Her voice sounded like the scent she wore. It had a hard tone which somehow brought the solitary threepence to mind.
The gardener returned at great speed to Penny Street.
It was lunch-time at Number Twenty-one. The eternal hash approached its daily martyrdom. Hash is a worthy thing, but it reminds you that you are not at the Ritz. There is nothing worse calculated to make you forget a lonely threepenny bit in your pocket.
The gardener had a hundred a year. He was apparently the only person in London with a hundred a year, for wherever he went he always found himself the wealthiest person present. His friends gave his natural generosity a free rein. After various experiments in social economy, he found it cheapest to rid himself of the hundred a year immediately on its quarterly appearance, and live on his expectations for the rest of the time. There are drawbacks about this plan, as well as many advantages. But the gardener was a pillar, and he found it easier to support the world than to support himself.
It was on this occasion that his neighbour at luncheon, unaware of his pillar-hood, asked him what he was doing for a living.
“Living,” replied the gardener. He was not absolutely sure that it made sense, but it sounded epigrammatic. He was, in some lights, a shameless prig. But then one often is, if one thinks, at twenty-three.
“It’s all living,” he continued to his neighbour. “It’s all life. Being out of a job is life. Being kicked is life. Starving’s life. Dying’s life.”
The neighbour did not reply because he was busy eating. One had to keep one’s attention fixed on the food problem at 21 Penny Street. There was no time for epigrams. It was a case of the survival of the most silent. The gardener was very thin.
The girl Courtesy, however, was one who could do two things at once. She could support life and impart information at the same time.
“I do believe you talk for the sake of talking,” she said; and it was true. “How can dying be living?”