Clacton patronized a vegetarian restaurant; Mrs. Seal brought sandwiches, which she ate beneath the plane-trees in Russell Square; while Mary generally went to a gaudy establishment, upholstered in red plush, near by, where, much to the vegetarian’s disapproval, you could buy steak, two inches thick, or a roast section of fowl, swimming in a pewter dish.
“The bare branches against the sky do one so much good,” Mrs. Seal asserted, looking out into the Square.
“But one can’t lunch off trees, Sally,” said Mary.
“I confess I don’t know how you manage it, Miss Datchet,” Mr. Clacton remarked. “I should sleep all the afternoon, I know, if I took a heavy meal in the middle of the day.”
“What’s the very latest thing in literature?” Mary asked, good-humouredly pointing to the yellow-covered volume beneath Mr. Clacton’s arm, for he invariably read some new French author at lunch-time, or squeezed in a visit to a picture gallery, balancing his social work with an ardent culture of which he was secretly proud, as Mary had very soon divined.
So they parted and Mary walked away, wondering if they guessed that she really wanted to get away from them, and supposing that they had not quite reached that degree of subtlety. She bought herself an evening paper, which she read as she ate, looking over the top of it again and again at the queer people who were buying cakes or imparting their secrets, until some young woman whom she knew came in, and she called out, “Eleanor, come and sit by me,” and they finished their lunch together, parting on the strip of pavement among the different lines of traffic with a pleasant feeling that they were stepping once more into their separate places in the great and eternally moving pattern of human life.
But, instead of going straight back to the office to-day, Mary turned into the British Museum, and strolled down
