It was a very hot evening. The Town Hall was breathless, and full of damp, coal-grimed, imperfectly-cleaned faces. Kitty too was damp, though she was wearing even less than usual. Chester was damp and white, and looked, for all his flame and ardour, which carried the meeting along with him, fatigued and on edge. Kitty, herself fatigued and on edge, watched him, seeing the way his hands moved nervously on the table as he spoke.
It was while he was talking about the demand for increased wages among colliers to facilitate the payment of the taxes on uncertificated babies, that he saw Kitty. His eyes stayed on hers for a moment, and he paused in the middle of a sentence ... "defeat the whole purpose of the Act," he finished it, and looked elsewhere. Kitty was startled by his pause; it was not like him. Normally he, so used to public speaking, so steeled against emergencies, so accustomed to strange irruptions into the flow of his speech, would surely have carried on without a break or a sign. That he had not done so showed him to be in a highly nervous state, thought Kitty, something like her own in this hot weather, through her continual travellings by train and staying in lodgings and writing absurd reports.
Across the length of the hall she saw nothing now but that thin, slouching figure, the gestures of those nervous, flexible hands, that white, damp face, with its crooked eyebrows and smile.
It was so long since she had seen him and spoken to him; something in her surged up at the sight of him and turned her giddy and faint. It was perilously hot; the heat soaked all one's will away and left one limp.... Did he too feel like that?
2
He looked at her once more, just before the end, and his eyes said, "Wait for me."
She waited, in the front of a little group by the door through which he was to come out. He came out with his secretary, and the mayor, and others; he was talking to them. When he saw her he stopped openly, and said, so that all could hear, "How do you do, Miss Grammont. I haven't seen you for some time. You're doing this reporting work for the Bulletin now, aren't you? I want to talk to you about that. If you'll give me the address I'll come round in about half an hour and see you about it."
She gave him the address of her rooms in Little Darkgate Street, and he nodded and walked on. He had done it well; no one thought it strange, or anything but all in the way of business. Ministers have to be good at camouflage, at throwing veils over situations; it is part of their job.
Kitty went back to her lodgings, and washed again, for the seventeenth time that day, and tried if she would feel less hot and less pale and more the captain of her soul in another and even filmier blouse. But she grew hotter, and paler, and less the captain of anything at all.
At 9.30 Chester came. He too was hot and pale and captain of nothing. He had not even the comfort of a filmy blouse.