with the sober magnificence, the massive respectability that surrounded him, the cheerful, marble hearth reddened with leaping flame, the luxurious lounges, the well-groomed old gentlemen smoking eighteenpenny cheroots, the suave, noiseless satellites, that Lancelot felt a sudden pang of bewildered shame. Why, the very waiter who stood bent before him would disdain her. He took his coffee hastily, with a sense of personal unworthiness. This feeling soon evaporated, but it left less of resentment against Mary Ann which made him inexplicable to her. Fortunately, her habit of acceptance saved her some tears, though she shed others. And there remained always the gloves. When she was putting them on she always felt she was slipping her hands in his.
And then there was yet a further consolation.
For the gloves had also a subtle effect on Lancelot. They gave him a sense of responsibility. Vaguely resentful as he felt against Mary Ann (in the intervals of his more definite resentment against publishers), he also felt that he could not stop at the gloves. He had started refining her, and he must go on till she was, so to speak, all gloves. He must cover up her coarse speech, as he had covered up her coarse hands. He owed that to the gloves; it was the least he could do for them. So, whenever Mary Ann made a mistake, Lancelot corrected her. He found these grammatical dialogues not uninteresting, and a vent for his ill-humour against publishers to boot. Very often his verbal corrections sounded astonishingly like reprimands. Here, again, Mary Ann was forearmed by her feeling that she deserved them. She would have been proud had she known how much Mr. Lancelot was satisfied with her aspirates, which came quite natural. She had only dropped her 'h's' temporarily, as one drops country friends in coming to London. Curiously enough, Mary Ann did not regard the new locutions and pronunciations as superseding the old. They were a new language; she knew two others, her mother-tongue and her missus's tongue. She would as little have thought of using her new linguistic acquirements in the kitchen as of wearing her gloves there. They were for Lancelot's ears only, as her gloves were for his eyes.
All this time Lancelot was displaying prodigious musical activity, so much so that the cost of ruled paper became a consideration. There was no form of composition he did not essay, none by which he made a shilling. Once he felt himself the prey of a splendid inspiration, and sat up all night writing at fever pitch, surrounded with celestial harmonies, audible to him alone; the little room resounded with the thunder of a mighty orchestra, in which every instrument sang to him individually-the piccolo, the flute, the oboes, the clarionets, filling the air with a silver spray of notes; the drums throbbing, the trumpets shrilling, the four horns pealing with long stately notes, the trombones and bassoons vibrating, the violins and violas sobbing in linked sweetness, the 'cello and the contra-bass moaning their under-chant. And then, in the morning, when the first rough sketch was written, the glory faded. He threw down his pen, and called himself an ass for wasting his time on what nobody would ever look at. Then he laid his head on the table, overwrought, full of an infinite pity for himself. A sudden longing seized him for some one to love him, to caress his hair, to smooth his hot forehead. This mood passed too; he smoothed the slumbering Beethoven instead. After a while he went into his bedroom, and sluiced his face and hands in ice-cold water, and rang the bell for breakfast.
There was a knock at the door in response.
'Come in!' he said gently-his emotions had left him tired to the point of tenderness. And then he waited a minute while Mary Ann was drawing on her gloves.
'Did you ring, sir?' said a wheezy voice, at last. Mrs. Leadbatter had got tired of waiting.
Lancelot started violently-Mrs. Leadbatter had latterly left him entirely to Mary Ann. 'It's my hastmer,' she had explained to him apologetically, meeting him casually in the passage. 'I can't trollop up and down stairs as I used to when I fust took this house five-an'-twenty year ago, and pore Mr. Leadbatter-' and here followed reminiscences long since in their hundredth edition.
'Yes; let me have some coffee-very hot-please,' said Lancelot, less gently. The woman's voice jarred upon him; and her features were not redeeming.
'Lawd, sir, I 'ope that gas 'asn't been burnin' all night, sir,' she said, as she was going out.
'It has,' he said shortly.
