"Has he got a helmet like mine?" Jimmy demanded.
"No; but I think I shall have to get him one."
"You stay here, Jimmy," said his mother; and she led the way to the kitchen.
Evie praised the kitchen and its meagre appointments, and was then shown the bathroom. "It hasn't a crystal bath," Louie said, "but it does to wash in." She lingered in the bathroom a little; she was thinking of another bath and certain old jokes about brown-paper parcels. Then, first showing Evie the bedroom that had been Kitty's, she passed to her own room at the back.
Against the wall on the left lay Jimmy's bed; her own was across the room, with its head under the break of the mansard roof. The little built-out window, from the glass sides of which rows of chimney-pots could be seen, faced the door, and over the fireplace on the right, full in the light, hung Billy's study. It was the second thing on which Evie's eyes rested. Louie was careful not to look at it.
For in that place at any rate she was going to strike; the rest might fall out afterwards as it would. As she turned away to pat Jimmy's pillow she was suddenly fighting white; the little creature had come for it and should have it. And she should have it swiftly and without warning. Even as Louie had turned her back her heart had given a leap....
For up to that moment it had been always possible that Jim had not spoken of his intrusion into Billy's studio that evening; but there was no doubt now! Jim—or perhaps Billy Izzard—had told her. Probably Billy. Probably Billy first, and then, seeing she already knew, Jim. All at once there rushed upon Louie, as she passed from Jimmy's bed to her own and smoothed the coverlet of that also, what had happened later that same evening, when her arms had supported a collapsing Jim in a Swan Walk doorway and she had passionately called him: "Come, come! Come, come!"
She spoke quietly; quietness was so much more destructive.
"This is where I get the morning sun. But it's very windy. The wind blew that picture you're looking at down the other day." Then, without either pause or change of tone: "By the way, that's what you came to see, isn't it—that and my boy?"
Simultaneously with her blow she was commenting to herself: "That's good-bye to you, Sir Julius; she'll see I don't come back to the Consolidation after that; will you have Miss Levey back again, or will you try her friend Miss Windus? I don't think you'll offer Miss Windus an—er—increase of wages. As for me, I suppose I can sit again; nothing matters now. Or there's a plainer way still——"