never fell, I am not sure. Thoughtful she was, smoking....
“Why does God do these things?” she asked in a suddenly strong, clear voice, a most surprising voice; but I said nothing, knowing nothing of God.
“Let us go,” she said.
“Shall I tell him you came?”
She thought about that, looking at me. “Yes,” she said, “will you? Please. Just that I came. You see, Gerald doesn’t ... well,” she smiled somewhere in those eyes, “let us say he is against me....”
We were in the doorway of the soiled room of the drunkard. I was going to switch out the light. Often I would come upstairs and switch out Gerald’s light.
“Gerald,” she said suddenly, in that strong voice, and I thought of a prefect’s voice at school,{28} down the corridor of a dormitory. “Good-bye to Gerald.”
{28}
“You see,” she said to me, “Gerald and I are the last Marches, and we ought to stand together. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes, you ought,” I said gravely. One hand, the hand of the great emerald, hung against her leather jacket. “Certainly you ought,” I said, and raised the hand to my lips. Her hand smelt dimly of petrol and cigarettes, and a scent whose name I shall now never know.
“These defiant courtesies,” she said thoughtfully. “They’re very nice, I always say....”
III
Slowly, she first, we went down the narrow stairs to my landing. In the sudden flare of my match there was revealed a threepenny-bit of flesh just above the heel of her left shoe, and I had occasion to rebuke myself on the depravity that is man. She said over her shoulder: “Hilary Townshend has told me about you....”
“But he has never told me about you!”
“Oh, he would if you provoked him!”
“And may I?”
But she did not seem to hear. Once Hilary had, I thought, said something about Gerald March having a sister, but I had not connected the vaguely heard name of Mrs. Storm with her. I don’t know why, but I had always imagined Gerald’s sister as a schoolgirl living somewhere in the country with a bankrupt old gentleman called Lord Portairley, Gerald’s uncle.{29}
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