As George walked alone down Charing Cross Road, he thought:  “That girl will have to look out,”—­meaning that in his opinion Lucas was not a man to be trifled with.  Lucas was a wise and an experienced man, and knew the world.  And what he did could not be other than right.  This notion comforted George, who had a small affair of his own, which he had not yet even mentioned to Lucas.  Delicacy as well as diffidence had prevented him from doing so.  It was a very different affair from any of Lucas’s, and he did not want Lucas to misesteem it; neither did he want Lucas to be under the temptation to regard him as a ninny.

Not the cathedral alone had induced George to leave the office early.  The dissembler had reflected that if he called in a certain conventional tea-shop near Cambridge Circus at a certain hour he would probably meet Marguerite Haim.  He knew that she had an appointment with one of her customers, a firm of bookbinders, that afternoon, and that on similar occasions she had been to the tea-shop.  In fact he had already once deliciously taken tea with her therein.  To-day he was disappointed, to the extent of the tea, for he met her as she was coming out of the shop.  Their greetings were rather punctilious, but beneath superficial formalities shone the proofs of intimacy.  They had had large opportunities to become intimate, and they had become intimate.  The immediate origin of and excuse for the intimacy was a lampshade.  George had needed a lampshade for his room, and she had offered to paint one.  She submitted sketches.  But George also could paint a bit.  Hence discussions, conferences, rival designs, and, lastly, an agreement upon a composite design.  Before long, the lampshade craze increasing in virulence, they had between them re-lampshaded the entire house.  Then the charming mania expired; but it had done its work.  During the summer holiday George had written twice to Marguerite, and he had thought pleasurably about her the whole time.  He had hoped that she would open the door for him upon his return, and that when he saw her again he would at length penetrate the baffling secret of her individuality.  She had opened the door for him, exquisitely, but the secret had not yielded itself.  It was astonishing to George, how that girl could combine the candours of honest intimacy with a profound reserve.

“Were you going in there for tea?” she asked, looking up at him gravely.

“No,” he said.  “I don’t want any tea.  I have to wend my way to the Roman Catholic Cathedral—­you know, the new one, near Victoria.  I suppose you wouldn’t care to see it?”

“I should love to,” she answered, with ingenuous eagerness.  “I think it might do me good.”

A strange phrase, he thought!  What did she mean?

“Would you mind walking?” she suggested.

“Let me take that portfolio, then.”