For Alvina it was a most curious tea-party. She listened and smiled and made vague answers to Albert, who leaned his broad, thin, brittle shoulders towards her. Lottie seemed rather shadowily to preside. But it was Arthur who came out into communication. And now, uttering his rather broad-mouthed speeches, she seemed to hear in him a quieter, subtler edition of his father. His father had been a little, terrifically loud-voiced, hard-skinned man, amazingly uneducated and amazingly bullying, who had tyrannized for many years over the Sunday School children during morning service. He had been an odd-looking creature with round grey whiskers: to Alvina, always a creature, never a man: an atrocious leprechaun from under the chapel floor. And how he used to dig the children in the back with his horrible iron thumb, if the poor things happened to whisper or nod in chapel!
These were his children—most curious chips of the old block. Who ever would have believed she would have been taking tea with them.
“Why don’t you have a bicycle, and go out on it?” Arthur was saying.
“But I can’t ride,” said Alvina.
“You’d learn in a couple of lessons. There’s nothing in riding a bicycle.”
“I don’t believe I ever should,” laughed Alvina.
“You don’t mean to say you’re nervous?” said Arthur rudely and sneeringly.
“I am,” she persisted.
“You needn’t be nervous with me,” smiled Albert broadly, with his odd, genuine gallantry. “I’ll hold you on.”
“But I haven’t got a bicycle,” said Alvina, feeling she was slowly colouring to a deep, uneasy blush.
“You can have mine to learn on,” said Lottie. “Albert will look after it.”
“There’s your chance,” said Arthur rudely. “Take it while you’ve got it.”
Now Alvina did not want to learn to ride a bicycle. The two Miss Carlins, two more old maids, had made themselves ridiculous forever by becoming twin cycle fiends. And the horrible energetic strain of peddling a bicycle over miles and miles of highway did not attract Alvina at all. She was completely indifferent to sightseeing and scouring about. She liked taking a walk, in her lingering indifferent fashion. But rushing about in any way was hateful to her. And then, to be taught to ride a bicycle by Albert Witham! Her very soul stood still.
“Yes,” said Albert, beaming down at her from his strange pale eyes. “Come on. When will you have your first lesson?”
“Oh,” cried Alvina in confusion. “I can’t promise. I haven’t time, really.”
“Time!” exclaimed Arthur rudely. “But what do you do wi’ yourself all day?”
“I have to keep house,” she said, looking at him archly.
“House! You can put a chain round its neck, and tie it up,” he retorted.
Albert laughed, showing all his teeth.
“I’m sure you find plenty to do, with everything on your hands,” said Lottie to Alvina.
“I do!” said Alvina. “By evening I’m quite tired—though you mayn’t believe it, since you say I do nothing,” she added, laughing confusedly to Arthur.
But he, hardheaded little fortune-maker, replied:
“You have a girl to help you, don’t you!”
Albert, however, was beaming at her sympathetically.
“You have too much to do indoors,” he said. “It would do you good to get a bit of exercise out of doors. Come down to the Coach Road tomorrow afternoon, and let me give you a lesson. Go on—”
Now the coach-road was a level drive between beautiful park-like grass-stretches, down in the valley. It was a delightful place for learning to ride a bicycle, but open in full view of all the world. Alvina would have died of shame. She began to laugh nervously and hurriedly at the very thought.
“No, I can’t. I really can’t. Thanks, awfully,” she said.
“Can’t you really!” said Albert. “Oh well, we’ll say another day, shall we?”
“When I feel I can,” she said.
“Yes, when you feel like it,” replied Albert.
“That’s more it,” said Arthur. “It’s not the time. It’s the nervousness.” Again Albert beamed at her sympathetically, and said:
“Oh, I’ll hold you. You needn’t be afraid.”
“But I’m not afraid,” she said.
“You won’t say you are,” interposed Arthur. “Women’s faults mustn’t be owned up to.”
Alvina was beginning to feel quite dazed. Their mechanical, overbearing way was something she was unaccustomed to. It was like the jaws of a pair of insentient iron pincers. She rose, saying she must go.
Albert rose also, and reached for his straw hat, with its coloured band.
“I’ll stroll up with you, if you don’t mind,” he said. And he took his place at her side along the Knarborough Road, where everybody turned to look. For, of course, he had a sort of fame in Woodhouse. She went with him laughing and chatting. But she did not feel at all comfortable. He seemed so pleased. Only he was not pleased with her. He was pleased with himself on her account: inordinately pleased with himself. In his world, as in a fish’s, there was but his own swimming self: and if he chanced to have something swimming alongside and doing him credit, why, so much the more complacently he smiled.
He walked stiff and erect, with his head pressed rather back, so that he always seemed to be advancing from the head and shoulders, in a flat kind of advance, horizontal. He did not seem to be walking with his whole body. His manner was oddly gallant, with a gallantry that completely missed the individual in the woman, circled round her and flew home gratified to his own hive. The way he raised his hat, the way he inclined and smiled flatly, even rather excitedly, as he talked, was all a little discomforting and comical.
He left her at the shop door, saying:
“I shall see you again, I hope.”
“Oh, yes,” she replied, rattling the door anxiously, for it was locked. She heard her father’s step at last tripping down the shop.
“Good evening,
