Jimmy frowned. "Why do you starve yourself in that way?" he asked.
In after years, he often thought of this question and her answer. He had been hungry himself more than once, and he knew, only too well, what it meant; but, somehow, he had never pictured a well-dressed girl as suffering that way.
"I only had a penny left, the one I spent on that bun, and no one will trust you with as much as a loaf round here. I was afraid you would notice how greedy I was at tea." Then, as he flushed awkwardly and began to speak, she stopped him with a little gesture. "Why should you have thought of it? You were very good, as it was. And I'm all right now. I got a postal order last night," she added rather hurriedly; then she changed the subject abruptly, and went on to talk of one or two matters of passing interest, which the papers had been booming for want of anything of real importance. She had evidently received an average education, Jimmy could see that plainly, and yet he was puzzled, for in many of her ideas, and especially in her strong prejudices, she belied her apparent age; for they were those of a child of fourteen, rather than of a girl of some two or three and twenty. Insensibly, he found himself listening to her as one would to a child, and then, a moment later, she would bring out some cynical scrap of wisdom, evidently the fruit of bitter experience, which sounded strange coming from her lips. Yet, despite the utter unconventionality, there was no hint of fastness about her, and even when she touched by implication on her way of life, she did so with a kind of frank simplicity, hiding nothing and trying to excuse nothing.
"What do you think of my little flat?" she asked suddenly, after what had been rather a long pause. "It's very tiny, of course; but it's a home, and when you've had nowhere to go to, not even a lodging——" She broke off, and stared into the fire. "It's simply awful to have nowhere," she went on after a while. "To walk about hour after hour with the mud squelching through your shoes, and nothing to eat; and getting more hopeless as midnight comes on. I was out two whole nights."
Jimmy breathed heavily; he had often heard the same sort of thing from men; but it sounded very different coming from the lips of a girl.
"And then one day I got ten pounds," Lalage continued, "and I made up my mind I would have a home. I paid a month's rent in advance—they don't worry over references if you do that—and I went to some hire-purchase people for furniture. Then I bought a kettle at the sixpenny halfpenny shop, and a cup and saucer and plate in the next street, where the barrows are. By the time I had got curtains and some sheets and one or two odd things like a lamp, there were only a few shillings left." She looked up seriously. "You wouldn't think till you try how expensive furnishing is; but I was so proud of my little home. I am still; and you know, when you've a place of your own, if you only have bread and milk no one is any the wiser. I've often been hard up since, but I've always managed to scrape up the rent and the hire-purchase instalment. One must do that; they don't give you a day's grace."
Jimmy was chewing savagely at the ends of his moustache. It never entered into his head that she was trying to play upon his sympathies. There was some curious quality of simplicity in her manner which forbade that supposition. She interested him as no woman had ever interested him before, and, suddenly, he was filled with a desire to know her past, and, in that, to find excuses for the present.
"Where do you come from?" he asked.
"Hampshire," she answered, adding, "My people are dead. I'm quite alone in the world." Then, as if to change the subject, she got up from her seat. "You must have a look round my tiny place."
Jimmy felt almost guilty as he noted her obvious pride in the few little articles she had collected together. May's cook would have rejected with scorn the kettle from the sixpenny halfpenny bazaar, and the one or two pots and pans which had since been bought at the same shop; whilst none of the Marlow servants would have deigned to use the thick earthenware plates on the dresser. Yet everywhere there was a perfect cleanliness, which, possibly, those same servants would never have succeeded in attaining in the smoke-laden atmosphere of that street.