Part 49 (2/2)

'He says he'll marry you.'

'Yes.' Betty hung her head, then raised it quickly. 'Oh, Vic, I can't believe it. It's too good to be true. I love him so dreadfully . . . I just can't wait for one o'clock. He didn't come on Wednesday. I thought he'd forgotten me and I was going off my head. But it was all right, they'd kept him in over something.'

'Poor little girl,' said Victoria gently. 'It's hard isn't it, but good too.'

'Good! Vic, when he kisses me I feel as if I were going to faint. He's strong, you see. And when he puts his arms round me I feel like a mouse in a trap . . . but I don't want to get away: I want it to go on for ever, just like that.'

She paused for a moment as if listening to the first words of love. Then her mind took a practical turn.

'Of course we shan't be able to live in Notting Hill,' she added. 'We'll have to go further out, Shepherd's Bush way, so as to be on the Tube.

And he says I shan't go to the P. R. R. any more.'

'Happy girl,' said Victoria. 'I'm so glad, Betty; I hope . . .'

She restrained a doubt. 'And as you say you can't stay to tea I think I know where you're going.'

'Well, yes, I am going to meet him,' said Betty laughing.

'Yes . . . and you're going to look at little houses at Shepherd's Bush.'

Betty looked up dreamily. She could see a two-storeyed house in a row, with a bay window, and a front garden where, winter or summer, marigolds grew.

After lunch, as the two women sat once more in the boudoir, they said very little. Victoria, from time to time, flicked the ash from her cigarette. Betty did not smoke, but, her hands clasped together in her lap, watched a handsome dark face in the coals.

'And how are you getting on, Vic?' she asked suddenly. Swamped by the impetuous tide of her own romance she had not as yet shown any interest in her friend's affairs.

'I? Oh, nothing special. Pretty fair.'

'But, I mean . . . you said you wanted to make a lot of money and . . .'

'Yes, I'm not badly off, but I can't go on, Betty. I shall never do any good like this.'

Betty was silent for some minutes. Her ingrained modesty made any discussion of her friend's profession intolerable. Vanquished in argument, grudgingly accepting the logic of Victoria's actions, she could not free her mind from the thought that these actions were repulsive, that there must have been some other way.

'Oh? You want to get out of it all . . . you know . . . I have never said you weren't quite right, but . . .'

'But I'm quite wrong?'

'No . . . I don't mean that . . . I don't like to say that . . . I'm not clever like you, Vic, but . . .'

'We've done with all that,' said Victoria coldly. 'I do want to get out of it because it's getting me no nearer to what I want. I don't quite know how to do it. I'm not very well, you know.'

Betty looked up quickly with concern in her face.

'Have those veins been troubling you again?'

'Yes, a little. I can't risk much more.'

'Then what are you going to do?'

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