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We had a little rally of Marion's relations, and several friends and friends' friends from Smithie's appeared in the church and drifted vestry-ward. I produced my aunt and uncle a select group of two. The effect in that shabby little house was one of exhilarating congestion.
Then by an enormous effort I would suppress myself for a time and continue a talk that made her happy, about Smithie's brother, about the new girl who had come to the workroom, about the house we would presently live in. But there we differed a little. I wanted to be accessible to St.
It was one of the intense minor irritations of my married life that Smithie's whirlwind chatter seemed to me to have far more influence with Marion than anything I had to say. Before all things I coveted her grip upon Marion's inaccessible mind. In the workroom at Smithie's, I gathered, they always spoke of me demurely as "A Certain Person."
There was a case of stealing at Smithie's, and many tears. Smithie I met before we were married, and afterwards she became a frequent visitor to our house at Ealing. She was a thin, bright-eyed, hawk-nosed girl of thirtyodd, with prominent teeth, a high-pitched, eager voice and a disposition to be urgently smart in her dress.
I walked to the hearthrug and stood quite still there regarding this new situation. "I didn't dream," she began. "How could you do such a thing?" It seemed a long interval before either of us spoke another word. "Who knows about it?" I asked at last. "Smithie's brother. They were at Cromer." "Confound Cromer! Yes!" "How could you bring yourself"
I felt a spasm of petulant annoyance at this unexpected catastrophe. "I should like to wring Smithie's brother's neck," I said.... Marion spoke in dry, broken fragments of sentences. "You... I'd always thought that anyhow you couldn't deceive me... I suppose all men are horrid about this." "It doesn't strike me as horrid.
Presently the rapid development of Tono-Bungay began to take me into the provinces, and I would be away sometimes for a week together. This she did not like; it left her "dull," she said, but after a time she began to go to Smithie's again and to develop an independence of me. At Smithie's she was now a woman with a position; she had money to spend.
"That's six pounds a week," she said. "One could manage on that, easily. Smithie's brother No, he only gets two hundred and fifty. He married a typewriting girl." "Will you marry me if I get three hundred a year?" She looked at me again, with a curious gleam of hope. "IF!" she said. I held out my hand and looked her in the eyes. "It's a bargain," I said.
That was the tenor of Marion's fiction; but I think the work-table conversation at Smithie's did something to modify that. At Smithie's it was recognised, I think, that a "fellow" was a possession to be desired; that it was better to be engaged to a fellow than not; that fellows had to be kept they might be mislaid, they might even be stolen.
Without any such training she would have been a shy lover, but now she was an impossible one. For the rest she had derived, I suppose, partly from the sort of fiction she got from the Public Library, and partly from the workroom talk at Smithie's.
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