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‘Well, I had to tell her something. It looks so funny me
being here and not married to you. I didn’t know what she’d
think of me.’
‘I don’t suppose she believed you for a moment.’
‘That she did, I lay. I told her we’d been married two
years—I had to say that, you know, because of baby—only
your people wouldn’t hear of it, because you was only a stu-
dent’—she pronounced it stoodent—‘and so we had to keep
it a secret, but they’d given way now and we were all going
down to stay with them in the summer.’
‘You’re a past mistress of the cock-and-bull story,’ said
Philip.
He was vaguely irritated that Mildred still had this pas-
sion for telling fibs. In the last two years she had learnt
nothing. But he shrugged his shoulders.
‘When all’s said and done,’ he reflected, ‘she hasn’t had
much chance.’
It was a beautiful evening, warm and cloudless, and the
people of South London seemed to have poured out into the
streets. There was that restlessness in the air which seizes
the cockney sometimes when a turn in the weather calls
him into the open. After Mildred had cleared away the sup-
per she went and stood at the window. The street noises
came up to them, noises of people calling to one another, of
the passing traffic, of a barrel-organ in the distance.
‘I suppose you must work tonight, Philip?’ she asked him,
with a wistful expression.
‘I ought, but I don’t know that I must. Why, d’you want
me to do anything else?’