What worlds away from the truth I was that clear look told me. His fame? She didn't care twopence for his fame, except that it might amuse him. His book? She didn't care whether he wrote his book or whether he didn't. To her, fame and books were the vanities with which men so incomprehensibly amuse themselves when they might be thinking of something that mattered. It was enormously more than that that her eyes told me on the top of that east-bound bus that morning.
For if he wished to remain thirty-three, she too as intensely wished and willed it. He should write any book he wanted, do anything on earth he liked, so long as that loft in a South Kensington mews became an upper room in Cremorne Road all over again. She would flutter about, pretending to be indexing the whole mass of human knowledge for him, clipping and pasting and filing within sound of his voice; but what she would really be doing would be to cut Patum Peperium sandwiches for him, to see that he fed himself properly, opened his windows, made his bed, had his washing and mending properly done. That former _Vicarage_ period had been the summer of her life; she would now thrust herself in the way of it once more. That she might do so with some sort of countenance she was on her way to read those thorny books in the British Museum. The latest thing in indexing was the bait with which she set the trap of her adoration. She would humour, encourage, wheedle, praise. But she too would have her summer twice.
We did not speak again until we descended in Tottenham Court Road and walked along Great Russell Street. Then as we approached the Museum railings she turned abruptly to me. She wanted her final confirmation of the facts.
"You've told me all that he said about me?"
"Yes." (This was untrue. I had suppressed one thing. I had not told her that he had sometimes stayed away from Cremorne Road because she bought things for him she could not afford.)
"And he's no idea at all that I know anything whatever about it?"
"Tell me again about his having sometimes thought of me lately."
I did so. "For all I know he might even have come to see you but for the fear of giving you that shock."
"Well, you didn't die of the shock, so why should I? Come and get me my ticket."