didn’t trouble to glance up from the entrance, where my employer joined me, to the landing window. The girls would not be watching me off this time.

“Savoy!”

The taxi-driver touched his peaked cap with a quite unusual suggestion of deference. I suppose he had found Savoy luncheon-escorts were generous tippers. I wondered if he had ever before driven a couple in quite these “circumstances.”

[75]

[75]

Miss Robinson’s sincerely-meant reproof, “It doesn’t look any too well! A girl in your position. A man in his!” echoed in my ears louder than the whirring of the wheels and the noise of the traffic. It rankled poisonously throughout the drive, throughout the whole luncheon.

We lunched outside, which Mr. Waters said laconically would be “more amusing for me than inside.” Personally I felt that nothing would ever amuse me less than this duty-lunch with its hateful obbligato-accompaniment of what those other girls were thinking, what they were saying.

Oh, it’s all very well to quote that French axiom—

“They say—What do they say?—Let them say!” The average person will always find that a counsel of perfection.—Especially the average girl. The impulse not to let them “say” if we can help it is nearly as strong in us as the instinct of self-preservation, and of touching our hair when we pass a mirror. So that there must be some really important basic reason for it. I do wish I knew what would happen if that suddenly crumbled away ...?

But it isn’t “away” yet: it spoiled every trace of amusement that I might otherwise have enjoyed in the lunch and the people that passed. I’ve merely a vague impression of cab-whistles, of taxis whirling up beyond the trellis[76] of the low balustrade, of obviously American figures appearing and disappearing among the evergreens; of a small, unhappy-looking face with dark eyes that stared resentfully at me out of the bowls of spoons, and of a voice that said half-absently, “I’m afraid you’ve made a very poor lunch, Miss Trant.”

[76]

“Oh, not at all.”

“Perhaps you are tired?”

“Oh, not in the least, thank you.”

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