged on his probably-to-be-successful rival for a bath.
He was masked too, then.
Yes, at this dingy School in Holborn Louie had found something even more interesting than amusement.
IV
§a