“First tell me what you are doing here. Fulham people don't come to Maida Vale just to take a walk in the rain.”
“I was going to see some friends,” she replied sulkily.
A motor-omnibus came surging down toward them. At his hail it stopped.
“Get into that at once, or it will be the worse for you.”
He took her arm in his powerful grip and dragged her to the curb.
“You bullying brute!” she hissed through her thin lips.
But she entered the 'bus. John watched it until it whizzed into space, and then retracing his steps, he went home and mounted guard by the window of his aunt's gimcrack drawing-room, to the huge delight of its unsuspecting mistress. But his wife did not double back, as he anticipated; nor did he see her again in the neighbourhood.
Thenceforward, save for irritating pin-pricks reminding him of her existence, such as futile revolts against the supervision of the Bences and occasional demands for money, she ceased to worry him. But since the day when he caught her about to spy on his home-life, her shadow, like that of some obscene bird, hovered over him perpetually. What she had tried to do then she might have already done, she might do in the future. The horrible sense of insecurity oppressed him: it is that which ages a man who cannot take himself happily.
Otherwise the two years had passed with no great stir. The recurrence of seasons alone surprised him now and then into a realization of the flight of time. He had succeeded to the editorship of the weekly review of which he had been assistant editor; he had published a little book on the “Casual Ward of Workhouses,” a despised hash of journalistic articles which had brought him considerable recognition; leader writers had quoted him flatteringly, and his publishers clamoured for another book on a cognate subject; the President of the Local Government Board had invited him to a discussion of the matter, with a view to possible legislation; honours fell thick upon him; but, if it had been a shower of frogs, his disgust could not have been greater. For about the same time he had published a chunky, doughy novel destined to set the world aflame, which sold about a couple of hundred copies. He had cursed all things cursable and uncursable without in any way affecting the heartless rhythm of life. The world went on serenely, and in his glum fashion he found himself going on with the world.
Unity mended his socks and poured out his tea day after day, unchanging in her dull and common scragginess. Neither fine clothes, nor jewels, nor Aunt Gladys's maxims could turn her into a young lady. Miss Lindon sighed, Unity's inability to purr genteelly at tea-parties, the breath of female autumn's being, was the main sorrow in the mild lady's heart. She used to dream of the swelling pride with which she might have listened to Unity playing the “Liederohne Worte” or Stephen Heller or “The Brook” (such a pretty piece!), before the ladies purring on the gim-crack chairs. But the dream was poignantly vain. She had striven with vast goodness to teach Unity to play the piano, and the girl had honestly tried to learn; but as her brain could not master the mystery of the various keys, and as her ear was not acute enough to enable her to sing “Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear,” in tune, the study of music had to be struck out of her curriculum. And she could not talk to the faded gentlewomen who came to the house, and to whose houses Miss Lindon took her. The ordeal always made her perspire, and little beads settled on her snub nose, and she knew it was not ladylike. Such a thing, said Miss Lindon, ought never to happen. But it did, in defiance of all the laws of gentility. So Miss Lindon sighed. But none of these things wrecked the peace of the home. Uneventful serenity reigned in the little house at Kilburn.