I did see her on the Monday. I saw her at the models' Club, to which place I telephoned early on the Monday morning. I had the luck to get on to her immediately. "Yes?... This is Miss Causton," came the diminished voice over the wire; and she said she would see me that evening at seven. I sent Evie a message that I should be late.

Perhaps you know those premises in the Chelsea Square. Two houses have been thrown into one, but all I know of the establishment is the two rooms of the ground floor, which, barring a narrow passage with a rustling bead curtain across it, communicate. The room on the left of the curtain is a large bare apartment that is used for parties, tableaux, dancing and such like entertainments; that on the right is the tea-room, sewing and wardrobe room, and room for general purposes. At one end of it is a kitchener; placed near the kitchener is a small service counter, brass foot-rail and all, that has done duty in some saloon bar or other—it was probably picked up in the York Road, N.; and the furniture has been given piecemeal by artists and is characterised by great variety. The members can get tea for threepence halfpenny and dinner for eightpence; and of course I was Louie Causton's guest. She was looking out of the window as I approached the house; she herself opened the door to me; and we walked through the bead portiÈre and entered the party-room on the left. We sat down by a yellow upright piano at the farther end of this room. I heard the frying of chops across the passage. They wouldn't be long, Louie said, and then added that I was looking pretty well.

A long walk round Chalfont Woods the previous day had, in fact, done me good. She herself appeared to be in excellent health and spirits. She asked me whether I had seen Billy Izzard lately, and then, without waiting for an answer, laughed as two girls, in waltzing attitude, balanced in the doorway for a moment, and then, seeing us, went out again. "The girls dance in here," Louie explained. "Oh, do you?" I remarked. "Oh, I don't," was her reply; and she went on to ask what was new with me. It was all refreshingly ordinary and matter-of-fact, and there was no indication that she had any serious care on her mind.

A stout woman in an apron appeared in the doorway and announced that our chops were ready. We passed into the other room. I said that the furniture of the Club had been given by artists; the table at which we sat down had been a card-table. As I could not get my legs under it I had to sit sideways at it, and our plates, cups and saucers were edge to edge, with the salt and pepper in the interstices. Louie smiled and said something about our interview being literally a tÊte-À-tÊte, and we attacked our chops.

From where I sat I could see the vista of the party-room across the passage, and Louie's eyes, as they met mine from time to time, had something of the same soft sheen of the polished floor of that apartment. She wore a navy blue skirt and plain white mercerised blouse without collar or any other finish at the neck; and as we ate and talked of this and that there rose in my mind again that surmise I had had when Billy had told me, by the Whitestone Pond, that she had stopped sitting. Nothing that I can describe happened to confirm that surmise, and yet somehow I was conscious of the growing confirmation. It had begun when she had twinkled and said, "How's Billy?" and a moment or two later, when the two girls had stood poised in the doorway for dancing, she had smiled and said, "Oh, I don't dance." The twinkle about Billy had not been lost on me; and when I tell you that the single dance of my own life had been with her, years before, at a breaking-up party at the old Business College, perhaps you can make a guess at the nature of my surmise.

For I had read in those eyes of hers, on that night of the Berkeley dinner, that she loved me and must go on loving me; and she herself had said, in so many words, "It's nothing to do with you—you can't help that." And now she had taken this fantastic resolution not to sit any more. Whether I would have it so or not, she had a right in me, in which, quite calmly and ordinarily, she now exulted. Yet had ever before mortal woman exulted over anything less substantial? The whole thing seemed to me both preposterously lovely and quite movingly absurd. She had wheedled out of Billy that perfect sketch that had stood on his easel that evening I had walked, unannounced, into his room opposite the Cobden Statue. Why? What ridiculous and sacred tapers did she burn about it? Billy must now paint her in costume or not at all. Why? Of what beautiful and empty union was this a consummation? Did she seriously intend that thenceforward no eye but mine—— But I waste words. You see it or you don't see it. That, as near as makes no matter, appeared to be how things stood between us, and there was nothing to tell me that she was not happy in this beautiful lunacy. As for myself, I supposed I must be content to be owned almost to the point of insult in possession.

"I'm just beginning to get used to it," I remember she said to me at one stage of that evening—the thing she was just beginning to get used to being sitting under the new conditions. "Did you know it was really harder? Your clothes tingle on you, you know."

I mention this only to show that, since she might speak at her pleasure of a thing of which I might not even recognise the existence, her tyranny over me was pretty complete.

We had finished our chops, and I was wondering what she supposed my reason for having sought her to be, when she herself put the direct question. She put her plate on the floor so as to make room for her elbows on the table.

"Give me a cigarette if you have one," she said. "I'm afraid I've picked up that habit here. All the girls do it: there's a cigarette-case in their bags if there's nothing else."

