Chapter 16

MISS HEYDINGER'S PRIVATE THOUGHTS.

The way from Chelsea to Clapham and the way from South Kensington to
Battersea, especially if the former is looped about a little to make
it longer, come very near to each other. One night close upon
Christmas two friends of Lewisham's passed him and Ethel. But Lewisham
did not see them, because he was looking at Ethel's face.

"Did you see?" said the other girl, a little maliciously.

"Mr. Lewisham--wasn't it?" said Miss Heydinger in a perfectly
indifferent tone.

* * * * *

Miss Heydinger sat in the room her younger sisters called her
"Sanctum." Her Sanctum was only too evidently an intellectualised
bedroom, and a cheap wallpaper of silvery roses peeped coquettishly
from among her draped furniture. Her particular glories were the
writing-desk in the middle and the microscope on the unsteady
octagonal table under the window. There were bookshelves of
workmanship patently feminine in their facile decoration and
structural instability, and on them an array of glittering poets,
Shelley, Rossetti, Keats, Browning, and odd volumes of Ruskin, South
Place Sermons, Socialistic publications in torn paper covers, and
above, science text-books and note-books in an oppressive
abundance. The autotypes that hung about the room were eloquent of
aesthetic ambitions and of a certain impermeability to implicit
meanings. There were the Mirror of Venus by Burne Jones, Rossetti's
Annunciation, Lippi's Annunciation, and the Love of Life and Love and
Death of Watts. And among other photographs was one of last year's
Debating Society Committee, Lewisham smiling a little weakly near the
centre, and Miss Heydinger out of focus in the right wing. And Miss
Heydinger sat with her back to all these things, in her black
horse-hair arm-chair, staring into the fire, her eyes hot, and her
chin on her hand.

"I might have guessed--before," she said. "Ever since that
_séance_. It has been different ..."

She smiled bitterly. "Some shop girl ..."

She mused. "They are all alike, I suppose. They come back--a little
damaged, as the woman says in 'Lady Windermere's Fan.' Perhaps he
will. I wonder ..."

"Why should he be so deceitful? Why should he act to me ...?"

"Pretty, pretty, pretty--that is our business. What man hesitates in
the choice? He goes his own way, thinks his own thoughts, does his own
work ...

"His dissection is getting behind--one can see he takes scarcely any
notes...."

For a long time she was silent. Her face became more intent. She began
to bite her thumb, at first slowly, then faster. She broke out at last
into