Presently Kitty rose. She crossed to Louie's mirror and adjusted the boat-shaped hat. Then she came back to the bedside again and craned her head forward.
"May I see the baby?" she asked.
"Another time, I think," said Louie, her lips compressed.
Kitty left.
Louie's mind was in a whirl. At her request, Kitty had turned out the gas before leaving, and only a nightlight glimmered on the little invalid's table. She gazed at it. So she too had been haled into the drama!
On the young fancy stationer she wasted never a thought, either of indignation or of anything else; but Kitty—Evie Soames—Mr. Jeffries—Roy—herself!—What a nightmare—what a pantomime! What an incredible genius this Mr. Jeffries seemed to have for getting himself into complications and dragging other people after him! It might well have puzzled anybody—anybody who had not the key of the puzzle—to know which among them all he really had honoured with his choice! Only Miss Levey seemed to be immune. Surely, for the sake of completeness, he could have found a way of dragging her in too!
Louie had to hold her key exceedingly firmly in order to retain even that lunatic theory that seemed to be the truth.
By dint of holding fast, however, the theory still stood the strain. Evie Soames and Mr. Jeffries were still the central figures of the piece. Kitty was still the stalking-horse behind which, for whatever reasons, he machinated. She herself was still merely dragged in at the whim of a vicious little scoundrel over whose tongue whisky and calumnies ran indifferently, and this little beast was still engaged, or all but engaged, to Evie Soames. Yes, the triangle re-established itself. Kitty and herself were no more than imported complications. The big man and the red-waistcoated youth were still the protagonists, and they faced one another over the stupid little head of Evie Soames.
And yet Louie, lying with her boy at her breast and blinking at the nightlight, refused to class herself with the superfluous Kitty. She did not see herself in a "walking on" part. Though she made her entry late, something told her that she would have a word to say—or else it was a botched and mangled piece indeed. Of life itself as a botched and mangled piece she had no conception; though she kept her thoughts of Him locked within her own breast, it was still the bed of them that there was an Artist over all. But for a false start she would have been on the stage now, and she would have given a voice to that pitiful part of poor Kitty's. Say she had not left that Holborn School when she did—she remembered that breaking-up dance—had one more opportunity like that been given to her——
Then in the darkness she coloured violently. She had realised her own thoughts. This was as much as to say that she would have accepted Kitty's rôle—would have consented to be an understudy—would, like other understudies, have ousted the principal in time—would have topped the bill with a man the latest of whose mysterious activities was that he had been a commissionaire——