And when I had given her a light, she put her elbows on the table again, her wrists and forearms fell into an attitude that really made me sorrow for Billy, and she said: "Well, what is it?"

With no more waste of words than she herself had used, I told her of Miss Levey's voracious curiosity, of Evie's perplexed sense of something unexplained, and of my own unsuccessful attempt to have my eggs and my omelette too.

She listened attentively: the change of which I shall speak in a moment did not come all at once. Other girls had now come into the Club, and two or three of them were gathered about a brown-paper parcel, some purchase of dress material or other which they were discussing with animation. Others fetched cups of tea from the saloon bar counter, eating and drinking, perched carelessly on the ends of tables, the spiral twist of the work of their stockings telling how readily they got into and out of their clothes.

Before I had finished my story Louie interrupted me with the first of a little series of detached remarks.

"One moment," she said. "When do you start—this Consolidation, I mean?"

"In a few weeks. We shall send some of the men on in advance in about a fortnight. Why?"

"You don't intend to take Miriam Levey over with you?"

"I do not."

"You don't suppose she doesn't know that?"

"Well?"

"Well—but go on." She made a little gesture. "I interrupted you."

I went on.

"Half-a-minute," she came in again presently. "All this was quite—— I mean, there was no quarrel?"

"With Evie? No—oh, no, no."

"Well——"

And the next time she interrupted me was merely to ask me whether I had another cigarette.

I admit that there had come over me as I had talked an increasing sense of the burden I had placed upon her. Nor do I mean that I had not had this sense before. I had, indeed, thought of little else during my walk to Chalfont the previous day. But it is yet another coin added to the price of a righteous but unlicenced slaying that a man's selfishness becomes merely inordinate. I had known more or less what she must bear; exactly what she had to bear it with I had taken for granted. She had perhaps herself to thank for that, and that tense and incredible calm she had shown on the night I had dined at the Berkeley. I had known the depths of her womanliness that other night; soon I was to learn the shallows of her femininity.

"Well," she said, when at last I had finished, "I really don't see what else you expected. And," she went on, but more slowly, and somehow as if she didn't quite trust herself, "I don't see either what you expect of me. I told you what I thought before."

"You mean that I should have to tell her?"

"Yes."

"Well, tell me why."

"You've just told me why."

"Well, put it another way. You see the frightful risk—to her. The question is, ought it to be taken?"

For a moment those tourmalines of her eyes seemed to flicker, as if she would have shown me again the abysses beyond them; but they remained shut as she spoke more slowly still.

"That's not quite the question. Can you—go on—as you are doing? And if you can't, what's the alternative?"

To that I had no answer to make.

Her cigarette had gone out, and her beautiful fingers were holding it listlessly. All at once I found myself noticing the contrast between her and the chattering group of models down the room. The girl with the brown-paper parcel had approached a cupboard and taken out some second-hand property or other of frayed velvet and torn gold: "It's hardly worth re-making: I vote we cut it up," I heard her say. And I wondered whether Louie had sat in the torn and tawdry thing—now that she had been warned against chills. The giggling and the skiddle of teacups went on, but Louie pressed her fingers on her eyeballs for a moment. Perhaps it was this pressure that made them, when she looked up again, seem dull and tired.

"At any rate, that's how it strikes me," she said.

She looked suddenly older—much older—so much older that it gave me a pang. During my walk on the previous day I had told myself over and over again that I must have made of her life also exactly what I had made of my own—a fearful thing without trifles; but I had had to tell myself, if you appreciate what I mean. Now, to see it with my own eyes was another matter. There was that other quantity, the quantity unknown to me but drearily familiar enough to her, I didn't doubt—Kitty.... A word of advice to those who contemplate the putting out of a life on their own responsibility: When a woman, on a rainy night in St. James's Park, or wherever and whenever, lets you look down into her soul, and drops a plummet into your own, and asks you whether you are not a murderer, and you no more dare to lie than you would dare a foulness in the face of majesty, then do anything you like—fly from her, bite out your tongue, kill her also—but for mere pity of her don't answer "Yes." Don't, that is, unless you are sure that she will betray you. If you do, depend on it she'll ask you to a Models' Club or somewhere, and the horror of a life without trifles will come over you, and you'll see her press her fingers on her eyeballs and then look up again, five years older in as many minutes.

"What about Kitty?" I asked abruptly.

She answered quickly—too quickly: "Oh, Kitty's all right; you needn't bother about Kitty; leave her to me. As a matter of fact she's been awfully useful to me."

"How useful?"

"Oh, in quite the most material way," she said, with a short and mirthless laugh. "That's not been pure philanthropy, I assure you. I dare say you know——"

I did know that Kitty had perhaps a pound a week of her own money, from some tramways out Edgbaston way.

"And she types at home, too—authors' manuscript—when she can get it—and I save the ten shillings I had to pay somebody to look after the boy."

