Not that there was not harder stuff in Louie. There was. There was, for example, that sense of proportion which is humour. How could her thoughts of Mr. Jeffries not be rather preposterous? She found it difficult sometimes to remember even his personal appearance; she had well-nigh forgotten his voice; many idle repetitions had dulled the memory of that odd little thrill she had felt when her hand had lain in his. True, she remembered these things in a way. She remembered the tawny bulk of him, the lion's eyes, the gloss of his hair, the modeless fashion of his speech; but these were mere noted facts, no more hers than everybody else's. Yet what (she asked herself) had become of her sense of humour that she should want something of him that nobody else had? What had happened to her sense of proportion that she did not forget him as she had forgotten scores of people of whom she had seen far, far more? And how had it come about that, for one thought she cast on Roy, Mr. Jeffries had twenty? And why this new and curious understanding of her mother?
She asked herself these questions behind the grilles of her cash-desks, behind the counters of her Earls Court stalls, posing or crocheting on her model thrones, riding backwards and forwards to her sittings or what not on the tops of omnibuses. Usually she answered herself more or less like this:
"It looks very much as if I was making of him what he seems to have made of that Soames girl—a sort of idée fixe; if I were to fall really in love now, I suppose I shouldn't think any more about him. Luckily it doesn't matter; it's my own affair. Good gracious, suppose he knew! He'd think me as imbecile as I am!—There I go again!" (This probably, some minutes later.) "Suppose I had met him earlier, and things had been different—what about it? What's the good of remembering all that now? Well, it puts the time on down this beastly Kennington Lane.... Thank goodness I'm not likely to come across him; I can't help thinking something would happen if I did.... Poor mother!" she usually ended inconsequentially, "I suppose she'd be about my age. I'm turned thirty—thirty-one in fact—shall have to stop counting soon. Time you stopped counting when it occurs to you that your mother had dreams just as silly as yours——"
And so, whether this Mr. Jeffries meant much or little to her, he did not mean so much but that any trivial near occurrence—a cold of young Jimmy's, a cold of her own that prevented her from sitting for a day or two, or a fall in the crochet-market—put Mr. Jeffries and the wild and tangled ideas that seemed to cloak his image temporarily quite out of her thoughts.
When early in the year 1900 she got regular sittings for a time with an artist who lived in St. John's Wood, she never went up or down Tottenham Court Road in the Victoria bus without half expecting to run across Evie Soames, who lived in Woburn Place. Because she did not meet her, she concluded that very likely she lived there no longer. But, late on a windy afternoon in March, at about the time when the street lamps were being lighted, she did meet her.
It was opposite the Adam and Eve, in Euston Road, and on either of the two women's parts there was a curious momentary hesitation. If Evie Soames still lived in Woburn Place and was going home, the first bus that came would do for her, and Louie had already seen her glance as it approached; but as it happened, that bus was the Victoria bus for which Louie herself was waiting. Louie spoke; it seemed to her that not to speak would be to apologise, by silence, for that episode in her career that had brought Kitty Windus in haste to the Nursing Home in Mortlake Road. A large parcel she was carrying gave her an excuse not to shake hands.
"How do you do?" she said.
Something, she could not have told what, had instantly drawn her eyes to the girl's attire. Evie Soames was wearing a black jacket and black fur cap, but the wind, turning the jacket aside, showed the narrow black and white stripes of the blouse beneath.
"Oh—fancy meeting you!" Evie said, turning her dark eyes as if she had only that moment seen Louie. There was something in her manner that Louie interpreted as meaning, "Very well, if I've got to be cordial I'll be cordial!" "Are you going by this bus?" she added.
"Yes."