Burton did not answer. For a minute they wrestled. Victoria thrust him back against the wall. She almost turned sick as his hand, slipping round her, flattened itself on her bare shoulder. In that moment of weakness Burton won, and, bending her over, kissed her on the mouth. She struggled, but Burton had gripped her behind the neck. Three times he kissed her on the lips. A convulsion of disgust and she lay motionless in his embrace. There was a step on the stairs. A few seconds later Burton had slipped out by the side door.
'What's up?' said Gladys suspiciously.
Victoria had sunk upon a chair, breathless, dishevelled, her face in her hands.
'Nothing . . . I . . . I feel sick,' she faltered. Then she savagely wiped her mouth with her feather boa.
Victoria was getting a grip of things. The brute, the currish brute. The words rang in her head like a chorus. For days, the memory of the affray did not leave her. She guarded, too, against any recurrence of the scene.
Her hatred for Burton seemed to increase the fascination of Neville. She did not think of them together, but it always seemed to happen that, immediately after thrusting away the toad-like picture of the chairman, she thought of the blue-eyed boy. Yet her relations with Neville were ill-fated. Some days after the foul incident in the change room, Neville took her for one of his little 'busts.' As it was one of her late nights he called for her at a quarter past nine. They walked towards the west and, on the stroke of ten, Neville escorted her into one of the enormous restaurants that the Refreshment Rendezvous, known to London as the Ah-Ah, runs as anonymously as it may.
Victoria was amused. The R. R. was the owner of a palace, built, if not for the classes, certainly not for the masses. Its facing was of tortured Portland stone, where Greek columns, Italian, Louis XIV and Tudor mouldings blended with rich Byzantine gildings and pre-Raphaelite frescoes. Inside too, it was all plush, mainly red; gold again; palms, fountains, with goldfish and tin ducks. The restaurant was quite a fair imitation of the Carlton, but a table d'hôte supper was provided for eighteen pence, including finger bowls in which floated a rose petal.
Neville and Victoria sat at a small table made for two. She surrendered her feet to the clasp of his. Around her were about two hundred couples and a hundred family parties. Most of the young men were elaborately casual; they wore blue or tweed suits, a few, frock coats marred by double collars; they had a tendency to loll and to puff the insolent tobacco smoke of virginias towards the distant roof. Their young ladies talked a great deal and looked about. There was much wriggling of chairs, much giggling, much pulling up of long gloves over bare arms. In a corner, all alone, a young man in well-fitting evening clothes was consuming in melancholy some chocolate and a sandwich.
Neville plied Victoria with the major part of a half bottle of claret.
'Burgundy's the thing,' he said. 'More body in it.'