Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/176

 to one another. It was no mean gathering of souls that Mrs. Brockett's dingy gas illuminated.

Every now and again the heavy curtains blew forward in the wind and the gas flared. There was no conversation, and the wind could be heard driving the rain past the windows.

Peter, that evening, took the manuscript of “Reuben Hallard” into Miss Monogue's room. Since her mother died Norah Monogue had had a bed sitting-room to herself. The bed was hidden by a high screen, the wall paper was a dark green, and low bookshelves, painted white, ran round the room. There were no pictures (she always said that until she could have good ones she wouldn't have any at all). There were some brown pots and vases on the shelves and a writing-table with a typewriter by the window.

When Peter came in, Norah Monogue was sitting in a low chair over a rather miserable fire; a little pool of light above her head came from two candles on the mantelpiece—otherwise the room was in darkness.

“Shall I turn on the gas?” she said, when she saw who it was.

“No, leave it as it is, I like it.” He sat down in a chair near her and put a pile of manuscript on the floor beside him. “I've brought it for you to read,” he said, “I'm frightened about it. I suddenly think it is the most rotten thing that ever was written.” He had become very intimate with her during these seven years. At first he had admired her because she behaved so splendidly to her abominable mother—then she had obviously been interested in him, had talked about the things that he was reading and his life at the bookshop. They had speedily become the very best of friends, and she understood friendship he thought in the right way—as though she had herself been a man. And yet she was with that completely feminine, a woman who had known struggle from the beginning and would know it to the end; but her personality—humorous, pathetic, understanding—was felt in her presence so strongly that no one ever forgot her after meeting her. Some one once said of her, “She's the nicest ugly woman to look at I've ever seen.”