“Indeed you may ...  Mr. Williams ... indeed you may....  Oh!  I’m so happy....  Good-night ...  Sir!”

And Adams’s heart was too full for attendance at a lecture on Roman law.  He went off instead to the play.  He himself belonged now to the world of romance.  He knew of things—­and wild horses and red-hot tweezers should not tear the knowledge from him, or make him formulate his deductions—­he knew of things as amazing, as prodigal of developments as anything in the problem play enacted beyond the pit and the stalls; he was the younger brother of Herbert Waring and the comrade of Jessie Joseph:  at that moment deceiving the sleuth hounds of Stage law by parading in her fiance’s evening dress and going to prison for his sake.

Beryl Claridge had taken up much of Vivie Warren’s work on the 1st of August in that year, while Honoria Fraser was touring in Switzerland.  Miss Mullet and Miss Steynes were replaced (Steynes staying on a little later to initiate the new-comers) by two young women so commonplace yet such efficient machines that their names are not worth hunting up or inventing.  If I have to refer to them I will call them Miss A. and Miss B.

Beryl Claridge was closely scanned by Bertie Adams, and frequently compared in his mind with the absent and idealized Vivie.  He decided that although she was shrewd and clever and very good-looking, he did not like her.  She smoked too many cigarettes for 1901.  She had her curly hair “bobbed” (though the term was not invented then).  She put up her feet too high and too often; so much so that the scandalized Bertie saw she wore black knickerbockers and no petticoats under her smart “tailor-made.”  She snapped your head off, was short, sharp and insolent, joked too much with the spectacled women clerks (who became her willing slaves); then would ask Bertie about his best girl and tell him he’d got jolly good teeth, a good biceps and quite a nice beginning of a moustache.

But she was a worker:  no doubt of that!  Of course, in the dead season there were not many clients to shock or to win over by her nonchalant manners, only a few women who required advice as to houses, stocks, and shares, law, or private enquiries as to the good faith of husbands or fiances.  Such as found their way up in the lift were a little disappointed at seeing Beryl in Vivie’s chair or at not being received by their old friend Honoria Fraser.  But Beryl was too good a business woman to put them off with any license of speech or manners.  For the rest she spent August and early September in “mugging up” the firm’s business.  Although deep down in her curious little heart, under all her affectation of hardness and insolent disdain of public or family opinion she firmly loved her architect and the children she had borne him, she desired quite as passionately to be self-supporting, to earn a sufficient income of her own, to be dependent on no one.  She might have her passing caprices and her loose and flippant mode of talking, but she wasn’t going to be a failure, a cadger, a parasite, a “fallen” woman.  She fully realized that in England no woman has fallen who is self-supporting, whose income meets her expenses and who pays her way.  Given those guarantees, all else that she does which is not actually criminal is eventually put down to mere eccentricity.