Common sense--except in that mad moment when he had hoped the bell had been rung by her--had debarred him from thinking of seeking her out.
But away in the deep corners of his mind, it was her company he was looking for--her company he had sought to find, first in Mrs. Rowse and then in the little typewriter.
Shutting the door of his room, he went across to the chair by the fire.
What did it mean? What did it mean? Here and there he had fallen in love; but this was not the same sort of thing. This was not falling in love. Falling in love was quick, sudden, a flash that burnt up all desire to work, flared out in a moment, obliterating everything else.
But this was slow, stealthy, a growing thing that asked, not for sudden satisfaction, but for wonderful, untellable things.
All the attributes common to love, as he had understood it, had no place in this sensation. As he had thought of it, love found its expression in the gratification of the need with which it had begun, or it ended, like his stories--unhappily. Then this could not be love. There was no ending of gratification and no ending of unhappiness to this. It was unending. Was that what his mother had meant he would learn?
Then, as he sat before the fire, wondering what new thing he had found, the bell rang again. It found no echo on this occasion. He slowly turned his head. They were not going to deceive him a second time. He rose quietly from his chair, crossed to the window, silently raised it and, as silently, looked out. There, below him, he saw a woman's hat--a hat with fur in it, cunningly twined through grey velvet,--a hat that he knew, a hat that he had often seen before.
He closed the window quietly and slowly made his way downstairs. Before he reached the end of the passage, the bell rang again. Then he opened the door.
It was the lady on whose behalf the fur coat had discharged the debt of honour.
She stepped right in with a little laugh of pleasure at finding him there; turned and waited while he closed the door behind them, then linked her arm in his as they mounted the stairs.
"I came," said she, "on chance. Aren't you glad to see me?"
There was just that fraction's pause before he replied--that pause into which a woman's mind leaps for answer. And how accurately she makes that leap, how surely she reaches the mental ground upon which you take your place, you will never be able truly to anticipate.
"Yes," said John, "I'm very glad."
"Then what is it?" she said quickly. "Are you writing?"
"No, I'm not. I've tried to, but I can't."
"Then are you expecting someone?"
He looked up at her, smiled, opened the door of his room, and bid her pass through.
"And is all this," said he, "because I paused a moment when you asked me if I was glad to see you?"
She seated herself easily in the chair to which she was accustomed. She began drawing the pins out of her hat, as a woman does when she feels at home. When the hat was free of her heaps of brown-red hair, she threw it carelessly upon the table, shook her head and lifted the hair from her forehead with her fingers. And John stood by with a smile, thinking how the faintest shadow of a word of question would make that hat fly back on to the head of brown-red hair, the hat-pins pierce the crown with hasty pride, and the little purse that lay upon the table alongside of them be clutched in an eager, scornful hand, as she would rise, full of dignity, to depart.
He let the smile fade away, and repeated his question.
"Yes," she said. "I thought when you didn't answer at once that you weren't very keen to see me."
"And if I said I wasn't very keen, would you go at once?"
Her eyebrows lifted high. She made a movement in her chair. One hand was already beginning to stretch out for the grey velvet hat.
"Like a shot!" she answered.
He nodded his head.
"That's what I thought," said John.
She rose quickly to her feet.
"If you want me to go, why don't you say so?"
He put his hands on her shoulders and seated her gently back again in the chair.
"But I don't want you to go," he replied. "I've got a lot of things I want to say to you."
"If you're going to talk evolution----" she began.
He laughed.
"It's something very like it," said he.
She gave a sigh of resignation, took out a packet of cigarettes, extracted one, lit it and inhaled the first breath deep--deep into her lungs.
"Well, go on," she said.
"Have you got plenty of cigarettes?"
"Yes, plenty to-day."
"Hadn't you yesterday?"
"No, Mother and I raked up all the cigarette ends out of the fireplaces, and I just had a penny for a packet of cigarette papers." She laughed.
This is the honesty of poverty. She would take no money from any man.
For just as the virtue of wealth will bring out the evil of avarice, so will the evil of poverty bring out the virtue of self-respect. In this world, there is as much good that comes out of evil as ever stands by itself alone. This, in fact, is the need of evil, that out of it may lift the good.
"Well, what have you got to say?" she continued. "Get it over as quick as you can. I shan't understand half of it."
"You'll understand it all," said John. "You may not admit it. You don't admit your own honesty--you probably won't admit mine."
She screwed up her eyes at him. He said the most incomprehensible things. Of course, he was a crank. She knew that--took it for granted--but what did he mean by her honesty?
"I don't steal," she said. "But I owe fifteen pounds to my dressmaker, and thirteen to Derry & Toms, and six somewhere else, and I don't suppose they'll ever get paid. Do you call that honest?"
"I don't mean that sort of honesty. That's the sort of honesty that a dishonest man shields behind. You'd pay them if I gave you the money to pay them, or if anybody else gave you the money, or if you made the money. You meant to pay them, you probably thought you could pay them when you ordered the things."
She looked up at him and laughed.
"You poor old dear! I don't suppose you've got twopence in your pocket.
You couldn't give it to me."
"I've got one and nine," said John. "But the point is, if I could give it you, you wouldn't take it. That's the honesty I'm talking about.
From the standard at which you rate life, that's honesty, and you never depart from it. And, in a way, my standard has been much about the same--till now."
"Till now?" She echoed it in a little note of apprehension.
"Yes--till now. I thought these things were honest--now I've changed my standard, and I find them different, too."