She was an upstart and an alien and here she was. It was more extraordinary in this Hampstead clarity than at a theatre or concert in town. It was a part of his world … and theirs; one might get the manner and still keep alive. … Was he out of humour because he had realised what he had done or because she had been late for dinner? Was he thinking what his behaviour amounted to in the eyes of his aunt and cousins; even supposing they did not know that the invitation to dinner and the lecture had been given only this afternoon? He must have known it was necessary to go home and tidy up. When he said the conservatoire was so near that there would be plenty of time was not that as good as saying she might be a little late? Why had he not said they were staying with him? Next week was full of appointments for their teeth. So he knew they were coming … and then to go marching in to the midst of them three quarters of an hour late and to be so dumbfounded as to be unable to apologise … my dear I shall never forget the faces of those women. I could not imagine at first what was wrong. He was looking so strange. The women barely noticed me—barely noticed me. “I’m afraid dinner will be spoiled,” he said, in his way. “They had all been sitting round the fire three mortal quarters of an hour waiting for me!” How they would talk. Their thoughts and feelings about employees could be seen at a glance. It was bad enough for them to have a secretary appearing at dinner the first evening of their great visit. And now they were sitting alone round the fire and she was at the lecture alone, unchaperoned, with him, “she had the effrontery to come to dinner three quarters of an hour late …” feathery hair and periwinkle eyes and white noses; gentle die-away voices. Perhaps the thought of his favourite cousins coming next week buoyed him up. No wonder he wanted to get away to the lecture. He had come, reasonably; not seeing why he should not; just as he would have gone if they had not been there. Now he saw it as they saw it. There he sat. She gazed at the shifting scenes … ports and strange islands in distant seas, sunlit coloured mountains tops peaking up from forests. The lecturing voice was far away, irrelevant and unintelligible. Peace flooded her.
XVII
The patient sat up with a groan of relief. His dark strong positive liverish profile turned away towards the spittoon. There was a clean broad gap of neck between the strong inturned ending of his hair and the narrow strip of firm heavily glazed blue white collar fitting perfectly into the collar of the well-cut grey coat clothing the firm bulk of his body. “To my mind there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do thoroughly well,” he said into the spittoon. “All the hospitals would employ ’em in the end. They’re more natty and conscientious than men and there’s nothing in the work they can’t manage.”
“No, I think that’s so.”
Miriam cleared her throat emphatically. They had no right to talk in that calm disposing way in the presence of a woman. Mr. Hancock felt that too. That kind of man was always nice to women. Strong and cheerful and helping them; but with his mind full of quotations and generalisations. He would bring them out anywhere. It would never occur to him that the statement of them could be offensive. His newspaper office would be full of little girls. “It’s those little ph’girls.” But the Amalgam Company probably had quite uneducated girls. Nobody ought to be asked to spend their lives calculating decimal quantities. The men who lived on these things had their drudgery done for them. They did it themselves first. Yes, but then it meant their future. A woman clerk never becomes a partner. There was no hope for women in business. That man’s wife would be wealthy and screened and looked after all her days; he working. He would live as long as she—a little old slender nut-brown man.
“What was the employment Mr. Dolland was speaking of?”
“Dispensing. I think he’s quite right. And it’s not at all badly paid.”
“It ought not to be. Think of the responsibility and anxiety.”
“It’s a jolly stiff exam too.”
“I like the calm way he talks, as if it were his business to decide what is suitable.”
