As she sat on the bed, shaking her head in a foolish, silly fashion, and smiling at the wall with the self-satisfied air of a person mildly and harmlessly distraught, the outer door of the flat opened. She jumped up with a wild hope, a sick dread. She gave the one essential look in the glass, raised her hot fingers mechanically to her crumpled hair, and went back to the drawing-room. Sutton was standing in the middle of it, his head bent in a listening way. “Oh!” she said stiffly, with an air of collapse. “You!” He did not answer, only stared at her. His face was aflame with some unusual emotion. It looked like a Christmas card--one of those things--transparencies--which admit a ruddy, steady light in places where you hold them up before a lamp. “Edred has gone out,” she continued with abrupt impulse, “and I--I’m going out too.” “Where?” “Anywhere. The pit of a theater, perhaps; he used to take me.” He was looking at her fixedly, as well he might. Her voice, her face, her attitude were reckless. “Will you come to a music-hall with me?” She looked at him. He read her contempt for him; it was steady behind the reckless mask. But he didn’t care. For many months he had been playing for this night. “Wait. One moment,” she said in a staccato fashion. “I’ll put on my long cloak--that’s all.” She whisked through the door and was back in a moment, wrapped to her ankles in the garment which Edred had bought for her on that fairy summer evening--the night of the day on which she had left Jethro. “You are going--like that?” he said musingly, as she hitched up the tail of her gown, and plunging his hand into his pocket. He didn’t choose his music-hall with any regard for her. He took her somewhere--she didn’t know or care exactly where. She only knew that it wasn’t in one of the big streets. She sat with him in the box, staring and smiling through the performance. Nothing smote her modesty that night. She had suddenly turned numb. Sometimes, as she stared and smiled at the stage, she saw, not a kicking, painted woman, but a demure, savagely respectable figure in brown. Once a dancer suddenly changed into a big woman, mostly jacket-buttons and red-lined petticoat, who extravagantly popped out a very long tongue, and said, “Yer never knows nothin’, do yer?” As the evening wore on, and she endured without flinching the risky songs and patter, Sutton’s attitude grew more free. In the cab on the way home he sat beside her, seeming to press her uncomfortably into the corner. When he unlocked the door of the flat her instinct told her at once that Edred had not returned. Sensation came back. She suddenly felt ill at ease. She wished from her heart that she had not gone out for the evening with Sutton, a man she detested and despised. She looked down at him contemptuously--a middle-aged, vacuous, little-minded, vulgar, cunning creature: a very good example of the played-out mercantile clerk. “Good-night,” she said curtly.