"It all depends," Lucas replied sternly. "I don't mind telling you she
wasn't so jolly nice on Tuesday."

"Wasn't she?" George raised his eyebrows.

Lucas silently scowled, and his handsomeness vanished for an instant.

"However----" he said.

As George walked alone down Charing Cross Road, he thought: "That girl
will have to look out,"--meaning that in his opinion Lucas was not a man
to be trifled with. Lucas was a wise and an experienced man, and knew
the world. And what he did could not be other than right. This notion
comforted George, who had a small affair of his own, which he had not
yet even mentioned to Lucas. Delicacy as well as diffidence had
prevented him from doing so. It was a very different affair from any of
Lucas's, and he did not want Lucas to misesteem it; neither did he want
Lucas to be under the temptation to regard him as a ninny.

Not the cathedral alone had induced George to leave the office early.
The dissembler had reflected that if he called in a certain conventional
tea-shop near Cambridge Circus at a certain hour he would probably meet
Marguerite Haim. He knew that she had an appointment with one of her
customers, a firm of bookbinders, that afternoon, and that on similar
occasions she had been to the tea-shop. In fact he had already once
deliciously taken tea with her therein. To-day he was disappointed, to
the extent of the tea, for he met her as she was coming out of the shop.
Their greetings were rather punctilious, but beneath superficial
formalities shone the proofs of intimacy. They had had large