Read Online Twopence Coloured by Patrick Hamilton - Free Book Online Page B

you going anywhere particular to-night?” he asked, stopping on his way up the stairs to his room.
    “No,” said Jackie, knowing perfectly where this question was leading to, but hiding that knowledge from her elevated self, as well as from him. “Why?”
    “I wondered if you’d like to come to the King’s?”
    “Oh, I should love to,” said Jackie. “It’d be ripping.”
    “Then you’ll come round with me?”
    “Yes. Rather,” said Jackie. “Will you be acting, then?”
    “Well,” confessed Mr. Gissing, “I will….”
    “In a manner of speaking,” he qualified, and looked at her not without the remotest traces of that faint sarcasm he had employed with her before now.
    “Good Lord,” said Jackie, softly, but why she said this it isimpossible to say. Mr. Gissing went on upstairs, and Jackie went back to her sitting-room.
    Here Mrs. Lover had already lit the gas and drawn down the blinds jealously against the benighted world outside. And here the fire was poked, and Jackie sat down in front of it for a quarter of an hour’s knee-clasping Nirvana, lulled by the eager flames, which might have been so many ecstatic prospects of the evening in front of her. But this was a mere preliminary, a scented bath of bliss prior to active participation , and soon enough she jumped up, and ran upstairs to change and prepare herself.
    And there had never been quite such a changing and preparing of herself in all her life. A violently cupboard-opening, a contemptuously clothes-flinging, a fiercely shoe-polishing, an inconsequently mind-changing, a giddily in-front-of-the mirror-whirling, a hurried, detailed, insane and chaotic changing it was, and if ever she stopped to listen, there came a leisurely and friendly bump from the light of her existence unpacking in the next room, as much as to say, “All right. Remember we have the whole evening in front of us.” And thirty-five minutes did this changing take, inclusive of finishing touches, which consumed ten (for however much one Liked him, one naturally had an instinct to Show him, as it were); and then she ran downstairs.
    And here the air was ripe with agreeable sounds of cooking — a much Higher tea than ever was bargained for being obviously in preparation — and here she was soon joined by Mrs. Lover, who came to lay the table. And Mrs. Lover did not at first speak, feeling that it was up to Jackie to fire the first shot of appraisement: and Jackie at last, after much light humming , and a great deal of detached stocking-ladder-examining, asked straight out what she thought of him. And Mrs. Lover, it may at once be said (though she herself took some time in coming to the point), described him as Decidedly Handsome. And, “You do think him handsome?” asked Jackie, as though that would not have been the exact epithet she herself would have selected. And Nice, also, did Mrs. Lover vote him; and, “Yes, he is nice ,”said a fair-minded Jackie, as though thatquality in him atoned for certain obscure charges that obtained in the back of her mind against him. Older than one had imagined, too, thought Mrs. Lover; and, “Yes, he is Older,” admitted Jackie, and added that that, really, was what made him so Nice, somehow, if Mrs. Lover knew what she meant. And Mrs. Lover was very quick in picking up the subtleties of this proposition, and said, in fact, that that was the very thing she had thought herself. They then both agreed that it was Strange, that they should both have struck upon the same idea, and they were both rather more emotional and glad-eyed about this circumstance than the thing actually warranted.
    The High tea went with a bang from the commencement, and although it would be an overstatement to say that the point of actual flirtatiousness was at any moment touched, there was certainly an altogether different and more human flavour in their discourse than had ever obtained before. This was nothing very strong, of course: but there was, nevertheless