CHAPTER IX


She was only an ordinary little variety actress, and he knew her
little programme pretty well by heart. But her fascinations were
independent of the glamour of the foot-lights. It was off the stage
that he had first come to know her, really know her, a thing that at
the first blush of it seems impossible; for the great goddess Diana is
not more divinely secret and secluded than (to a young bookseller) a
popular Dance and Song Artiste in private life. Poppy's rooms were
next door to the boarding-house balcony, and it was the balcony that
did it.

Now, in the matter of balconies, if you choose to regard the receding
wooden partition as a partition, and sit very far back behind it, you
will have your balcony all to yourself, that is to say, you will see
nothing, neither will you be seen. If, however, you prefer, as Mr.
Rickman preferred, to lean forward over the railings and observe
things passing in the street below, you can hardly help establishing
some sort of communication with the next-door neighbour who happens to
be doing the same thing. At first this communication was purely in the
region of the mind, without so much as the movement of an eyelid on
either side, and that made it all the more intimate and intense. But
to sit there Sunday evening after Sunday evening, when the other
boarders were at church, both looking at the same plane-tree opposite,
or the same tail-end of a sunset flung across the chimney pots,
without uttering a syllable or a sound, was at last seen by both in
its true light, as a thing not only painful but absurd. So one evening
the deep, full-hearted silence burst and flowered into speech. In
common courtesy Mr. Rickman had to open his lips to ask her whether