Part 47 (2/2)

Something had got dislocated in the world for both of them....

He ought to have told her he was engaged. He ought to have explained things to her. Perhaps even now he might be able to drop her a hint.

”Don't you think so, Mr. Kipps?”

”Oo rather,” said Kipps for the third time.

A lady with a tired smile, who was labelled conspicuously ”Wogdelenk,”

drifted towards Kipps' interlocutor and the two fell into conversation.

Kipps found himself socially aground. He looked about him. Helen was talking to a curate and laughing. Kipps was overcome by a vague desire to speak to Ann. He was for sidling doorward.

”What are _you_, please?” said an extraordinarily bold, tall girl, and arrested him while she took down ”Cyps.h.i.+.”

”I'm sure I don't know what it means,” she explained. ”I'm Sir Bubh.

Don't you think anagrams are something chronic?”

Kipps made stockish noises, and the young lady suddenly became the nucleus of a party of excited friends who were forming a syndicate to guess, and barred his escape. She took no further notice of him. He found himself jammed against an occasional table and listening to the conversation of Mrs. ”Wogdelenk” and his lady with the big bonnet.

”She packed her two beauties off together,” said the lady in the big bonnet. ”Time enough, too. Don't think much of this girl; she's got as housemaid now. Pretty, of course, but there's no occasion for a housemaid to be pretty--none whatever. And she doesn't look particularly up to her work either. Kind of 'mazed expression.”

”You never can tell,” said the lady labelled ”Wogdelenk;” ”you never can tell. My wretches are big enough, Heaven knows, and do they work?

Not a bit of it!”...

Kipps felt dreadfully out of it with regard to all these people, and dreadfully in it with Ann.

He scanned the back of the big bonnet and concluded it was an extremely ugly bonnet indeed. It got jerking forward as each short, dry sentence was snapped off at the end and a plume of osprey on it jerked excessively. ”She hasn't guessed even one!” followed by a shriek of girlish merriment, came from the group about the tall, bold girl. They'd shriek at him presently, perhaps. Beyond thinking his own anagram might be Cuyps, he hadn't a notion. What a chatter they were all making! It was just like a summer sale! Just the sort of people who'd give a lot of trouble and swap you! And suddenly the smouldering fires of rebellion leapt to flame again. These were a rotten lot of people, and the anagrams were rotten nonsense, and he, Kipps, had been a rotten fool to come. There was Helen away there, still laughing, with her curate. Pity she couldn't marry a curate and leave him (Kipps) alone! Then he'd know what to do. He disliked the whole gathering collectively and in detail.

Why were they all trying to make him one of themselves? He perceived unexpected ugliness everywhere about him. There were two great pins jabbed through the tall girl's hat, and the swirls of her hair below the brim with the minutest piece of tape tie-up showing did not repay close examination. Mrs. ”Wogdelenk” wore a sort of mumps bandage of lace, and there was another lady perfectly dazzling with beads, and jewels and bits of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. They were all flaps and angles and flounces--these women. Not one of them looked as neat and decent a shape as Ann's clean, trim, little figure. Echoes of Masterman woke up in him again. Ladies indeed! Here were all these chattering people, with money, with leisure, with every chance in the world, and all they could do was to crowd like this into a couple of rooms and jabber nonsense about anagrams.

”Could Cyps.h.i.+ really mean Cuyps?” floated like a dissolving wreath of mist across his mind.

Abruptly resolution stood armed in his heart. He was going to get out of this!

”'Scuse me,” he said, and began to wade neck deep through the bubbling tea party.

He was going to get out of it all!

He found himself close by Helen. ”I'm orf,” he said, but she gave him the briefest glance. She did not appear to hear him. ”Still, Mr.

Spratlingdown, you _must_ admit there's a limit even to conformity,” she was saying....

He was in a curtained archway, and Ann was before him carrying a tray supporting several small sugar bowls.

He was moved to speech. ”_What_ a Lot!” he said, and then mysteriously, ”I'm engaged to _her_.” He indicated Helen's new hat, and became aware of a skirt he had stepped upon.

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