"Only from the waist upwards," she displayed her boots, still caked with a large portion of Bure's shores.
They were both in brilliant form, bandying their shafts to and fro over that jolted meal. Liverpool Street came as a shock. They continued to jest in the taxi which bore them with uncanny rapidity to the boarding-house in Merton Crescent. The chauffeur mistook the number; halted with a jerk several houses before the squat complacent little red-brick building where Peter was to pass the night. They alighted, and Stuart paid and dismissed the man. They waited, listening, as if it were of importance that not a throb of the vanishing wheels should elude their concentration. Then in silence they walked up to the iron gate of number seventy-four, stood stock-still facing one another. There was a sickly dazzle of light behind the Venetian blinds of the window level with the street; somebody was watching them through the chinks. Not that it mattered in the slightest degree. Peter's head was tilted well up, and she was smiling. Far away, that old discarded Peter clung tightly to her lover, pleaded with him not to go; Peter eyed the shadow in contempt--she had no more use for it.
As they had planned it, without lingering or reproach.
"I'm not going to kiss you," said Stuart. He did not even touch her; yet she winced and braced herself beneath his look as she had done perforce when his actual grip had tightened.
The front door of the house was suddenly flung wide open, and Peter's flapper cousin Jinny, flanked by a whole bevy of young people, flocked through the aperture, bore down upon her with boisterous greeting. And now steps and doorway and silent street were a-swarm with marionette-shapes, whose shrill cries and exclamations drowned the beat of Stuart's retreating steps....
Peter was hauled indoors--she could almost hear her face click as she adjusted it to the suddenly altered conditions.
"Come along in, do; we're kicking up no end of a shindy! I say, won't your friend join as well?"
And then the red-plush drawing-room, with red-plush music tinkling from a cheap piano, and air thick with gas and seed-cake, and Cousin Constance, Jinny's mother, saying with interpolation of stuffy and affectionate kisses: "These young folk are behaving disgracefully, my dear; but there, it's Saturday evening, and I hope you ain't too tired to join them."