And all for an empty-headed little thing who could have been found in her dozens behind twenty shop counters not a quarter of a mile away!

What on earth, what on, or under, or above the earth, could this brooding, clever, gigantic, laughed-at creature want with such a doll?

Why could he not leave her in her proper place--cheek by cheek with the little bounder of her choice in that smelly, unlighted old ledger-room? The man must be blind, or a fool.

Then a sort of lethargy took Louie. Suddenly she cared for nothing.

Let the fancy-stationer's cub take his risks; let the other eat his heart out if he would; it was no business of hers. Nor was that absurd table of questions before her any business of hers. Kitty Windus might answer that sort of thing; Mackie might answer it; but the Scarisbricks were not Kittys, with her "part-independency," not Mackies, to stuff their heads and ink their fingers like this for their "permanencies." She did not know now why she had ever come to the place, and she wanted no more of it. What she was going to do she did not know. She did know, however, that she was not going to answer that silly paper.

So, by-and-by, she allowed the paper to be collected again, as blank as when it had been placed before her.

She came upon the perverse Mr. Jeffries once more before she left. He almost ran her down bodily as they met in the doorway of the typewriting-room. But this time she did not look at his face. With a swift intaking of her breath she fell back to save herself. She did not hear whether he apologised or not; in one moment, without premeditation, her whole being had become constrained to a new, protective, instinctive att.i.tude.

Slowly and thoughtfully she left the School.

She alone of the students was unsurprised to hear, four or five days later, that Mr. Jeffries, who had pa.s.sed with distinction in the first part of his paper, had, like herself, failed in the second part.

--_b_

For the examination the rooms had been cut up with screens; for the breaking-up social they were cleared of everything that could be stowed away into dark corners. Never was such a hoisting and calling as those with which the hired piano was got up the three flights of stairs. Most of it came from Mr. Mackie, turned for the nonce into a shabash-wallah.

"Mind her funnybone--all together--up with her! Oh, pursue me, wenches, I've got my muscle up, first time since the second housemaid ran away with the dustman! Don't tickle her parson's nose, Archi-bald, or she'll sneeze when I sing, key in the usual place--and mind the stair above the top, it isn't there. This way--excuse my shirt-sleeves, Miss Windus, I'm in mourning."

And so the piano was trundled to its place in the corner by the big blackboard.

Mr. Mackie was of service, too, in the French-chalking of the floor, for the men hauled him about by the arms and legs on a piece of sacking in order to give it its final polish for dancing. Half the students, male and female, helped to wind the blackened old brackets and chandeliers with red and green tissue paper, to set evergreens on the tops of the cupboards, and to affix the trophies of little Christmas tree flags on the cabbagey old walls; and Louie helped with the refreshments. Three women had been got in, one to make coffee and the others to preside in the cloakrooms, and Miss Levey had won half-a-crown from Kitty Windus.

For Mr. Jeffries was coming to the party after all. More, it had been Louie herself who had asked him, though it had been Miss Levey's cunning that had made her do so. On no grounds at all save that it appeared to annoy, the Jewess had once or twice twitted Louie that Mr.

Jeffries favoured _her_ and, when Mr. Jeffries had declined her own invitation, had nudged Louie. "_You_ ask him, and see whether he doesn't come!" the nudge had meant. Louie entered into no contest with Miss Levey. She had turned at once to Mr. Jeffries and repeated the invitation. He had accepted it.

Louie doubted her own wisdom in going to that social at all. Even when she had reached Sutherland Place and spread out her frocks on her bed she still doubted. But suddenly she gave a short laugh. Of course she was going! It was her first "social," and it might be her last; she was going, and she was going to wear the oyster-grey satin that, ever since she had had it, had always seemed to "live" so on her shoulders.

She declined Mrs. Leggat's help in getting into it; if Mrs. Leggat would be so good as to get her a hansom instead----Mrs. Leggat went out. The oyster-grey was one of the oldest of her frocks; Louie knew every st.i.tch of it; and she smiled as she thought that for that very reason she would have chosen it had she deliberately intended to make a conquest. She surveyed herself in it in the tilted gla.s.s. Yes, she thought she would do.

