“What sort of young lady’s the lodger, Bert? Anything on?”
“Not my style. Ain’t taking any!”
“Go on, you don’t know how to play up to a girl. I’d get round anything in London.”
Just about dusk Mr. Buss and his friends sauntered out on love adventures, and Mrs. Buss sat down at her piano and sung hymns with a sort of rolling, throaty gusto. Eve found it almost unendurable, so much so that she abandoned the idea of trying to use her Sundays at Bosnia Road, and asked Kate Duveen to let her spend the day with her in Bloomsbury.
On weekdays, when it happened to be fine and not too cold, she and Kate would spend the twenty minutes after lunch in St. James’s Park, sitting on a seat and watching the irrepressible sparrows or the machinations of a predatory cat. The bare trees stood out against the misty blue of the London horizon, and even when the sun shone, the sunlight seemed very thin and feeble. Other people sat on the seats, and read, or ate food out of paper bags. Very rarely were these people conversational. They appeared to have many thoughts to brood over, and nothing to say.
Kate Duveen had noticed a change in Eve. There was a different look in her eyes. She, too, was less talkative, and sometimes a cynical note came into her voice.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Was I thinking?”
“You haven’t said anything for five minutes.”
“One can be conscious of an inner atmosphere, without calling it thought.”