Here Louie interposed. Even amusement can be too rich. "Good-bye," she said, "there's my bus." She heard Kitty call after her something about the penny stage, but by that time she was half-way across the road. Brass-buttoned little beast! She got on her bus. But a quarter of a mile farther on she descended from it again. She wanted to buy chocolates for herself. She bought them, walked to the Marble Arch, and there turned into the Park. She ate the chocolates as she walked. Little animal! He appeared to keep the whole School posted about Mr. Jeffries' personal habits. He could not go down to his home for the week-end, taking the Polly Ross girl and her aunt with him apparently, but Mr. Jeffries and half-a-cake of soap must be dragged in. And that pathetic, pathetic care the man took of his hair and hands! For all that, as she strode along, crunching her chocolates, she became almost angry with him too. Was soap so frightfully dear, and was there no water anywhere but at Mr. Merridew's rooms? She could not understand a man who had any sensitiveness at all suffering his mind to be turned over and inspected and thumb-marked by these people in this way. Still, she must not forget that these things were diverting. There was no class that night: Louie forced herself to apply herself to her book-keeping until half-past nine, and then went to bed. That, as has been said, was on a Thursday. On the following evening, feeling indisposed to work, she moved about the School, amusing herself to her heart's content. She was getting adept in the sport of it. She bandied back to Kitty Windus, with whom she found herself in talk, half-a-score of her own expressions: "Beg yours," "Granted," "As the poet says," and the like; and she all but openly stalked Mr. Mackie for the sake of the pearls that rippled from his lips. If Mr. Mackie had offered to take her for a walk or to a shilling hop at the Holborn Town Hall on the next blank evening, Lord Moone's niece, who must allow no chance of amusement to slip her, would have let him. Indeed, she was in two minds whether or not to go to this last place of entertainment alone. It was not for another week that her amusement at the School in general and at Mr. Jeffries in particular became almost painfully ecstatic. III On that Friday afternoon she did not go home as usual to Sutherland Place to tea. She went instead to the tea-shop across the street the waitresses of which seemed to crowd upon her as if the width of Holborn did not exist. As she sat down at her little marble table she glanced involuntarily across to the windows of the Business School and for a moment dropped the mask to herself. "Dingy place!" she thought; "well, we're a dingy crew inside it." Then, after a long, long walk down Chancery Lane and along the Embankment almost as far as the ship-breakers' yard at Millbank, she returned to evening class.