The Drunkard. Thorne Guy

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      She was all innocent eagerness and fire, astonishingly sweet and enthusiastic as she hurried to a bookshelf and came back with a volume.

      Following her slim finger, he read: —

      The girl was gazing at him in breathless attention, wondering whether she had done the right thing, hoping, indeed, that Lothian would be pleased.

      He was both pleased and touched by this lovely eager little champion, so unexpectedly raised up to defend him.

      "Thank you very much," he said. "How kind of you! My bruised vanity is now at rest. I am healed of my grievous wound! But this seems quite a good library. Are you here all alone, does nobody ever come here? I always heard that the Podley Library was where the bad books went when they died. Tell me all about it."

      His hand had mechanically slipped into his waistcoat and half withdrawn his cigarette case. He could never be long without smoking and he wanted a cigarette now more than ever. During a whole hour he had not had a drink. A slight suspicion of headache floated at the back of his head, he was conscious of something heavy at his right side.

      "Do smoke," she said. "No one minds – there never is any one to mind, and I smoke here myself. Mr. Hands, the head librarian, didn't like it at first but he does what I tell him now. I'm the assistant librarian."

      She announced her status with genuine pride and pleasure, being obviously certain that she occupied a far from unimportant position in public affairs.

      Lothian was touched at her simplicity. What a child she was really, with all her cleverness and quickness.

      He smoked and made her smoke also – "Delicious!" she exclaimed with pretty greediness. "How perfectly sweet to be a man and able to afford Ben Ezra's Number 5."

      "How perfectly sweet!" – it was a favourite expression of Rita's. He soon got to know it very well.

      He soon got to know all about the library and about her also, as she showed him round.

      She was twenty-one, only twenty-one. Her father, a captain in the Navy, had left her just sufficient money for her education, which had been at a first-class school. Then she had had to be dependent entirely upon her own exertions. She seemed to have no relations and not many friends of importance, and she lived in a tiny three-roomed flat with another girl who was a typist in the city.

      She chattered away to him just as if he were a girl friend as they moved among the books, and it was nearly an hour before they left the Library together.

      "And now what are you going to do?"

      "I must go home, Mr. Lothian," she said with a little sigh. "It has been so kind of you to come and see me. I was going to sit in Kensington Palace Gardens for a little while, but I think I shall go back to the flat now. How hot it is! Oh, for the sea, now, just think of it!"

      There was a flat sound in her voice. It lost its animation and timbre. He knew she was sorry to say good-bye to him, rather forlorn now that the stimulus and excitement of their talk was over.

      She was lonely, of course. Her pleasures could be but few and far between, and at twenty-one, when the currents of the blood run fast and free, even books cannot provide everything. Thirty-five shillings a week! He had been poor himself in his early journalistic days. It was harder for a girl. He thought of her sitting in Kensington Gardens – the pathetic and solitary pleasure the child had mapped out for herself! He could see the little three-roomed flat in imagination, with its girlish decorations and lack of any real comfort, and some appalling meal presently to be eaten, bread and jam, a lettuce!

      The idea came into his mind in a flash, but he hesitated before speaking. Wouldn't she be angry if he asked her? He'd only met her twice, she was a lady. Then he decided to risk it.