"Why do you think I haven't got any money to throw away?" he asked.
She gave a wise little nod. "You tell me you write, and I know literary men never have anything to spare."
Jimmy laughed. "How do you know?"
Lalage turned away. "Never mind, but I do know, only too well."
CHAPTER XI
"I have not heard from you for several days," Mrs. Marlow wrote to Jimmy, "though I have had a couple of letters from Eliza Benn, who says that for two consecutive nights you did not come home. The first night you wired to her, but the second time she sat up until after midnight, fearing lest it might not be safe to let you have a light. I need not say how annoying it is to hear these things from one's former servants. Both Henry and I trust that you are not already getting into dissipated ways, and that you will remember that you belong to a respectable family, which will have to bear a large share of any disgrace into which you may fall, or be led." Then there was a postscript. "Eliza Benn is a person for whom I have a great regard; and I hear that her husband holds quite an excellent situation in Mr. Grimmer's salesrooms, where he is paid thirty-five shillings a week, which, Henry says, would only be given to a most experienced and steady man."
Jimmy tore the letter across savagely and tossed it into the fire. It annoyed him the more because his sister had got within measurable distance of the truth, at least from her point of view. He had already had some uncomfortable moments over the thought of what the family would say if it ever came to know of Lalage. He had not seen the latter again, but, though it was less than forty-eight hours since they had parted, he had written to her twice, and he could not disguise from himself the fact that she filled his life to the exclusion of all else. No other woman had ever appealed to him in the same way. Lalage had gripped his imagination. He could remember every word she had said, and, having been on the rocks himself, he could understand what she had suffered—the rain squelching through the thin little shoes, the bitter loneliness of the great city, the meals of bread and milk which had to last the whole day, the passionate longing for a home of some sort. He did not attempt to argue the thing out logically, as a Grierson would have done. The thought of her way of life inspired him, not with the scorn or loathing a man of position would have felt, even when taking advantage of it, but with a terrible, gnawing jealousy. Probably, he would not have admitted, even to himself, that he was in love, for, somehow, the phrase seemed hopelessly inapplicable. It belonged to the Grierson part of his nature, and was supposed to signify a preliminary to marriage, an altogether decorous kind of affection for a decorously-behaved girl, who had never been homeless or hungry or cold. All he cared for now was to get Lalage away, to be with her always, and, for the moment at least, anything which did not help towards that end seemed of absolutely no importance. He had thrust family considerations on one side, thrust on one side all those good resolutions, or rather those revived instincts of the past, which had been uppermost in his mind when he first came home. His own world, the Griersons and Marlows and Grimmers, would have called him either mad or hopelessly immoral, according to the degree of charity latent in their respective natures; Kelly would have warned him bluntly not to endanger his prospects by being a fool; a mental specialist would have explained that the shock of John Locke's death, coming on top of the ten years of almost continual overstrain in bad climates, had temporarily affected his balance, an opinion with which Lalage herself would have agreed, knowing, after all, nothing of men's love; but neither opinions nor diagnosis would have altered Jimmy's determination.