"Who've b--ee--een--my lads! And s--ee--een--my lads!"
marched round the garden and out into the crowds beyond. I seized my opportunity. Evie and I followed them, I with her tucked safely away under my arm; and we joined the dense stream that was already pouring southwards. And as I struggled for places on a bus at Hampstead Heath Station, my heart was grateful for that illusion of the day that had banished, first, the remnant of Evie's sorrow, and had afterwards cut short that impossible course of unmeasured confidences to which that moodiness had given rise.
I began to foresee those inconveniences that afterwards made me hate that house in the Vale of Health as soon as I had signed my contract and got the key. The contract was for a year only, and as for any period less than three years the agents had refused to "do up" the place for me, I became plasterer, painter and plumber myself. I suppose that from the strictly conventional point of view Evie ought to have had no hand in this; indeed, she read me, from the "Etiquette" column of one of her weekly papers, a passage that informed me that between her choice of a house and her going into it as its mistress in the eyes of all the world a bride-elect ought to betray no knowledge of that house's existence; but as she delivered this from over the bib of an enormous apron, holding the journal in one hand, while the fingers of the other rubbed the lumps out of a bucket of whitewash, the knowledge came too late to be of much use. Anyway, there we were, with Miss Angela or an old charwoman or else nobody at all for chaperon, scraping walls, mixing paint, puttying cracks, fixing shelves, dragging at obstinate old nails; and seeing that from the point of view of Etiquette we were already numbered with the lost, we made no bones about walking into a shop in Tottenham Court Road together and brazenly asking to be shown the bedstead department. After that we took tea, with never a human eye upon us, in my lofty room near the Cobden Statue. Doubtless this cut us off finally from that dim eschatological hope when even the devil shall have his respite of a thousand years. Our only solace was that we found ourselves in the company of a good many others who have to square their Etiquette with their opportunities as best they can.