Only to look at the advertisements in the papers had she come to the
Club that morning at all. Well, she was not going to answer that
clairvoyant's announcement she had seen in _The Telegraph_ now. Kitty
would ask her that evening whether she had been looking for work, and
would hold up Miriam Levey and her determination as an example; let
her; Louie couldn't be bothered with clairvoyants and their
advertisements to-day.
And Kitty little dreamed how near Louie had more than once been to
showing herself as determined even as Miriam. Miriam was not the only
one who might be "taken on" at this new Consolidation of Mr. Pepper's
and Jim's, whatever it was. There is such a thing, when a man doesn't
come to you, as a miserable, ignoble yielding to the ache to go to
him. There is such a thing as the willingness even to keep a door all
day for the sake of seeing him go through it just once. After a
certain time pride becomes a poor staff, and--but he was coming, in
eight hours. That was why she had refused to dine with him. Your pride
stiffens again when you have just been on the point of throwing it
aside.
She knew that she would be good for nothing for the rest of the day;
in that case she might as well go and see her father. She had money
enough for her bus fares; half-past one found her at the Molyneux
Arms.
Buck was in high feather. His name had been proposed, in the interests
of Church and State, as a candidate for the Borough Council; and the
chief plank of the platform which Buck occupied during the whole of
that afternoon, descending from it with the greatest reluctance only
when Louie vowed that she could not stay another moment, was that as
long as England had Queensberrys to make her P.R. Rules it didn't
matter what Radicals tried to make of her laws. Louie fondled his
silver hair; dear old dad! Then she made him drive her back to
Chelsea.
(Buck, by the way, was returned at the head of the poll, a few weeks
later, amid acclamations that might well have rendered him deaf in his
other ear also.)
Back in the Club once more, Louie set aside the best chop, and made a
tour of the place in search of the narrowest table. The one she chose
was so narrow that the backs of the two chairs she turned up against
it almost touched. Lightheartedly she rebuked Myrtle Morris, who asked
her whether she was expecting "a boy"; and she laughed as Myrtle went
off to tell another girl that "Causton was on the warpath." Her
warpaint consisted of a white blouse, low and perfectly plain at the
neck, and a navy blue skirt. She was waiting at the window for Jim
twenty minutes before he came.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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