“It seems as though he was down and out before I came up,” said Triona.
“If you hadn’t I don’t [know] how I should have carried on,” she confessed.
They walked down the wide, empty street. The moon shone high above them, the girl in her elegance, the man in his loose grey flannels and soft felt hat, an incongruous couple, save for their common air of alert youth. And while they walked she rapidly told her story. She had been to Percy’s with the usual crowd, Lydia Dawlish her nominal chaperone. The man, Edwin Mavenna, a city friend of Sydney Rooke, whom she had met a half a dozen times, had offered to drive her home in his waiting taxi. Tired, dependent for transport on Rooke and Lydia, who desired a further hour of the night club’s dismal jocundity, and angry with Bobby Quinton, who seemed to think that her ear had no other function than to listen to tales of sentimenti-financial woe, she had accepted. Half-way home she had begun to regret; three-quarters of the way she had been frightened. As they turned into Victoria Street she had managed to free her arm and wield the victorious slipper.
“I’ll never go to that abominable place again as long as I live,” she cried.
“I should, if I were you,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
“I’d go once or twice, at any rate. To show yourself independent of it. To prove to yourself that you’re not frightened of it.”
“But I am frightened of it. On the outside it’s as respectable as Medlow Parish Church on Sunday. But below the surface there’s all sorts of hideousness—and I’m frightened.”
“You’re not,” said he. “Things may startle you, infuriate you, put you off your equilibrium; but they don’t frighten you. They didn’t this evening. I’ve seen too many people frightened in my time not to know. You’re not that sort.”
They had reached the door of the Mansions. She smiled at him, her gaiety returning.