"No, no," I said. "Let me think for a minute...." The next moment my brain was buzzing with thought. I knew that only some such contact with plain raw actuality as this had been lacking in order to make Evie's transition from girlhood to womanhood complete. No longer now was she the fair young tree standing over its sprinkling of delicate discarded sheaths; this puff of Life's east wind had carried away the last of them. She had heard of these things, and so in a sense knew of them; but that somebody she knew ... that it should have come so near ... yes, poor shocked heart, that finished it. Archie's insupportable vanities had begun her enlightenment; the menace of his father's condition had touched her with the fringe of its shadow; and now this revelation had come upon her. Mr Merridew's illness, moreover, had a plainly seen peril for me. I knew that if anything happened Archie would immediately have enough money to marry on, and my own labours--all that I had planned and done from the first moment of my loving her to this present hour when I sat in Kitty Windus' back room holding Kitty's hand--would go for nothing. They, Evie and Archie, would probably marry, and I--I knew this in that moment for a certainty--I, from sheer yielding, should find myself married to Kitty Windus the moment I could scrape the money together. I gave a soft groan. I don't know whether Kitty supposed my groan the commiseration for Louie Causton. Yet what else, if I had chosen a different line, could I have done? Nothing! My shrinking heart cried, Nothing! What was I to have spoken to a young girl of marriage? An Agency clerk--with dazzling hopes! A dweller over a sordid publi-house--and a dreamer of visions! The possessor of a single suit of presentable clothes, the knees of which I was even now deteriorating past remedy--and of a heart tapestried with purple and gold, filled with an almost insensate ambition! And I saw Evie only at all on the well-nigh insupportable footing that I was the betrothed of Kitty Windus! Oh, if I had but had two suits of clothes, and thirty-six shillings a week instead of eighteen shillings, I think I would have cut the knot there and then and have sought Evie out that very night and asked her to marry me! Then after a time I became more practical. Things, even the heart-breaking small things of my life, were after all slowly changing. One of these things was that my slavery at Rixon Tebb & Masters' was already promising to draw to a close. I have not yet spoken of this. Let me do so, briefly, now.