"And you yourself?" I ventured meaningly.

"Oh," she answered evasively, "we've not stuck fast yet."

"In spite of your chills," thought I; and then, as another burst of laughter broke from the girls down the room, I said aloud: "Tell me—I've never asked you—how did you drop into this kind of thing? You used to be at a business college."

Again she smiled. "Did I? Sometimes I can hardly believe that was I. It's precious little I learned there, anyway. And this other—I could explain to Billy—I'm not pretty, I know, not my face, but—well, it seemed a fairly obvious thing to do. There wasn't much else, anyhow, and remember I did fairly well out of it—better than most girls in offices."

She had grown faintly pink, and again the tourmalines had given, as it were, a half turn. I dropped my voice and looked earnestly at her.

"And these—chills—aren't they anything you could ever grow out of?"

The soft irradiation deepened as she looked as earnestly back at me.

"No," she said.

"I see. And what you learned at the College—have you forgotten all that?"

Then, looking almost challengingly at one another, we began to speak rather quickly, and a little elliptically.

"I think I can guess what you mean," she said, dropping her gaze again.

"I think you do."

"That's why I asked you just now when the Consolidation was starting.... You don't suppose she'll love you any more for throwing her out of a job, do you?"

"She can't hate me much more than she does."

"Well, you may depend upon it, she knows she's going."

"Well, that saves trouble."

"Oh, no, it doesn't."

"Ah!—You think not?"

"I'm sure not."

A pause.

"I gather you've seen her?"

"Oh, often."

"At your place?"

"Yes."

"I don't suppose you love her much. Why do you have her there?"

"You don't love her either. Why do you?"

"Well, there's Evie."

"And there's Kitty."

Another pause, and then: "I see."

Then suddenly I spoke a little more to the point.

"Well, would you accept the job if I could arrange it?"

She hesitated. "It's very necessary, of course, that I should do something."

"You'd take it?"

"I almost think—there's my boy, you see—but we'll talk about that in a minute. You were asking me about Kitty. I don't think you need worry about her. I keep her in hand. I don't think it would matter very much if she and your wife did meet, and, on the whole, you'd be doing more harm by objecting beyond a certain point than you would by allowing it. So, as far as she's concerned, things had better drift. The worst of it is"—again the fingers on the eyeballs—"they don't drift."

"Don't drift?"

"You know what Miriam Levey is."

I caught my breath. "You don't mean she's any idea——" I said quickly.

"Oh, none whatever," Louie said hurriedly. "I don't mean that at all. But I do mean she'd thoroughly enjoy seeing you made uncomfortable—got at—scored off—get her own back—you know what I mean."

"That's noth——" I began absently, but checked myself. "That's nothing," I had been on the point of saying, but there were no nothings for us. Louie's vigils must be as unremitting as my own.

Suddenly I found myself without the heart to ask her in detail what these were. We now had the tea-room to ourselves; the bevy of models had scurried off to the party-room, and two of them appeared to be playing an elementary duet on the piano, with wrong notes loudly and laboriously corrected, amid laughter and general high spirits. Again the contrast was cruel. They hadn't to look before, behind and about them for the dread of a ruinous inadvertence.... You will find it difficult to reconcile with remorse, by the way, that, stealing another glance at Louie's drawn and anxious face, I cursed a heedless young cub who had gone to his account nearly six years before.

"Anyway," she said, after a long silence, "I'll see to that as far as I can. Plan as we like, we've got to take some risks. Don't look at me like that. It isn't more than I can bear. There's joy in it too. The only thing I don't quite understand is why I should want to throw that joy away by—by giving you the advice I did."

"The advice you did?"

"To tell your wife."

"But——" It broke agitatedly from me. Again the tourmalines seemed to move.

"The risk; just so; don't think I don't see it. Oh, I see it—far more plainly than you do! Haven't you thought that perhaps it's that that——" She stopped abruptly, ending in a little twanging murmur.

And I had at last become conscious of something that hitherto I had only half consciously noticed—namely, that she spoke of Evie repeatedly as "your wife." Obstinately she refused to use her name. I think that I felt even then our approach to what I have called the shallows of her femininity. Can you wonder at it? Is it so very surprising that, with the tremors of those shut transmitters of her eyes, the whole fantastic and exhausting fabric of my interpretation of her feeling for myself tottered? He has to be a greater painter than Billy Izzard whose fiction can fill the life of a woman already past thirty, whom you have so heaped with cares that her face takes on age as you look at it! Her voice shook as she strove to hide all this from me.

"But you see the disadvantage you have me at," she said. "You know what you really want, though you haven't put it quite plainly yet; but even if I were to try it you wouldn't let me say what I mean."

"Oh, say it, say it: we're in the mess, and it's no good keeping things back."

