"Yes, James Jeffries! What do you think of that? They're going to start on their own, in no end of a swell way, and Miriam's going over with them. It's Mr. Pepper's doing, of course, and as Mr. Pepper isn't exactly a nobody even where he is, you may bet your boots he won't change for the worse! Oh, James Jeffries knows the kind of person to hang on to! He's to be a partner, if you please, as good as Mr. Pepper himself; how's that for greasing in? Friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, I don't think!"
Kitty had this way now of speaking of her former fiancé. Sometimes she so extended his name that it became "Mister James Herbert Jeffries." And however Jim now "got on," his advancement would still be, to Kitty, a magnification of her own superiority in those days when she had had a pound a week and he nothing. She began to take out hairpins and went on.
"Oh dear, I wish my brushes were here!" (Louie fetched them.) "What was I saying? Oh yes, about Miriam. She's to have an office to herself, perhaps, or at any rate she's not going to sit with the other girls; and when I tell you it's in Pall Mall, you can judge for yourself—not just a couple of offices rented, but a whole building—what ho! The stone that the builders rejected if you like! And she'll have her own extending-bracket telephone, the very latest, and arms to her chair to put her elbows on, not like the typists! And Mr. Pepper's most friendly with her—she takes down his conversations with no end of swells! And I say, Evie Jeffries won't be half set up over it all, oh no! Even his office—James Herbert's, Miriam says—is going to be perfectly scrumptious!"
Her head was on one side; her short hair, as she brushed it, hardly reached farther than the sharp point of her shoulder; and Louie was thinking of that spurious engagement again. And suddenly—this had happened before, but never before with so keen a stab—the thought set her raging.... She herself had been so near!... Her elbow caught her cup of cocoa; it spilt, and ran in a little stream from the corner of the mantelpiece.... So near! And once again she cried to herself that she would have known how to keep him, Roy or no Roy!... Kitty? What could his courtship of Kitty and her bones have been? She would have shown him the difference! To have been so near and then—Mortlake Road, Putney!
Suddenly there seemed to her to be a great deal to be said for conventional morality after all.
For a moment her heart was full of hate—hate of Kitty, hate of Evie Jeffries, hate of Roy, hate of herself. To have been so near!
But the sharpness of it died down to a sullen ache. In his affairs he seemed to be going up, up; she had always known he would; and less than ever might she expect to hear from him now. And he would take his common little wife up with him. He might go anywhere, meet anybody; but sourly she wondered what sort of a figure he supposed his Evie would cut up there—would have cut at Trant or Mallard Bois? Oh, Louie would dearly have liked to see her there, to have pointed to her, and to have told Jim to his face that whatever ability he might have seemed to be yoked with an unimaginable stupidity, since he had not known instantly the one woman for him.
Well, there was simply no accounting for these things.
But if he was going up, Louie did not very much like the channel by which she had received the information. She had known that Kitty saw Miriam Levey; now she seemed to hear her thick voice again, "I vill find out!" She was aware, too, that there was little love lost between Miriam Levey and herself. She herself had encouraged Kitty in her present attitude of "Mister Jeffries," but it only needed the Jewess to propose the contrary attitude and in all probability there would be a struggle between them for the possession of Kitty. She detested Kitty; yet in order that Evie Jeffries might make an exhibition of herself among the people whose equal Louie was, Louie had to put up with her, bones and chilblains and all! Much he left her, didn't he? Good gracious, yes! And it was about time he was told that flesh and blood women weren't made like that!
Kitty, remarking that it was a shame to leave the now glowing fire, had passed out of the room for a minute; she now returned, in her slippers and nightgown. Her feet, she said, were still cold with waiting on the pavement; she would say her prayers with them turned to the fire. She knelt by a wicker chair, and set the red slippers on the low kerb, their worn soles to the fire. Louie, still from the end of the mantelpiece, watched her. At a slight sound she made Kitty turned her head for a moment; then she put it on the cushion of the chair again.