'You'll hexcoose me, sir, but I didn't bargen for that. I'm only a pore, honest, 'ard-workin' widder, and I noticed the last gas bill was 'eavier then hever since that black winter that took pore Mr. Leadbatter to 'is grave. Fair is fair, and I shall 'ave to reckon it a hextry, with the rate gone up sevenpence a thousand and my Rosie leavin' a fine nurse-maid's place in Bayswater at the end of the month to come 'ome and 'elp 'er mother, 'cos my hastmer-'
'Will you please shut the door after you?' interrupted Lancelot, biting his lip with irritation. And Mrs. Leadbatter, who was standing in the aperture with no immediate intention of departing, could find no repartee beyond slamming the door as hard as she could.
This little passage of arms strangely softened Lancelot to Mary Ann. It made him realise faintly what her life must be.
'I should go mad and smash all the crockery!' he cried aloud. He felt quite tender again towards the uncomplaining girl.
Presently there was another knock. Lancelot growled, half prepared to renew the battle, and to give Mrs. Leadbatter a piece of his mind on the subject. But it was merely Mary Ann.
Shaken in his routine, he looked on steadily while Mary Ann drew on her gloves; and this in turn confused Mary Ann. Her hand trembled.
'Let me help you,' he said.
And there was Lancelot buttoning Mary Ann's glove just as if her name were Guinevere! And neither saw the absurdity of wasting time upon an operation which would have to be undone in two minutes. Then Mary Ann, her eyes full of soft light, went to the sideboard and took out the prosaic elements of breakfast.
When she returned, to put them back, Lancelot was astonished to see her carrying a cage-a plain square cage, made of white tin wire.
'What's that?' he gasped.
'Please, Mr. Lancelot, I want to ask you to do me a favour.' She dropped her eyelashes timidly.
'Yes, Mary Ann,' he said briskly. 'But what have you got there?'
'It's only my canary, sir. Would you-please, sir, would you mind?'-then desperately, 'I want to hang it up here, sir!'
'Here?' he repeated in frank astonishment. 'Why?'
'Please, sir, I-I-it's sunnier here, sir, and I-I think it must be pining away. It hardly ever sings in my bedroom.'
'Well, but,' he began-then seeing the tears gathering on her eyelids, he finished with laughing good-nature-'as long as Mrs. Leadbatter doesn't reckon it an extra.'
'Oh, no, sir,' said Mary Ann, seriously. 'I'll tell her. Besides, she will be glad, because she don't like the canary-she says its singing disturbs her. Her room is next to mine, you know, Mr. Lancelot.'
'But you said it doesn't sing much.'
'Please, sir, I-I mean in summer,' explained Mary Ann, in rosy confusion; 'and-and-it'll soon be summer, sir.'
'Sw-e-e-t!' burst forth the canary, suddenly, as if encouraged by Mary Ann's opinion.
It was a pretty little bird-one golden yellow from beak to tail, as though it had been dipped in sunshine.
'You see, sir,' she cried eagerly, 'it's beginning already.'
'Yes,' said Lancelot, grimly; 'but so is Beethoven.'
'I'll hang it high up-in the window,' said Mary Ann, 'where the dog can't get at it.'
'Well, I won't take any responsibilities,' murmured Lancelot, resignedly.
'No, sir, I'll attend to that,' said Mary Ann, vaguely.
After the installation of the canary Lancelot found himself slipping more and more into a continuous matter-of- course flirtation; more and more forgetting the slavey in the candid young creature who had, at moments, strange dancing lights in her awakened eyes, strange flashes of witchery in her ingenuous expression. And yet he made a desultory struggle against what a secret voice was always whispering was a degradation. He knew she had no real place in his life; he scarce thought of her save when she came bodily before his eyes with her pretty face and her trustful glance.
He felt no temptation to write sonatas on her eyebrow-to borrow Peter's variation, for the use of musicians, of Shakespeare's 'write sonnets on his mistress's eyebrow'-and, indeed, he knew she could be no fit mistress for him-this starveling drudge, with passive passions, meek, accepting, with well-nigh every spark of spontaneity choked out of her. The women of his dreams were quite other-beautiful, voluptuous, full of the joy of life, tremulous
