I know everything,’ said Vicki, in the same mocking and suggestive way, and taking a puff at her cigarette she threw her head back and puffed the smoke out in a thin, premeditated stream, as though aiming at some precise target in the air. She then neatly tapped at her cigarette over an ash-tray – doing this simply for the sake of neatly doing so, for there was as yet hardly any ash upon her cigarette.

Her English accent was curiously in keeping with her cigarette smoking – a little too excellently polished, a little too much at ease, and conscious of being so. Her skill here, however, was remarkable, and could only have been acquired by one who had spent, as she had, the greater part of her adult years in England. It was, when first meeting her, only in the consciousness that she was speaking English extraordinarily well that the listener realised that she was not English.

‘No – how did you know?’ asked Miss Roach, genuinely puzzled and interested, for she had not as yet said a word to the German girl about the Lieutenant, and could not conceive how this last meeting with him had become public property already.

‘Ah – I have my spies,’ said Vicki, and then added, ‘As a matter of fact, I was the other side of the street and saw you going in.’

‘Oh – really?’ said Miss Roach. ‘I didn’t see you.’

‘No – I know you didn’t. But I saw you.’ And at this Vicki again needlessly tapped at her cigarette over the ash-tray, and then looked at her cigarette in an amused and mysterious way.

It was now quite clear to Miss Roach that Vicki was deliberately making a ‘thing’ of her visit to the pictures with an American, and she thought this rather absurd and characteristic of the other’s slightly old-fashioned, ‘foreign’ psychology. On the other hand, was she not in reality fully justified? Was there not, if all was told, a very positive and mature ‘thing’ already in being? But how could Vicki know this?

‘As a matter of fact,’ Vicki went on, ‘I have seen you with him before. I have seen you sitting in here.’

This was a double surprise to Miss Roach; firstly because, quite unknown to herself, she had been seen in here with the Lieutenant by someone who knew her; and secondly because of the rather strange item of news accidentally furnished, that the German girl had been in here apart from her. She would hardly have come in here alone, so who had brought her in? A man? It flashed across Miss Roach’s mind that she had, conceivably, created a false mental picture of her new friend, that the lonely ‘German spy’ she had taken under her protection might, conceivably, lead a life of her own, with other protectors. But the thought passed, and she said, ‘Oh – so you’ve seen me in here, have you?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Vicki, ‘I have seen you in here. It seems you have adopted your pet American already, my dear . . . No?’

Again Miss Roach was slightly taken aback – partly because Vicki had unexpectedly called her ‘my dear’ for the first time in their acquaintanceship, and partly because of the boldness and outspokenness of the remark itself – her direct allusion to a sexual aspect of life, and her jaunty assumption of its normality, not only for men and women in general, but for Miss Roach in particular. Hitherto Vicki had never opened her mouth with her save shyly and reticently to speak of purely impersonal or sorrowful matters.

‘Well,’ she said, not quite knowing what to say, ‘I don’t know about adopted . . .’

‘Kidnapped, then, perhaps?’ said Vicki. ‘You are a fast worker, my dear.’

This time Miss Roach could hardly believe her ears. To be called, at her age, with her physical equipment, in Thames Lockdon of all places, and by Vicki Kugelmann of all people, a ‘fast worker’! As if she were a young, attractive girl, who went about with and was neither incapable nor guiltless of enticing men! And that ‘my dear’ again. And ‘kidnapped’ – what an extraordinary expression! This indeed was a new Vicki Kugelmann. She also realised that Vicki was deliberately airing her fearfully outmoded idiomatic virtuosity. ‘Kidnapped’, and ‘fast worker’, along with ‘my dear’, all bore that faintly grotesque stamp of 1925 which she had so often observed in her.

She was not quite sure whether she altogether liked and approved of this new Vicki Kugelmann, or whether she did not. It then occurred to her that Vicki’s sole object in all this was that of pleasing, encouraging, and flattering her friend, and that she was partially succeeding in her object, inasmuch as she (Miss Roach) was already, and in spite of a warning voice inside telling her to do otherwise, feeling slightly pleased, encouraged, and flattered.

‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘he’s just staying in the same boarding-house, that’s all. Or rather, he comes in for meals.’

‘Oh well,’ said Vicki, ‘one has to meet a person somewhere, doesn’t one?’

Finding Vicki thus relentless in attack, Miss Roach now decided to counter-attack.

‘And who were you in here with,’ she said, her tone and looks adding a sort of humorous ‘pray’ to her words, ‘when you saw me?’

Thus, in addition to going over to the attack, she was able directly to seek the answer to a question which actually filled her with some curiosity.

‘Me? . . .’ said Vicki. ‘Oh – only Mr. Jordan . . .’

And by the use of the word ‘only’, it seemed to Miss Roach that Vicki intended to convey that Mr.