"Well--more like a boy, somehow, than a girl. She doesn't care. She'll do anything. And she's plucky. If she's taken a thing into her head she'll go through with it whatever you say."

"Yes, she's got pluck," he a.s.sented. "_And_ cheek."

"Mind you, she's as good as gold, with all her queerness. But it _is_ queer, Mr. Ransome, if you're a woman, not to care what you do, or what you look like doing it. And she's so innocent, she doesn't reelly know.

She couldn't do it if she did. All the same, I wish she wouldn't."

She seemed to brood over it in beautiful distress.

"It's a pity that the boys encourage them. Boys don't mind, of course.

But _men_ don't like it."

And with every word of her strange, magical voice there went from him some shred of innocence and illusion. It was, of course, his innocence, his ignorance that had made him tolerant of a Grand Display, that had filled him with admiration for the Young Ladies of the Polytechnic Gymnasium, and that had attracted him to Winny Dymond. Everything he had thought and felt about Winny was illusion. It was illusion, that sense she gave him of tenderness and of absurdity. Gymnastics were all very well in their way. But nice women, the women that men cared about, women like Violet Usher, did not make of their bodies a spectacle in Grand Displays. Little Winny, whatever she did, was all right, of course; but now he came to think of it, he began to wish, like Violet Usher, that she wouldn't do it. It was as a boy and her comrade that he had admired her. It was as a man that he criticized her now, looking at her through Violet Usher's eyes. And it was as a boy that he had cared, and as a man that he had ceased to care.

In one night Ranny had suddenly grown up.

Of course, it might have been different if she had cared for _him_.

"What does it mean, the Combined Maze? What is it?"

Miss Usher was studying her programme.

The Combined Maze? That wasn't so easy to explain. But Ranny explained it. It was, he said, a maze, because you ran it winding in and out like, and combined, because men and women ran in it all mixed up together.

They made patterns accordin' as they ran, and the patterns were the plan of the maze. You didn't see the plan. You didn't know it, unless you were leader. You just followed.

"I see. Men and women together."

"Men and women together."

"Are you running in it?"

"Yes."

"Does Winny run in it?"

"Rather. We run together. You'll see how it's done."

Miss Usher thought she saw.

And they ran in it together, Ransome with Winny before him, turning from him, parting from him, flying from him, and returning to him again.

Always with the same soft pad of her feet, the same swaying of her st.u.r.dy, slender body, the same rising and falling on her shoulders of her childish door-knocker plat.

Winny was a child; that was all that could be said of her; and he, he was a man, grown up suddenly in a single night.

He ran, perfunctorily, through all the foolish turnings and windings of the maze. He put his hands on Winny's waist to guide her when, in her excitement, she went wrong. He linked his arm with hers when they ran locked, shoulder to shoulder, in the Great Wheel; but it was as if he held and caught, and was locked together with a child. Winny's charm was gone; and with it gone the sense of tenderness and absurdity; gone the magic and the madness of the running. For in Ranny's heart there was another magic and another madness. And it was as if Life itself had caught him and locked him with a woman in the whirling of its Great Wheel.

CHAPTER IX

He haunted that door in the shutter more than ever in the hope of seeing Violet Usher. Not that he wanted to haunt it. It was as if, set his feet southward as he would, they were turned back irresistibly and drawn eastward in the direction of the door.

There was nothing furtive and secret in his haunting. He had a right to hang about Starker's, for he knew Miss Usher now. He had been formally introduced to her by Winny as they left the Polytechnic together, on the night of the Grand Display. Winny, preoccupied with her own performance on the parallel bars, had remained unaware of their communion in the gallery, and Violet Usher had evidently judged it best to say nothing about their previous interviews.

The introducing, of course, made all the difference in the world; for Ransome, reckless as he was, respected the conventions where women were concerned. He had seen too much of the secret and furtive ways of other fellows, and he knew what their hanging about meant. It meant in nine cases out of ten that they wanted kicking badly. And Ranny would have told you gravely that, in his experience, it was the "swells" who wanted kicking most of all. The "fellows," the shop a.s.sistants, and the young clerks, like himself, were fairly decent, but sometimes they wanted kicking, too, and in any case the "flabby" way they fooled about with girls, and their "silly goats' talk" outraged Ranny. It made a girl cheap, and kept other fellows off her. It didn't give her her chance. It wasn't cricket.

