When everything was going well with Ivy Lexton, she felt bored, often even irritated, with Roger Gretorex and his great love for her. But the moment she was under the weather and worried, as she was again beginning to be, then she found it a comfort to be with a man who not only worshipped her, but who never wanted her to make any effort to amuse or flatter him, as did all the other men with whom she was now once more thrown in contact.
So it was that this late afternoon, immediately after Jervis had left the flat, she telephoned and told the enraptured Gretorex that as she happened to have this evening free, she would come and have dinner with him at Ferry Place.
And yet, as she sat in the almost empty omnibus on her way to Westminster, her heart and her imagination were full of Miles Rushworth, and not once did she even throw a fleeting thought to the man she was going to see. Gretorex had become to Ivy Lexton what she had once heard a friend of hers funnily describe as a kind of “Stepney” to her husband. Sometimes she felt that she really preferred Jervis to Roger. Jervis was so kindly, easygoing, unexacting.
Still tonight she felt cross with Jervis, because of the scrap they had had over the tailor’s bill, so the thought of secret revenge was sweet.
But the image securely throned in her inmost heart was that of Miles Rushworth.
The knowledge that Rushworth, a man possessed of great, to her imagination limitless, wealth, was loving her, longing for her, and yet, owing to his oversensitive, absurdly scrupulous, conscience, hopelessly out of her reach, awoke in Ivy Lexton a feeling of fierce, passionate exasperation.
At last she stepped lightly out of the omnibus, the conductor, and an old gentleman who had been her only fellow-passenger, eagerly assisting her. She smiled at them both. Even the most trifling tribute to her beauty always gave her a touch of genuine pleasure. She was looking very pretty tonight in a charming frock, and in her hand she held the curious little bolster bag which Rushworth had bought for her at Dieppe.
Eight o’clock boomed from Big Ben, and Roger Gretorex, his arm round Ivy’s shoulder, led her into the tiny dining-room, where had been prepared in haste an attractive little meal. She had been what the man who loved her with so devoted and absorbing a passion, called “kind,” and he felt happy and at peace.
After they had finished dinner they sat on at table for a while, and, as she looked across at him, Ivy told herself that her lover was indeed a splendid-looking man—a man many a woman would envy her.
“Sometimes,” he said in a low voice, “I dream such a wonderful dream, my dearest. I dreamt it last night—”
She looked at him roguishly. “Tell me your dream!”
“I dreamt that you were free, and that we were married, you and I—”
She made no answer to that remark, only shook her head, a little pettishly. For one thing, she always felt a trifle cross, as well as bored, when Gretorex talked in what she called to herself a sloppy, sentimental way. Could he seriously suppose that, if she had the good fortune to be what he called “free,” she would marry a poverty-stricken doctor who was forced to live and work in a slum? He evidently did suppose that; and the fact that he did so made her feel uncomfortable.
“I don’t set out to be particularly good, Roger, but I do think it awfully wrong to talk like that!”
He said slowly, “I agree, it is.”
“It makes me feel I oughtn’t to come and see you like this, in your own house. Jervis would be very much put out if he knew I ever came here.”
Gretorex, wincing inwardly, made no answer to that observation. Sometimes this woman, who was all his life, would say something that made him experience a violent feeling of recoil.
She had got up as she spoke, and with a sensation of relief she put on her hat. It was still early, and she had suddenly remembered an amusing bachelor girl named Judy Swinston, who lived not far from here, in Queen Anne’s Mansions. Judy had said that she was always at home after dinner on Thursdays, so why shouldn’t she, Ivy, go along there now? She could telephone from a call office to find out if it was really true that the Bohemian crowd who formed Judy Swinston’s circle didn’t bother to dress.
In some ways Ivy Lexton was very conventional. She would have disliked making part of any gathering which could be called a party, in her present day-frock and walking shoes, charming as were both the frock and the shoes. It was a perfect St. Martin’s summer evening, more like June than the first of November.
“You’re not going yet?” asked Gretorex, in a tone almost of anguish.
“Jervis said he’d try and be back by half-past ten, so I knew I’d have to be home early.”
“I see. All right. You won’t mind my walking with you a little way?”
And then she turned and faced him, angry at his obtuseness. How utterly selfish men were!
“I should mind—mind very much indeed! Whenever we’ve left the place together, I’ve always felt uncomfortable. Taxis go all sorts of ways nowadays—just to make their fares bigger, I suppose. The other day a taxi brought Jervis and me down close here, past the end of this street, though it was quite out of our way. I should hate it, if he met us walking together at this time of night. He would think it so queer.”
Again he said sorely, “I see. All right.”
Suddenly there came the sound of raucous cries echoing down
