(Buck, by the way, was returned at the head of the poll, a few weeks later, amid acclamations that might well have rendered him deaf in his other ear also.)
Back in the Club once more, Louie set aside the best chop, and made a tour of the place in search of the narrowest table. The one she chose was so narrow that the backs of the two chairs she turned up against it almost touched. Lightheartedly she rebuked Myrtle Morris, who asked her whether she was expecting "a boy"; and she laughed as Myrtle went off to tell another girl that "Causton was on the warpath." Her warpaint consisted of a white blouse, low and perfectly plain at the neck, and a navy blue skirt. She was waiting at the window for Jim twenty minutes before he came.
She had schooled herself to a rigorous composure. She opened the door for him and told him to mind the hall lamp, within an inch of which his hat reached; and the hand she gave him was not gloved this time. But she barely touched his hand; had she not two whole hours before her? He put aside a cheap hanging of rustling beads for her to pass, and then followed her into the large room on the left of the hall, empty save for a piano and a few chairs, that was used for parties and tableaux. Myrtle and another girl appeared for a moment in the doorway; the minxes appeared to be waltzing, but they had come to see who "Causton's boy" was; and as they sat down she asked him, as if daring him to find any but the plainer meaning in it, how Billy Izzard was. She exulted that she could say these things and he could not. Then she was told that their chops were ready. They passed into the next room.
The table—it was a flimsy card-table covered with a cheap traycloth stiff with starch—accounted for all awkwardnesses and proximities; again she found it secretly delicious to murmur a demure apology for its smallness. She lingered over the eating of her chop merely because her plate was edge to edge with his; she would manage badly if she could not keep him at least two hours! Then, when she could linger out her eating no longer, she asked him for a cigarette and a light—for in the studios she had learned to smoke. He gave them to her. Her lids hovered as he held the match; she wondered whether she should look straight into his eyes or keep her lids downcast. In the end she did both, looking at him first, then down. Whether he looked at her at all she did not know; the first at any rate was a miss. She did not ask for a second match (she had, she told herself, some shame); instead, she put her elbows on the table and said, without further delay: "Well, what is it?"
She nodded as he began to tell her; it seemed to be pretty much what she had expected. She listened, or half listened; she would not have sworn, had he challenged her, that her attention did not wander a little. Her thoughts were ahead of his, but a little patience—he would catch up; he would see presently that what his wife might think or what she might not think (for that was what he was talking about) was of less practical importance than he supposed. Naturally his wife must be thinking this and that; marriage that left such a thing as a—call it a private execution—out of the calculation might even turn out to be a little difficult; but she might as well hear what he had to say about it. She waited for the cropping up of the names of Miriam Levey and Kitty Windus; they duly appeared. Mrs. Jeffries, it seemed, wanted to see Kitty, and Miriam Levey wanted her to do so. Why they wanted these things was not very clear, but possibly, if Louie was giving him only half her attention, Jim was not saying all he knew either. He still considered that aspect of the affair to be wholly and solely the problem: but no doubt he would wake up by-and-by.
Suddenly she asked him whether he and his wife had quarrelled. He shook his head that apparently, in spite of its stupidity, she must still love.
"Well——"
And on he went again, still quite a number of leagues behind—the complication of his former engagement to Kitty, Evie's sense of unexplained things, Miriam Levey, her voracious curiosity, her presence at this new Consolidation.
But here she interrupted him. "One moment. When do you start—this Consolidation?"