However, three years of Islington was enough for him. He pulled himself together ... and moved to Muswell Hill.
There, we have him back at Muswell Hill now, and I have not been long, have I? He has been two years with Mrs. Morrison. I should like to say that he is happy with Mrs. Morrison, but he is not. The terrible thing is that he cannot get hardened to it. He hates Muswell Hill; he hates Traill and the Fossetts and Ransom; he hates Miss Gertie Morrison. The whole vulgar, familiar, shabby, sociable atmosphere of the place he hates. Some day, perhaps, he will pull himself together and move again. There is a boarding-house at Finsbury Park he has heard of....
II
If you had three weeks’ holiday in the year, three whole weeks in which to amuse yourself as you liked, how would you spend it? Algy Traill went to Brighton in August; you should have seen him on the pier. The Fossett Brothers adorned Weymouth, the Naples of England. They did good, if slightly obvious, work on the esplanade in fairly white flannels. This during the day; eight-thirty in the evening found them in the Alexandra Gardens—dressed. It is doubtful if the Weymouth boarding-house would have stood it at dinner, so they went up directly afterwards and changed. Mr. Ransom spent August at Folkestone, where he was understood to have a doubtful wife. She was really his widowed mother. You would never have suspected him of a mother, but there she was in Folkestone, thinking of him always, and only living for the next August. It was she who knitted him the M.C.C. tie; he had noticed the colours in a Piccadilly window.
Miss Gertie went to Cliftonville—not Margate.
And where did George go? The conversation at dinner that evening would have given us a clue; or perhaps it wouldn’t.
“So you’re off to-morrow,” Mrs. Morrison had said. “Well, I’m sure I hope you’ll have a nice time. A little sea air will do you good.”
“Where are you going, Crosby?” asked Ransom, with the air of a man who means to know.
George looked uncomfortable.
“I’m not quite sure,” he said awkwardly. “I’m going a sort of walking-tour, you know; stopping at inns and things. I expect it—er—will depend a bit, you know.”