“I hope you won’t find her this time,” said Courtesy. “Will you come to tea with us one day, and tell us which of your searches seems most hopeful. You see, now the suffragette’s gone, you are respectable for the moment, and I needn’t be afraid for Mrs. Rust’s morals.”
When Courtesy giggled, her hair laughed in the most extraordinary way. Everything she did was transmuted into something wonderful by that halo of hers.
“I’ll come to-day, if I may,” said the gardener, who had never mastered the art of social diffidence. “You’d better have me to-day, for I hope I shan’t be respectable to-morrow.”
Courtesy did not want him to-day. In her code there was only one programme for the first day in a strange land. It was made up of a visit to the principal church, the principal shop, the principal public gardens, and to a few “old-world relics of the past.” It did not include ordinary five-o’clock tea with a familiar figure. But, on the other hand, her invincible conventionality made it impossible for her to evade the gardener’s suggestion. Courtesy was content to suffer for her convictions. At any rate, you will notice that Mrs. Rust was not consulted.
“You may come,” Courtesy said. “At five. We are due back from the cathedral at a quarter to.”
Probably the reason why Mrs. Rust submitted to Courtesy’s tyranny from the first was that no other woman in the world would have done so.
The land reeled under the gardener’s feet as he arrived. The only comfort in parting with the sea after a long intimacy is that for the first day or two the land follows the example of its sister element. The gardener found more difficulty in walking straight along Union High Street than he had experienced along the deck of the Caribbeania.
The morning was yet very young when he put his little luggage down at the bamboo-tree arch of a house that proclaimed itself ready to receive boarders at moderate terms. He relied much on impulse, and the little house, which was lightly built on its own first story, so to speak, beckoned to him. But only in theory, for when he mounted the flight of wooden steps, and, through the open door, saw the dirty living-room, seething with gaudy trifles, he knew that in practice it was better suited to his means than to his mind.
However, he had rung the bell. One has to pay penalties for acting on impulse. A woman with black wire hair, a face the colour of varnished deal, and a pale pink dressing-gown, appeared. Luckily she transpired to be the hostess before the gardener had voiced the fact that he mistook her for a drunken housemaid.
“I want a room here,” began the gardener, who had never wanted anything less in his life. But the three pounds lay very light in his pocket.