Page:In The Cage (London, Duckworth, 1898).djvu/100

94 that you should have been there just the one time!'

'The one time you've passed my place?'

'Yes; you can fancy I haven't many minutes to waste. There was a place to-night I had to stop at.'

'I see, I see'—he knew already so much about her work. 'It must be an awful grind—for a lady.'

'It is; but I don't think I groan over it any more than my companions—and you've seen they're not ladies!' She mildly jested, but with an intention. 'One gets used to things, and there are employments I should have hated much more.' She had the finest conception of the beauty of not, at least, boring him. To whine, to count up her wrongs, was what a barmaid or a shopgirl would do, and it was quite enough to sit there like one of these.

'If you had had another employment,' he remarked after a moment, 'we might never have become acquainted.'

'It's highly probable—and certainly not in the same way.' Then, still with her heap of gold in