"And there’s something else, Miss Share. Now please don’t cry. When Mr. Grig came up the night before last to tell you that I was unwell, you ought not to have allowed him to stay. You know that he can’t stand night-work. Men are not like us women----"
"But how could I possibly----" Lilian interrupted, quite forgetting the impulse to cry.
"You should have seen that he left again at once. It would have been quite easy--especially for a girl like you. The result is that he’s been a wreck ever since. It seems he stayed till four o’clock and after. I tried my best to stop him from coming at all; but he would come.... Please, please, think over what I’ve said. Thank you."
Lilian felt all the soft, cruel, unopposable force of Miss Grig’s individuality. She vaguely and with inimical deference comprehended the secret of Miss Grig’s success in business. Youth and beauty and charm, qualities so well appreciated by Felix, so rich in promise for Lilian, were absolutely powerless against the armour of Miss Grig. To Miss Grig Lilian was no better than a cross-eyed, flat-bosomed spinster of thirty-nine. Not a bit better! Perhaps worse! Miss Grig actually had the assurance to preach to Lilian the nauseous and unnatural doctrine that men are by right entitled to the protection and self-sacrifice of women.
Moreover, Miss Grig, without knowing it, had convinced Lilian that her ideas concerning Lord Mackworth were the hallucinations of an excessively silly and despicable kind of brain. And even if Lord Mackworth did playfully attempt to continue the divertissement begun in the romantic night, Miss Grig by the sureness of her perceptions and the bland pitilessness of her tactics would undoubtedly counter him once and for all. The two women, so acutely contrasted in age, form and temperament, had this in common--that they secretly and unwillingly respected each other. But the younger was at present no match at all for the elder.
And yet Lilian was not cast down--neither by the realization of her awful silliness and of her lack of the sense of responsibility, nor by her powerlessness, nor by the awaking from the dream of Lord Mackworth. On the contrary, she was quite uplifted and agreeably excited, and her brain was working on lines of which Miss Grig had absolutely no notion whatever. Miss Grig, obviously truthful, had said that she had tried to prevent her brother from coming to the office on the last night but one. Miss Grig had been ready enough to let Lilian stay till morning without a word. But Felix had told Lilian that he had come to the office to warn her at his sister’s urgent request. Why had Felix lied?