"Poor Kitty! But let me see: was Miriam at the office when Kitty came to Mortlake Road? I thought it was after that she went."
"I've seen Kitty more than once," said Louie, compressing her lips. The bus was slowing down opposite the Oxford.
"Ah, yes, you said so. Well, remember me to her when you see her again, won't you? I get down here. I hope you'll get your parcel home all right; it's rather a large one, isn't it? Good-bye."
As Evie Soames's figure was lost in the crowd that jostled in the lights of the Horse Shoe Louie did not look round. She was too angry. "Good gracious!" she exclaimed, "the insupportable little creature! Why, I never looked at one of my mother's housemaids so! De haut en bas—her to me! But I did catch you that day, Miss Polly Ross, and you know it!"
But as the bus moved southwards again, she was trying once more to forget that white stripe in Evie Soames's dress. She did not want to think that anything had suddenly seemed to come a stride nearer. And she would now rather not have been told, what apparently was the fact, that, whether frequently or not, Evie Soames did see Mr. Jeffries.
The parcel she was taking home contained a dress; she had been sitting in it; but it was not the oyster-grey. The old oyster-grey, too, served to bring her nearer to her mother and that weak flicker of romance long ago in Henson's studio. Not for worlds would she have had Céleste see the idiotic looks she sometimes gave that dress in which she had danced with Mr. Jeffries. And sometimes she would suddenly toss it aside, roughly, anyhow. She was not seventeen (she would tell herself), to moon over a flower a man had given her or a dance programme on which he had scrawled his name. She was a woman of turned thirty-one (she rubbed it in), with her living to earn and an illegitimate son to provide for.... But sometimes she was very wistful too. She had never (she sighed) really been a girl of seventeen at all; looking back, she saw that she had missed that. She blamed nobody; no doubt she had been unruly, ill-conditioned, unmanageable; still, she had missed that. The thought always sent her off into her reveries again; and then, how differently, how much more admirably, she was able to plan everything to herself! Over and over again she built it all up, unbuilt it again, rearranged it, played with it. Had she, as a girl of seventeen, met Mr. Jeffries—had this circumstance been different, that particular not been the same—had she nursed no grudge against her mother—had it been Mr. Jeffries, not Roy, with whom she had kicked her long legs during the vacations at Mallard Bois—had she, in a word, had the arranging of the world herself and the choosing of the places she and he were to occupy in it——
"Bosh!" she usually cut herself abruptly off. "I shall be afraid of turning a corner soon for fear of walking into the gentleman! What shall I take in for supper?"
She did not know yet—indeed it was only some months later that she learned it, but it is set down here—that already, at a Langham Exhibition, Billy Izzard had one day seen a big stranger standing before one of his sketches, had gone up and spoken to him, and had liked the fellow—had liked his hewn slab of a face with the yellow eyes in it so much that presently, having an old sketch he was never likely to sell, he had given it to him. But Billy would at any time rather give away a sketch to somebody he liked than sell one to somebody he didn't like, and he still set, moreover, less than their real value on those paintings of flowers that he "knocked off" in a couple of keen and nervous hours. One of these sketches, by the way, Louie herself coveted—a straggle of violets, a few white ones among them, in a lustre bowl; and she offered a certain number of sittings in exchange for it—another elementary example of the transaction in kind. But Billy shook his head. He wanted that for a wedding present for a fellow, he said. He'd give Louie another some time—after he'd found another studio. He was sick of Chelsea; when a fellow got to know the cracks in the flagstones it was time he moved. He thought of going up north somewhere, Camden Town or Hampstead or St. John's Wood—better air. So Louie could make up her mind to the bus-rides, or else move too. He wasn't going to let Henson get hold of her.
But Louie still delayed to move from Lavender Hill.
III