Chapter 2

The Little Nursery Governess

As I enter the club smoking-room you are to conceive David
vanishing into nothingness, and that it is any day six years ago
at two in the afternoon. I ring for coffee, cigarette, and
cherry brandy, and take my chair by the window, just as the
absurd little nursery governess comes tripping into the street.
I always feel that I have rung for her.

While I am lifting the coffee-pot cautiously lest the lid fall
into the cup, she is crossing to the post-office; as I select the
one suitable lump of sugar she is taking six last looks at the
letter; with the aid of William I light my cigarette, and now she
is re-reading the delicious address. I lie back in my chair, and
by this time she has dropped the letter down the slit. I toy
with my liqueur, and she is listening to hear whether the postal
authorities have come for her letter. I scowl at a fellow-member
who has had the impudence to enter the smoking-room, and her two
little charges are pulling her away from the post-office. When I
look out at the window again she is gone, but I shall ring for
her to-morrow at two sharp.

She must have passed the window many times before I noticed her.
I know not where she lives, though I suppose it to be hard by.
She is taking the little boy and girl, who bully her, to the St.
James's Park, as their hoops tell me, and she ought to look
crushed and faded. No doubt her mistress overworks her. It must
enrage the other servants to see her deporting herself as if she
were quite the lady.

I noticed that she had sometimes other letters to post, but that
the posting of the one only was a process. They shot down the
slit, plebeians all, but it followed pompously like royalty. I
have even seen her blow a kiss after it.

Then there was her ring, of which she was as conscious as if it
rather than she was what came gaily down the street. She felt it
through her glove to make sure that it was still there. She took
off the glove and raised the ring to her lips, though I doubt not
it was the cheapest trinket. She viewed it from afar by
stretching out her hand; she stooped to see how it looked near
the ground; she considered its effect on the right of her and on
the left of her and through one eye at a time. Even when you saw
that she had made up her mind to think hard of something else,
the little silly would take another look.

I give anyone three chances to guess why Mary was so happy.

No and no and no. The reason was simply this, that a lout of a
young man loved her. And so, instead of crying because she was
the merest nobody, she must, forsooth, sail jauntily down Pall
Mall, very trim as to her tackle and ticketed with the
insufferable air of an engaged