Daisy, the maid, came back at ten.
“Sittin’ in the dark, mum?” she asked, looking into the sitting room. She turned on the light. Marjorie winced. The glare brought back to her dazzled eyes all the close immediate details of the material world. God had vanished like a pricked bubble. Daisy caught sight of the unlaid table. “What, ’aven’t you ’ad no supper?” she exclaimed in horror.
“Why, no,” said Marjorie. “I quite forgot about supper.”
“Not Mr. Bidlake neither?” Daisy went on reproachfully. “Why, pore man, ’e must be perished.”
She hurried away toward the kitchen in search of cold beef and pickles.
Upstairs in his room Walter was lying on the bed, his face buried in the pillows.
XXXI
A crossword problem had brought Mr. Quarles to the seventeenth volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Idle curiosity detained him. The Lord Chamberlain, he learned, carries a white staff and wears a golden or jewelled key. The word lottery has no very definite signification; but Nero gave such prizes as a house or a slave, while Heliogabalus introduced an element of absurdity—one ticket for a golden vase, another for six flies. Pickney B. S. Pinchback was the acting Republican governor of Louisiana in 1783. To define the lyre, it is necessary clearly to separate it from the allied harp and guitar. In one of the northern ravines of Madeira some masses of a coarsely crystalline Essexite are exposed to view. But there is also a negative side to magic. And terrestrial magnetism has a long history. He had just started to read about Sir John Blundell Maple, Bart. (1845–1903), whose father, John Maple (d. 1900) had a small furniture shop in the Tottenham Court Road, when the parlour maid appeared at the door and announced that there was a young lady to see him.
“A young ladah?” he repeated with some surprise, taking off his pince-nez.
“Yes, it’s me,” said a familiar voice, and Gladys pushed past the maid and advanced into the middle of the room.
At the sight of her, Mr. Quarles felt a sudden spasm of apprehension. He got up. “You can go,” he said with dignity to the maid. She went. “My dyah child!” He took Gladys’s hand; she disengaged it. “But what a surprise!”
“Ow, a pleasant surprise!” she answered sarcastically. Emotion always resuscitated the cockney in her. She sat down, planting herself with force and determination in the chair. “Here I am,” that determined down-sitting seemed to imply, “and here I stay”—perhaps even, “here I bloody well stay.”
“Pleasant indeed,” said Mr. Quarles mellifluously, for the sake of saying something. This was terrible, he was thinking. What could she want? And how should he get her out of the house again? But if necessary, he could say he’d sent for her to do some specially urgent typing for him. “But very unexpected,” he added.
“Very.” She shut her mouth firmly and looked at him—with eyes that Mr. Quarles didn’t at all like the expression of—as if in expectation. Of what?
“I’m delighted to see you, of course,” he went on.
“Ow, are you?” She laughed dangerously.
Mr. Quarles looked at her and was afraid. He really hated the girl. He began to wonder why he had ever desired her. “Very glad,” he repeated, with dignified emphasis. The great thing was to remain dignified, firmly superior. “But …”
“But,” she echoed.
“Well, ryahlly, I think it was rather rash to come here.”
“He thinks it rather rash,” said Gladys, as though passing on the information to an invisible third party.
“Not to say unnecessarah.”
“Well, I’m the judge of that.”
“After all, you know quite well that if you’d wanted to see me, you’d only got to write and I’d have come at once. So why run the risk of coming hyah?” He waited. But Gladys did not answer, only looked at him with those hard green eyes of hers and that close-lipped smile that seemed to shut in enigmatically heaven only knew what dangerous thoughts and feelings. “I’m ryahlly annoyed with you.” The manner of Mr. Quarles’s rebuke was dignified and impressive, but kind—always kind. “Yes, ryahlly annoyed.”
Gladys threw back her head and uttered a shrill, short, hyena-like laugh.
Mr. Quarles was disconcerted. But he preserved his dignity. “You may laugh,” he said. “But I speak syahriously. You had no right to come. You knew quite well how important it is that nothing should be suspected. Especially hyah—hyah, in my own house. You know it.”
“Yes, I knew it,” Gladys repeated, nodding her head truculently. “And that’s exactly why I came.” She was silent for a moment. But the pressure of her feelings made silence no longer bearable. “Because I knew you were frightened,” she went on, “frightened that people might find out what you were really like. You dirty old swine!” And suddenly losing all control of her fury, she sprang to her feet and advanced on Mr. Quarles so menacingly that he recoiled a step. But her attack was only verbal. “Giving yourself such airs, as though you was the Prince of Wales. And then taking a girl to dinner at the Corner House. And blaming everybody else, worse than a parson, when you’re no better than a dirty old pig yourself. Yes, a dirty old pig, that’s what you are. Saying you loved me, indeed! I know what that sort of love is. Why, a girl isn’t safe with you in a taxi. No, she isn’t. You filthy old beast! And then …”
“Ryahlly, ryahlly!” Mr. Quarles had sufficiently recovered from his first shock of horrified surprise to be able to protest. This was terrible, unheard of. He felt himself being devastated, laid waste to, ravaged.
“ ‘Ryahlly, ryahlly,’ ” she mimicked derisively. “And then not even taking a girl to a decent seat at the theatre. But when it was a question of your having
