"Yes," Lilian agreed with dignity. "I was bound to come, of course."
She felt wise and mature and tremendously aware of her responsibilities; and she intended to remain so. Nobody should be able to say of her that she had lost her head or that she was silly or weak or in any way unequal to her situation. Above all, Miss Grig should be forced to continue to respect her.
"I suppose I’d better just go and see them all now," she suggested, after more tea.
"They’d be delighted if you would," said Gertrude, as if the thing had not already been arranged.
Naturally Lilian honoured the small room first. The three inhabitants of the small room--two of them were unknown to her--sprang up, flattered, ruffled, flustered, excited, at her entrance. There she stood, the marvellous, the semi-legendary Lilian, who had captured the aristocratic master, run off with him to the Continent, married him, buried him, inherited all his possessions, and was soon going to have a baby. Her famous beauty was under eclipse, her famous figure had grown monstrous beyond any possible concealment; but she was still marvellous. She was the most romantic figure that those girls had ever seen; she was all picture-paper serials and cinema films rolled together and come to life and reality. Her prestige was terrific. She felt it and knew it and acted on it. How pathetically common the girls were, how slave-like! How cheap their frocks! How very small the room (but evidently it had been tidied for her visit)! She recognized one of the old Underwoods by a dent in its frame, and remembered the stain on one of the green lampshades, and the peculiarities of the woodwork of the absurdly small mirror. She was touched; she might have wept a little, but her great pride--in her achievement, in her position, in her condition, even in her tragic sorrow--upheld her safely. Tenderly invited to sit down, she sat down, and she put expert questions, to the wonderment of practising typists, thus proving that she was not proud. And then with gracious adieux she proceeded to the large room where, though her stay was (properly) more brief, she created still more sensation. In the large room she surprised one or two surreptitious exchanges of glance betraying a too critical awareness on the part of some that she had sinned against the code and perhaps only saved herself by the skin of her teeth. These unkind exhibitions did not trouble her in the least. The demeanour of the more serious and best-paid girls showed absolutely no _arrière pensée_, and better than anybody else they knew what was what in the real world. Gertrude Jackson, the honest soul of purity, already adored her employer.