"Oh, come, come! Come, come!"
Afterwards she thought of it as a hail from a ship to another ship across a stretch of water so narrow that it was all but a stepping aboard. How could such a hail be a farewell also? They were not passing; as they glided side by side together, either seemed stationary. Other things, the whole offing of Life, were in motion; these slipped past, as it were sky, shore, shipping; but for a space he and she spoke from bridge to bridge. And he heard the hail too, for he opened his eyes. Though they never looked on her again they did so now, relinquishing all to her. Was there anything she had not known? There was nothing she might not know—now——
By-and-by she had helped him to a seat on the Embankment and had made him sit down. She took off his tie and collar; she smiled as he thanked her. "That was absurd," he said.
Then he asked her where she lived.
It was over.
Well, perhaps more would have been more than she could have borne.
But when she sat at last alone in the hansom he had called, conscious that she was wet to the skin and that her boots needed to be resoled, she still had the image of the ships before her eyes, gliding together side by side, with all else in quiet, relentless motion behind them. She held fast to it. She could not have endured to think that of that night's long wandering all that would remain on the morrow would be yet another dream and a wet glove left behind in an empty Chelsea street.
III
Louie Causton would have been more than human had she not frequently thought, as her life became a moving from pillar to post again, that there was an exasperating proportion of absence in her heart's story. But at first she was not petulant. Some absences are brimful, as other presences are mere vacancy, and, now that she no longer sat, she had other things, plenty of them, to think of.
There was little money in the sale of crochet; there was not much more in sitting in costumes hired from the Models' Club. From both these things she quickly turned. Perhaps she turned from them the more quickly because of Kitty Windus—for Kitty was now with her in the flat in the New Kings Road, and the way in which Kitty, without spoken words, paid over her weekly fifteen shillings, was in itself a spur. Not that Kitty always spared her the words either. Two words at least that she did not always spare her were "rise" and "permanency." Often Louie felt all the amazement, and now quite without any leaven of amusement, that she had felt when first she had entered the Business School in Holborn; but she was not keeping Kitty (or Kitty keeping her) either for love of Kitty or her own mere necessity. To keep Kitty was part and parcel of that absence she was already beginning to resent. It was merely safer to keep Kitty than to have anybody else keep her. Besides, as long as she kept Kitty, she had only to write a note, justifying it afterwards as best she could, and two ships (so to speak) would come together again. She delayed to write the note; none the less it was in her power to do so.