"It's your last time on, poor old rag," she muttered.

She heard the pulling up of the hansom; she put on a light shawl and descended; and Mrs. Leggat lingered in the doorway as she drove off.

They had set candles on the floors of the landings of the Holborn stairs, but they guttered in the draughts, and showed little but the feet of those who ascended. Louie followed a pair of orange silk-stockinged ankles and a trammel of orange petticoats (she didn't know whose) up the stairs, and entered the general-room. The library had been converted into a ladies' cloakroom, with the old ledger-room as an annexe; and in this last room Evie Soames, with an elaborate running of pink ribbons beneath the openwork of her cream net blouse, was putting on her slippers. She only showed Louie the top of her dark head; in this and other ways she had displayed reserve since the lunch interval of the examination day. A woman with a pair of very chapped hands and a very clean ap.r.o.n took Louie's shawl; and Louie, first glancing at her hair over the powdered shoulders of the person in orange, went into the double room that had been prepared for dancing.

Students and their friends had turned up in their best bibs and tuckers. Most of the men wore swallow-tailed coats; one of the exceptions was Mr. Jeffries in his brown jacket-suit. He was talking to Miss Levey, or rather Miss Levey was gasping to him; she had just given him, or rather hung upon his wrist, one of the violet-written cards, printed from the gelatine-copier, which served as programmes.

Weston wore a tightly fitting old frock-coat, which Mr. Mackie humorously likened to the overcoat of sausage that had spent the night in the coal-hole. Archie Merridew had a white waistcoat. All the men stroked the wrinkles out of their white gloves without ceasing. The women, to the reflective eye, had lost little by the foregoing of out-and-out evening-dress. There was an "I could an' if I would" about their long sleeves and high necks. Kitty Windus, in her blue foulard, with a cutlet-frill about her thin neck, graciously consented to the level of those who had not a pound a week on their own; Miriam Levey, in a maroon pinafore-frock with broad braces over her shoulders, instantly put every simple blouse in the room at its ease. One frock only flouted the modest agreement to which the executive had come; this was the orange satin one which Louie had followed upstairs. It partially clothed a friend of Mr. Mackie's. Louie heard the words in which Mr. Mackie introduced young Merridew to its wearer.

"Mr. Merridew, Miss Dulcie Levine, Miss Levine, Mr. Merridew, two of the best, seasonable weather for the time of the year, ain't it, what?

Permit me, Dulcibella, a bit of fluff" (here Mr. Mackie cast aside the bit of fluff, if there was one, which he had taken from Miss Dulcie's shoulder, and represented the noise of its falling by a loud stamp on the floor). "Ought to be dancing soon; what time is it by your clocks, Dulcie? _I_ saw them as you got out of the Black Maria, the cab, I mean--_heu_, desist, Mr. Mackie, you wag!" (Mr. Mackie smacked his own wrist in reproof of himself.) "Why am I not in me usual spirits, gin cold, to-night, Dulcinea? 'Tis thy fatal beauty has undone me; what ho, a needle and threat, O fairest of thy socks, s.e.x I should say....

Ay, she dances, Archibald, but not with thee, base varlet; she dances at the Theatre hight Alcazar, nigh unto ye Square called Leicester."

Louie heard Kitty Windus whisper to Evie Soames that Mr. Mackie was going to be splendid to-night; but her approval did not extend to Mr.

Mackie's friend, who was already too splendid. Kitty's head was held so high when Miss Levine pa.s.sed that she appeared to be looking at her with her nostrils. With her eyes she saw only the orange creature's back. This was a rather handsome =V=, and that did not improve matters. Kitty whispered behind her fan about "some people." Miss Dulcie used Kitty as a quizzing-gla.s.s for the inspection of whoever happened to be behind her.

Mr. Jeffries stood with his back against the thrown-back folding door.

He did not dance, but he had not at all the air of a wet blanket; on the contrary, his face wore a quite lively smile. He was smiling at the red and green tissue paper that enswathed the central chandelier.

