“You’re very punctual, my dyah,” he said, holding out his hand.
Gladys was rather taken aback by the coolness of his greeting. After what had happened last time, she had expected something tenderer.
“Am I?” she said, for lack of anything better to say; and since human beings have only a limited number of noises and grimaces with which to express the multiplicity of their emotions, she laughed as though she had been amused by something, when in fact she was only surprised and disquieted. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him, provocative-petulantly, why he didn’t kiss her, whether he was tired of her—already. But she decided to wait.
“Almost too punctual,” Sidney went on. “My train was scandalouslah late. Scandalouslah!” He radiated indignation.
“Fancy!” said Gladys. The refinement that hung around her speech, like a too-genteel disguise, dropped away from time to time, leaving individual words and phrases nakedly cockney.
“Ryahlly disgraceful!” said Sidney. “Trains have no business to be late. I shall write to the Traffic Superintendent at Liverpool Street. I’m not sure,” he added, still more importantly, “that I shan’t write to the Times as well.”
Gladys was impressed. Mr. Quarles had intended that she should be. Apart from all merely sensual satisfactions, the greatest charm of his sexual holidays resided in the fact that they were shared with impressible companions. Sidney liked them, not only young, but of a lower class, and poor. To feel himself unequivocally superior and genuinely admired was, for Sidney, a luxury almost as great as an embracement. His escapades were holidays not only from chastity, but also from that sense of inferiority which, at home, in Parliament, at the office, had always inveterately haunted him. In relation to young women of the lower classes he was a great man, as well as a “passionate” one.
Gladys, on her side, was impressed by his thunderings. But she was also amused. Impressed, because she belonged to the world of poor and patient wage-slaves, who accept the unpleasantnesses of social life as so many natural phenomena, uncontrollable by human agency and recalcitrant to human desires. But Sidney was one of the Olympian rich; the rich refuse to accept unpleasantness; they write letters to the Times about it, they pull wires, use influence, lodge formal complaints with an always friendly and obsequious police. To Gladys it was wonderful—wonderful, but also very funny. There was such a lot of loud haw-haw and lahdy-da about the whole performance. It was so like the parody of itself on the music-hall stage. She admired, she realized very accurately the economic and social causes of Sidney’s behaviour (it was that realization which had made her so promptly his mistress). But she also laughed. She lacked reverence.
Mr. Quarles opened the sitting-room door to let her pass.
“Ta,” said Gladys and walked in.
He followed. On the nape of her neck, her dark cropped hair ended in a little triangle that pointed downward along the spine. She was wearing a thin green dress. Through the fine stuff he could see, just below her shoulders, the line where the underclothes gave place to bare skin. A belt of black shiny leather was fastened in a slant very low on her hips. At every stride it rose and fell on her left hip with a rhythmical regularity. Her stockings were the colour of sunburnt flesh. Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on wheels, Mr. Quarles was peculiarly susceptible to calves, found modern fashions a treat, and could never quite get over the belief that the young women who adopted them had deliberately made themselves indecent for his benefit and because they wanted him to become their lover. His eyes followed the curves of the lustrous sunburn. But what fascinated him most today was the black leather belt flicking up and down over the left haunch, with the regularity of a piece of machinery, every time she moved her leg. In that rise and fall the whole unindividualized species, the entire sex, semaphored their appeal.
Gladys halted and turned toward him with a smile, expectantly coquettish. But Mr. Quarles made no responding gesture.
“I’ve got the Corona hyah,” he said. “Perhaps we had better begin at once.”
For the second time Gladys was surprised, thought of making a comment, and again said nothing, but sat down in silence before the typewriter.
Mr. Quarles put on his tortoiseshell-rimmed pince-nez and opened his despatch case. He had found a mistress, but he did not see why that should entail the loss of a typist, for whose services, after all, he paid.
“Perhaps,” he said, looking up at her over the top of his pince-nez, “we’d better begin with those letters to the Traffic Superintendent and the Times.” Gladys adjusted the paper, typed the date. Mr. Quarles cleared his throat and dictated. There were some good phrases, he flattered himself, in the letters. “Inexcusable slackness entailing the waste of time otherwise valuable than that of drowsy railway bureaucrats”—that, for example, was excellent. And so (for the benefit of the Times) was “the pampered social parasites of a protected industry.”
“That’ll teach the dogs,” he said with satisfaction, as he read the letters through. “That’ll make them squirm.” He looked to Gladys for applause and was not entirely satisfied with the smile on that impertinent face. “Pity old Lord Hagworm’s not alive,” he added, calling up strong allies. “I’d have written to him. He was a director of the company.” But the last of the Hagworms had died in 1912. And Gladys continued to be more amused than admiring.
Mr. Quarles dictated a dozen