"No, no—you've no right to expect that of me. I'll do everything else, but I'm only a mortal woman, with limbs and hungers, after all."

"You're a very wondrous one."

"Tch!" The exclamation broke from her as if I had blundered on a nerve with an instrument. "You're making big demands of my wondrousness, Jim!"

I gave a low groan. "Poor woman! Is it more than——"

But she broke out into quite a loud cry.

"Not that, Jim," she commanded, "not—that! That's the only thing I will not bear! If you're going to make me out noble, or disinterested, or self-sacrificing, or anything of that sort I—I can't bear it. I'm not. I hate Evie. I hate myself. I almost hate you when I see how stupid and clumsy you can be. Oh, you know what you want! You want just one thing—to be happy with her; but do you think I scheme and contrive for you because I want you to be happy with her? Oh no! I do it because I can't help myself, and because it's that or nothing between you and me, and that's all there is splendid about it! I won't be called 'Poor woman.' And you needn't shake your head either. If I could get you, I would; but there it is, I can't, and that's all the loyalty I have for her! And you ask me," she broke out anew, almost furiously, "you ask me whether I 'don't see' things! It's you who don't see, and never will! You get a fixed idea into your head, and everything else——" She snapped her fingers. "What do you suppose your wife would say if she knew you were here with me now? I shouldn't care a straw about her knowing, but have you told her? Will you tell her? You know you won't! You daren't—you daren't trust her! Oh, I know what you're going to say—that you can't discuss her with me—but in that case you shouldn't take my position quite so much for granted. I'm the last person to put on a pedestal. You ask me whether I see things: don't I! Don't I see what they might have been—yes, even in spite of the mess I made of them! With half a chance I could have——"

"Louie!"

"Sssh—it's got to come out now! I was happy till that night—you know the night I mean—and that night I was fool enough to think it was possible to stop up there—away up in the air. I gave you and got from you that night what no other woman on earth could have done, and I thought we could stop at that. I thought I could go on living at that. I thought that would be enough for me; and when I found it wasn't, I began to—bolster it up. You've seen Billy—you know what I mean. And I still have something of you that nobody else has, and—I want to give it away! I want you to give her that too! I advise you to tell her and leave me with nothing! I must be mad! Jim"—her voice dropped with startling effect—"you once said that to tell her would be to kill her: if I could only think that!... But there, you'll tell her, and take away the last thing I have of you.... But she won't get that thing. It's beyond her. That's yours and mine whether you wish it or not. If you don't believe me, try it. Tell her. Tell her her husband made away with her sweetheart; tell her why; tell her what you've told me, and if she takes it as I did, I haven't another word to say. I hate her; I'm not running away from that; so perhaps I'm not just. Perhaps there is a chance: if so, it's your only one. I've had no luck. I'm out of it, and there's no more to say. Give me a match."

She took up and relighted her half-smoked cigarette.

I have merely set down what she said, and the way she said it; for the rest, I leave you to draw your own conclusions. Perhaps it is unusual to allow these freedoms to be taken with your wife, but I think you will admit that the occasion was unusual. She had told me, in effect, that murderers ought to be careful whom they marry, and that I had married the wrong woman: but she had left out of the account one thing that made all the difference. You know as well as I what she had left out—the supreme sanctification of the flesh: "With my body I thee worship."... It was Evie, not Louie Causton, with whom I had heard that nightingale sing on Wimbledon Common. They had been Evie's lips, not Louie's, that had not sought to escape my own on that September evening in Kensington Gardens. It was Evie whom I had married.... It was natural that Louie should see how things might conceivably have been different; you can say that however they turn out; and perhaps that was where the fatality came in. Circumstance, propinquity, accident, a step rightly or wrongly taken, and the rest is predicated with a terrible inevitability. Louie had had no luck; and now, not because I had placed a crushing weight upon her, but because I had given her the pity while another got the love, she had broken out upon me.

At any rate, I saw her own position sadly clearly now.

And, there being no more to say, she rose.

In the hall, however, she did find one more word to say. They were playing Sir Roger in the party-room as I held aside the bead portiÈre for Louie to pass, and the couples, seen through the gauzy hanging, seemed spectrally charming. Louie stood on the other side of the curtain, mortal, unspectral enough under a cheap square hall lamp with tesserÆ of coloured glass. With head downhung, she moved spiritlessly towards the outer door, where she stood meditatively with her hand on the letter-box. At last she looked up.

"About what you were saying about Miriam Levey," she said, without preface. "I don't think it would do—not now."

I knew she meant her own acceptance of Miriam's place. I asked her why not.

"Oh, I've said too much for that to be possible now. We've been too near. We mustn't come so near again."

"But surely," I said dispiritedly, "a job——"

She shook her head. "I should be seeing you," she said. "It wouldn't do. Good-night."

And I lost the strains of Sir Roger as the door closed between us.