Louie saw Evie Soames pa.s.s him; his eyes rested on her for a moment, but only as they rested on everybody else, and then went back to the red and green tissue paper of the chandelier again. He had accepted the inevitable, then. Indeed, had he not done so, Louie could hardly imagine that he would have been there. Well, it was the most sensible thing he could do. Louie would go and speak to him presently.

Louie made a tour of the rooms. The =E= of reference-books had been turned into a place for sitting out, and in the typewriting-room the lids of two or three desks had been wedged up to form card-tables.

Into the room beyond, which was the smoking-room, she did not penetrate. Already a fiddle was tuning up, but Louie had told young Merridew, who had magnanimously asked her for her card, that she did not intend to dance. None the less he had taken her card and scrawled something on it. She had tossed the piece of violet-written pasteboard into a corner.

At nine o'clock there was a tapping on the top of the piano, and the music began. Mr. Mackie and the lady in orange glided out over the French-chalked floor. Two minutes later the room was full of waltzing couples.

Louie had sat down on the opposite side of the room to Mr. Jeffries.

Through momentarily clear s.p.a.ces she saw him from time to time. He did not move from his station by the folding door, where, among the hoppers and caperers who sped past him, he seemed to have something of the stability of a monument in some centre of apparently aimless traffic. Still, he seemed to be enjoying himself, and Louie intended to go across to him when the waltz was over.

A word she overheard, however, caused her to change her mind and to rise to her feet at once. Mr. Mackie, pa.s.sing with his orange partner, had repeated his j.a.pe about the Ruthless Boaz.

Without more ado Louie threaded her way through the dancers and stood before Mr. Jeffries.

"Won't you try to dance?" she said.

As he turned the amber eyes on her she had the feeling that she slid all at once into the field of some piece of apparatus with an object-gla.s.s. She was the object. For a moment he forgot his smile; he looked attentively at her; and then the smile returned. He answered in an easy, deep voice, the accent of which was neither c.o.c.kney nor yet quite of the mode of the men Louie knew.

"Oh, I--I don't dance," he said.

"Won't you let me teach you?"

His eyes were still on hers. He seemed to give the simple question weighty consideration. Then his eyes dropped to his hands.

"Hallo," he said, as if to himself. His programme was where Miss Levey had put it, dangling from his wrist as if from a hook. Apparently he had not noticed it before. Then, looking at Louie again, he said: "I mean, my gloves--I've no gloves."

"Gloves!" she said quietly. "Come."

She took the absurd programme from his wrist, threw it away, and put her gloved hand into his naked one.

She drew Mr. Jeffries into the current.

Louie had danced with ignoramuses before, but never with a man quite so awkward as this. She did her best to steer him, but before they had gone half-way round the room they had collided with Evie Soames, leaning back in the crook of young Merridew's arm--with Kitty Windus, tiptoe and leaning forward over her partner--with Mr. Mackie, who had lighted a cigarette and was singing the refrain of the dance as he pa.s.sed. Then Mr. Jeffries begged her, out of consideration for herself, to stop. But she had no desire to stop. She wondered why, b.u.mped and trampled so, she should want to go on, but she gave that riddle up. He did not cease to apologise for his ungainliness.

But the riddle of why she did not wish to stop refused to be given up.

It renewed itself with each of his apologies. Stumbling ludicrously, she knew that she still wished to go on. What she did not know at that time of her life was that she had secrets that hitherto she had kept even from herself.

Then, all in a moment, the strange thing happened. She felt that colour, that stress and anger never brought there, rise slow and warm into her cheeks. Her glance had merely rested for a moment on that hand of hers that lay slender as a willow leaf in his, but the riddle was a puzzle no longer. Abashed, she _had_ surprised a secret.

She had caught herself wishing--half wishing--she did not quite know what--that she too had taken off her glove.

Her colour lasted for half-a-minute; then, perhaps because of the colour, her voice became matter-of-fact. She glanced up at him.

"I'm sorry you failed in your examination," she said.

Louie was tall, but his head was clear and away above hers. He looked down, earnest, anxious, smiling, all three.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "Why should it?" he added.