4
As Evie and Captain Gordon had taxied down Holborn, they had passed, and been held up for a minute near Alix, Nicholas, and West, who stood talking at the corner of Chancery Lane.
'Hugh Montgomery Gordon,' Nicholas murmured. 'Bright and beautiful as usual. Know him, Alix? Surely he doesn't visit at Violette? I can't picture it, somehow.'
'Oh, he might, for Evie's sake. Evie picks them up, you know; it's remarkable how she picks them up. They look very beautiful together, don't they? Is he nice?'
'Just as you saw. I scarcely know him more than that. He was a Hall man; my year. I believe he had a good time there. He looks as if he had a good time still. West's opinions about him are more pronounced than mine. Is he nice, West?'
'He's in the family jam,' West told Alix, as sufficient answer. 'Gordon's jam, if that means anything to you.'
'Wooden pips and sweated girls,' Alix assented, having picked up these things from her mother. 'It must be exciting: so many improvements to be made.'
'No doubt,' agreed West. 'But the Gordons won't make them. They make jam and they make money—any amount of it—but they don't make improvements that won't pay. A bad business. It will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, at least I hope it will. They've been badgered and bullied about it by social workers for years, but they don't mind.... And at the same time, of course, they've no more ideas about what to do with their money than—than Solomon had. They put it into peacocks and ivory apes. These rich people—well, I should like to have the Gordons in a dungeon and pull out their teeth one by one, as if they were Jews, till they forked out their ill-gotten gains for worthy objects.... If you ever meet Gordon, Miss Sandomir, you might tell him what I think about him. Tell him we have a meeting of the Anti-Sweating League in our parish room every Monday, and should be glad to see him there.'
Nicholas wondered, though he didn't ask Alix, whether Evie was still on with Basil Doye, or whether a breach there had made a gap by which Hugh Montgomery Gordon was entering in. One thought of Evie's friendships with men in these terms; whereas Alix might drive with a different man every day without suggesting to the onlooker that one was likely to oust another. The difference was less between Evie and Alix (for Evie was of a fine and wide companionableness) than in what men required of them respectively.
'Evie and he,' Alix commented, considering them. 'They might be good friends, I think. They might fit. The jam wouldn't get between them—nor the money.... I rather like him too, I think. He's so beautiful, and looks as if he'd never been ill. That's so jolly.' She was giving the same reasons which Basil had given for liking Evie. It occurred to her to wonder whether, if she'd been to the war, these two things would take her further in her mild inclination towards Hugh Montgomery Gordon—much further. Perhaps they would....