IV
It was his voice over the telephone of the Models' Club that broke the long silence. Ten chances to one but the bell had rung in an empty room, for, save for a woman who was washing the hall floor, Louie was alone in the place. She unhooked the receiver. "Hallo!" she called.... "Yes, this is the Models' Club.... This is Miss Causton...."
At last!
He did not say why he wanted to see her; he only said that he wanted to do so at once. His minimised voice, with its suggestion of distance, seemed to her curiously symbolic of their whole relation. A telephone was supposed to bring voices near, but far more than that the smallness and the distance struck her.
"No, I'm afraid not," she continued to speak into the instrument, "but I can give you dinner here. You know the address?... Yes, at seven.... All right...."
Seek him? No, she certainly would not seek him. He must come to her. She could give him tea and chops. As she hung up the receiver again she glanced at the clock over the little service counter. Eleven. Eight hours.... She had waited for months, now she must wait another eight hours. She could have faced the months again with more composure.
Only to look at the advertisements in the papers had she come to the Club that morning at all. Well, she was not going to answer that clairvoyant's announcement she had seen in The Telegraph now. Kitty would ask her that evening whether she had been looking for work, and would hold up Miriam Levey and her determination as an example; let her; Louie couldn't be bothered with clairvoyants and their advertisements to-day.
And Kitty little dreamed how near Louie had more than once been to showing herself as determined even as Miriam. Miriam was not the only one who might be "taken on" at this new Consolidation of Mr. Pepper's and Jim's, whatever it was. There is such a thing, when a man doesn't come to you, as a miserable, ignoble yielding to the ache to go to him. There is such a thing as the willingness even to keep a door all day for the sake of seeing him go through it just once. After a certain time pride becomes a poor staff, and—but he was coming, in eight hours. That was why she had refused to dine with him. Your pride stiffens again when you have just been on the point of throwing it aside.
She knew that she would be good for nothing for the rest of the day; in that case she might as well go and see her father. She had money enough for her bus fares; half-past one found her at the Molyneux Arms.
Buck was in high feather. His name had been proposed, in the interests of Church and State, as a candidate for the Borough Council; and the chief plank of the platform which Buck occupied during the whole of that afternoon, descending from it with the greatest reluctance only when Louie vowed that she could not stay another moment, was that as long as England had Queensberrys to make her P.R. Rules it didn't matter what Radicals tried to make of her laws. Louie fondled his silver hair; dear old dad! Then she made him drive her back to Chelsea.