The girl who had played the accompaniments sat at the piano and placed a decided foot on the loud pedal.
She played a dreamy waltz, marking the time with the bass, while with the right hand she 'tiddled' in alternate octaves.
By way of a change she crossed her hands and played the air in the bass.
"She does play well, doesn't she?" Mrs. Hodges remarked to Philip. "And what's more she's never 'ad a lesson in 'er life; it's all ear."
Miss Bennett liked dancing and poetry better than anything in the world.
She danced well, but very, very slowly, and an expression came into her eyes as though her thoughts were far, far away.
She talked breathlessly of the floor and the heat and the supper.
She said that the Portman Rooms had the best floor in London and she always liked the dances there; they were very select, and she couldn't bear dancing with all sorts of men you didn't know anything about; why, you might be exposing yourself to you didn't know what all.
Nearly all the people danced very well, and they enjoyed themselves.
Sweat poured down their faces, and the very high collars of the young men grew limp.
Philip looked on, and a greater depression seized him than he remembered to have felt for a long time.
He felt intolerably alone.
He did not go, because he was afraid to seem supercilious, and he talked with the girls and laughed, but in his heart was unhappiness.
Miss Bennett asked him if he had a girl.
"No," he smiled.
"Oh, well, there's plenty to choose from here.
And they're very nice respectable girls, some of them.
I expect you'll have a girl before you've been here long."
She looked at him very archly.
"Meet 'em 'alf-way," said Mrs. Hodges. "That's what I tell him."
It was nearly eleven o'clock, and the party broke up.
Philip could not get to sleep.
Like the others he kept his aching feet outside the bed-clothes.
He tried with all his might not to think of the life he was leading.
The soldier was snoring quietly.
CV
The wages were paid once a month by the secretary.
On pay-day each batch of assistants, coming down from tea, went into the passage and joined the long line of people waiting orderly like the audience in a queue outside a gallery door.
One by one they entered the office.
The secretary sat at a desk with wooden bowls of money in front of him, and he asked the employe's name; he referred to a book, quickly, after a suspicious glance at the assistant, said aloud the sum due, and taking money out of the bowl counted it into his hand.
"Thank you," he said. "Next."
"Thank you," was the reply.
The assistant passed on to the second secretary and before leaving the room paid him four shillings for washing money, two shillings for the club, and any fines that he might have incurred.
With what he had left he went back into his department and there waited till it was time to go.
Most of the men in Philip's house were in debt with the woman who sold the sandwiches they generally ate for supper.
She was a funny old thing, very fat, with a broad, red face, and black hair plastered neatly on each side of the forehead in the fashion shown in early pictures of Queen Victoria.
She always wore a little black bonnet and a white apron; her sleeves were tucked up to the elbow; she cut the sandwiches with large, dirty, greasy hands; and there was grease on her bodice, grease on her apron, grease on her skirt.
She was called Mrs. Fletcher, but everyone addressed her as 'Ma'; she was really fond of the shop assistants, whom she called her boys; she never minded giving credit towards the end of the month, and it was known that now and then she had lent someone or other a few shillings when he was in straits.
She was a good woman.
When they were leaving or when they came back from the holidays, the boys kissed her fat red cheek; and more than one, dismissed and unable to find another job, had got for nothing food to keep body and soul together.
The boys were sensible of her large heart and repaid her with genuine affection.
There was a story they liked to tell of a man who had done well for himself at Bradford, and had five shops of his own, and had come back after fifteen years and visited Ma Fletcher and given her a gold watch.
Philip found himself with eighteen shillings left out of his month's pay.
It was the first money he had ever earned in his life.
It gave him none of the pride which might have been expected, but merely a feeling of dismay.
The smallness of the sum emphasised the hopelessness of his position.
He took fifteen shillings to Mrs. Athelny to pay back part of what he owed her, but she would not take more than half a sovereign.
"D'you know, at that rate it'll take me eight months to settle up with you."
"As long as Athelny's in work I can afford to wait, and who knows, p'raps they'll give you a rise."
Athelny kept on saying that he would speak to the manager about Philip, it was absurd that no use should be made of his talents; but he did nothing, and Philip soon came to the conclusion that the press-agent was not a person of so much importance in the manager's eyes as in his own.