“I won’t—­I won’t!”

“I’ll make you.  You took him up.  You made him think you cared about him.  You’re responsible——­”

“I’m not—­I won’t be responsible; it’s not my line.  I’ve got myself to look after.”

She had the look of someone struggling against an invisible entanglement—­a pitiable, rather horrible look of naked purpose.  She meant to cut free at whatever cost.

“You little beast!” he said.

He was sick with contempt.  He swung away from her, and she stood in the middle of the pavement and called names after him like a drunken, furious street-girl.  She did not seem to be even aware of the people who stared at her.  When he was almost out of hearing, she added: 

“Give him my love!” shrilly, vindictively, as though it had been a final insult.  But he took no notice and now, at any rate, she was crying bitterly enough.

2

“E” proved to be the top room of No. 10, a dingy lodging-house whose front door, in accordance with the uncertain habits of its patrons, stood open from year’s end to year’s end.  Robert went in unnoticed.  He ran up the steep, narrow stairs, with their tattered carpeting, two steps at a time.  A queer elation surged beneath his anger and distress.  Cosgrave’s failure was like a personal challenge—­a defiance thrown in his teeth.  The old fight was on again.  It was against odds.  But then, he had always fought against odds—­won against them.

The room was Connie Edwards herself.  It seemed to rush out at him in a tearing rage, flaunting its vulgar finery and its odour of bad scent and cheap cigarette smoke.  It made him sick, and he brushed it out of his consciousness.  He did not see the poor attempts to make it decent and attractive—­the bed disguised beneath a faded Liberty cretonne, a sentimental Christ hanging between a galaxy of matinee heroes, nor a full-length woman’s portrait, across which was scrawled “Gyp Labelle” in letters large enough to conceal half of her outrageous nakedness.  There were even a few flowers, drooping forlornly out of a dusty vase, and a collection of theatrical posters, to lend a touch, of serious professionalism.

But the end of it all was a frowzy, hopeless disorder.

Cosgrave lay huddled over the littered table by the open window.  The red untidy head made a patch of grotesque colour in the general murk.  He looked like a poor rag doll that had been torn and battered in some wild carnival scrimmage and flung aside.

There was not much in him—­not much fight, as he himself said.  Not the sort to survive.  Life was too strong—­too difficult for him.  He bungled everything—­even an exam.  It would be wiser, more consistent to let him drift.  And yet at sight of that futile breakdown, it was not impatience or contempt that Robert felt, but a choking tenderness—­a fierce pity.  He had to protect him—­pull him through.  He had promised so much—­he forgot when:  that afternoon lying in the long, sooty grass behind the biscuit factory, or that night when he had dragged Cosgrave breathless and staggering in pursuit of the Greatest Show in Europe.  It did not matter.  It had become part of himself.  And Cosgrave had always trusted him—­believed in him.