He was prepared to kick, personally, any fellow he found making Winny Dymond or Violet Usher cheap.

Not that Winny lent herself to cheapness, but about Violet he was not quite sure. And if you had asked why not, he would have told you it was because she was so different. By which he meant so dangerously, so disastrously feminine and innocent and pretty. He knew now (she had "jolly well shown him") that Winny could take care of herself; but Violet, no; she was too impulsive, too helpless, too confiding. To think of her waiting for him like that--for a fellow she'd never met before--in Oxford Street at closing-time! How did she know that he wasn't a blackguard? Supposing it had been some other fellow? Ranny's muscles quivered as he thought of Violet's innocence and Violet's danger.

All this was luminously clear to Ranny.

But when he asked himself why, and to what end he himself desired to cultivate her acquaintance, it was there that obscurity set in. One thing he was sure about. He did not intend to marry her. If he couldn't afford to marry Winny he most certainly could not afford to marry Violet, not for years and years, so many years that you might just as well say never, and have done with it. Violet was not the sort of girl you could ask to wait for you years and years. His youth was not too sanguine to divine in her the makings of a more expensive woman than even a petty cas.h.i.+er could afford.

To be sure, Ranny did not enter into any sordid calculations, neither did he think the thing out in so many words; for in this matter of Violet Usher he was incapable of any sustained and connected thought. It came to him--the utter hopelessness of it--in glimpses and by flashes, as he sat at his high desk in the counting-house.

But no flashes came to him with the question, Why, then, did he keep on running after Violet Usher? He ran because he couldn't help it; because of the sheer excitement of the running; because he was venturesome, and because of the very mystery and danger of the adventure.

But, though he hung round Starker's evening after evening, from the middle to the very end of October, he never once caught sight of Violet Usher. Winny he caught, as often as not, now that he had given up trying to catch her; sometimes he caught her at Starker's, sometimes at their old corner by the Gymnasium; and whenever he caught her he walked home with her. If Winny did not positively seek capture, she no longer positively evaded it. She was no longer afraid of him, recognizing, no doubt, that he wanted nothing of her, that he would never worry her again. It was as if she had given him his lesson, and was content now that he had learned it.

One night, early in November, as they were going over Wandsworth Bridge, the question that had been burning in him suddenly flared up.

"What has become of your friend Miss Usher?"

"Nothing," said Winny, "has become of her. She's gone home. Her father sent for her."

"What ever for?"

"To look after her. She never should have left home."

Then she told him what she knew of Violet, bit by bit, as he drew it out of her. She was very fond of Violet. Violet had pretty ways that made you fond of her. Everybody was fond of Violet. Only her people--they'd been a bit too harsh and strict with her, Winny fancied. Not that she knew anything but what Violet had told her.

Where was her home?

In the country. Down in Hertfords.h.i.+re. Her father was a farmer, a small farmer. The trouble was that Violet couldn't bear the country. She wouldn't stay a day in it if she could help it. She was all for life.

She'd been about a year in town. No, Winny hadn't known her for a year.

Only for a few months really, since she came to Starker's. She'd been in several situations before that. She was a.s.sistant at the ribbon counter at Starker's. The clerks didn't have anything to do with the shop girls as a rule: but Winny thought the custom silly and stuck up. Anyhow, she'd taken a fancy to Violet, seeing her go in and out. And Violet needed a deal of looking after. She was like a child. A spoiled child with little ways. Winny had tried her best to take care of her, but she couldn't be taking care of her all the time. She was glad she had gone home, though she was so fond of her. But she was afraid she wouldn't stay long.

"You think," said Ransome, "she'll come back?"

"I shouldn't be surprised if she turned up any day."

"And you'll take care of her?"

"Yes, I shall take care of her."