"You don't know, you never will know, how grateful I am to you."
But her eyes would gaze far beyond him, through him, and light up wistfully, and he would have a queer discomfortable sensation of being a sojourner in his own house. Then he would think and puzzle over Panoukian's rapturous description of her. She was discreet and guarded: only her smile was intimate; her thoughts, if she had thoughts, were shy and never sought out his; demonstrative she never was. She led a busy, active life, the normal existence of moneyed or successful women in London, and she was distinguished in her efficiency. She had learned and developed taste, and was ever transforming the chambers in Gray's Inn, driving out Robert and installing in every corner of it the expression of her own personality. After the first dazzling discovery of the possibilities of clothes she had rebelled against the price charged by the fashionable dressmakers and made her own gowns. Robert used to twit her about her restlessness, and declared that one week when he came he would find her wearing the curtains, and the next her gown would be covering the cushions. Old Mole used to tease her, too, but what she would take quite amiably from Robert she could not endure from him.
"I thought you'd like it," she would say.
And sometimes there would be tears. Once it came to a quarrel, and after they had made it up she said she wanted a change, and went off to stay with Bertha Boothroyd. In two days she was back again with the most maliciously funny description of Jim's reception of her and his absolute refusal to leave her alone with Bertha lest she should be contaminated. Then she was gay and light-hearted, glad to be back again and more busy than ever, and when Panoukian came to see them she teased him out of his solemnity and earnestness almost into tears of rage. She told him he ought to go to Thrigsby and work, find some real work to do and not loaf about in London, in blue socks and white spats, waiting until he was old enough to be taken seriously.
He went away in the depths of misery, and she said to Old Mole:
"Why don't you find him something to do?"
"Don't you know that you are a very important person? You know everybody who is anybody, and there is nobody you can't know if you want to. Think of the hundreds of men in London who spend their whole lives struggling to pull themselves up into your position so that in the end they may have the pleasure of jobbing some one into a billet."