For the moment Mr. Weston was engaged. He was standing near the lecture-room blackboard, talking to the girl who lived with her partly independent aunt at the boarding-house in Woburn Place. Louie had already remarked the likeness of this girl, who might have been twenty but looked younger, to Polly Ross, the pretty daughter of the tipsy veterinary surgeon at Trant. Polly too had sported that running of pale blue ribbon beneath the openwork of what Kitty Windus called her "pneumonia blouse," and the clumps of dark hair on her nape too was like Polly's, and she had Polly's dark and sidelong glance, and highly conscious air of unconsciousness when that glance had attracted what it had probably been meant to attract, attention to herself. She had a copy of the Pansy Library in her hand, and Louie smiled as she remembered Burnett Minor and her spoutings. She waited until Weston should be at liberty.
As she waited, Kitty Windus, wearing an Inverness cape and a boat-shaped hat, came up. Miss Windus lived in a street off Tottenham Court Road, and already once or twice Louie had walked with her as far as the Oxford corner. She was waiting for the Polly Ross girl now, whose direction was the same. She asked Louie whether she intended to walk or to "hop on a bus." She always spoke in these rather sprightly terms, just as she always stiffened the line of her back a little the moment a man, any man, entered the room; and she referred, brightly and hopefully, to proposals of marriage as "chances." Louie was already learning when she might expect any given one of Kitty's innumerable clichés, and had several times (humorously) given them back to Kitty again with complete success. As they waited for the Polly Ross girl (whose name was Evie Soames) Louie asked Kitty who the big man who had gone out with Mr. Merridew was.
"Oh, the Mandrill!" said Kitty, laughing even before Louie had got out the word "big." "That's Mr. Jeffries. Isn't he a caution? But he only comes in the evenings."
She meant that Mr. Jeffries had not a pound a week on his own. Students who only came in the evenings were of a slightly inferior order to those who came during the day.
"I suppose he had his brown paper parcel with him?" Kitty said, with more mirth in her peering little eyes.
Louie remembered that Mr. Jeffries had carried a brown paper parcel. Kitty twittered.
"Bet you can't guess what was in it—that is, if you haven't heard it?"
She said "it" as if it had been a riddle or some sort of a joke. Louie admitted that she could not guess what had been in Mr. Jeffries' parcel.
"Good old brown paper parcel!" Kitty chuckled. "You'll get to know it by-and-by! You see," she explained, "he goes to Archie's for a bath. Isn't it killing?"
"I—I don't quite see what you mean," said Louie. She honestly did not.