Victoria did not answer for a second.
'Oh, yes, I—he's very funny—you see I've never been in a music hall before.'
'Oh, is that it?' Cairns's brow cleared. 'It's a little coarse, but so natural.'
'Is that the same thing?' asked Victoria.
'S'pose it is. With some of us anyhow. But what's the next?'
Cairns had already relapsed into the programme. He hated the abstract; a public school, Sandhurst and the army had armoured him magnificently against intrusive thought. They watched the next turn silently. A couple of cross-talk comedians, one a shocking creature in pegtop trousers, a shock yellow head and a battered opera hat, the other young, handsome and smart as a superior barber's assistant, gibbered incomprehensibly of songs they couldn't sing and lies they could tell.
The splendid irresponsibility of the music hall was wasted on Victoria. She had the mind of a schoolmistress grafted on a social sense. She saw nothing before her but the gross riot of the drunken. She saw no humour in that cockney cruelty, capable though it be of absurd generosity. She resented too Cairns's boyish pleasure in it all; he revelled, she felt, as a buffalo wallows in a mud bath. He was gross, stupid, dull. It was degrading to be his instrument of pleasure. But, after all, what did it matter? He was the narrow way which would lead her to the august.
Though Cairns was not thin-skinned he perceived a little of this. Without a word he watched the cross-talk comedians, then the 'Dandy Girl of Cornucopia,' a rainbow of stiff frills with a voice like a fretsaw. As the lights went down for the bioscope, the idea of reconciliation that springs from fat cheery hearts overwhelmed him. He put his hand out and closed it over hers. With a tremendous effort she repressed her repulsion, and in so doing won her victory. In the darkness Cairns threw his arms round her. He drew her towards him, moved, the least bit hysterical. As if fearful of losing her he crushed her against his shirt front.
Victoria did not resist him. Her eyes fixed on the blackness of the roof she submitted to the growing brutality of his kisses on her neck, her shoulders, her cheeks. Pressed close against him she did not withdraw her knees from the grasp of his.
'Kiss me,' whispered Cairns imperiously.