Gerda, looking up from her typewriter to say “How do you spell comparatively?” saw his face in its momentary bitterness as he frowned, pen in hand, out of the window.  He was waiting to sign the letters before he went out to a committee meeting, and she thought she was annoying him by her slowness.  She spelt comparatively anyhow, and with the wholehearted wrongness to which she and the typewriter, both bad spellers, often attained in conjunction, hastily finished and laid the letters before him.  Called back to work and actuality, Barry was again cheerful and kind, and he smilingly corrected comparatively.

“You might ask me,” he suggested, “instead of experimenting, when I do happen to be at hand.  Otherwise a dictionary, or Miss Pinner in the next room...?”

Gerda was happy, now that the shadow was off his face.  Raillery and rebuke she did not mind; only the shadow, which fell coldly on her heart too.

He left the office then for the day, as he often did, but it was warm and alive with his presence, and she was doing his work, and she would see him again in the morning.

6

Gerda went home only for week-ends now; it was too slow a journey to make every morning and evening.  She stayed during the week at a hotel called the Red House, in Magpie Alley, off Bouverie Street.  It was a hotel kept by revolutionary souls exclusively for revolutionary souls.  Gerda, who had every right there, had gained admittance through friends of hers who lodged there.  Every evening at six o’clock she went back through the rain, as she did this evening, and changed her wet clothes and sat down to dinner, a meal which all the revolutionary souls ate together so that it was sacramental, a breaking of common bread in token of a common faith.

They were a friendly party.  At one end of the table Aunt Phyllis presided.  Aunt Phyllis, who was really the aunt of only one young man, kept this Red House.  She was a fiery little revolutionary in the late forties, small, and thin and darting, full of faith and fire.  She was on the staff of the British Bolshevist, and for the rest, wrote leaflets, which showered from her as from trees in autumn gales.  So did the Rev. Anselm Digby.  Mr. Digby had also the platform habit, he would go round the country denouncing and inciting to revolution in the name of Christ and of the Third International.  Though grizzled, he belonged to the League of Youth, as well as to many other eager fraternities.  He was unbeneficed, having no time for parish work.  This ardent clergyman sat at the other end of Aunt Phyllis’s table, as befitted his years.