"Oh, of course--"
"Hurry, then!"
He seized his small foolishly round hat, and he tucked his new walking-stick under his arm without displaying it too proudly, waiting for her comment.
She led the way down-stairs and across the quiet streets and squares of Bloomsbury to Great James Street. She did not even see the stick.
She said scarce a word beyond: "I'm sick of Olympia's bunch--I never want to dine in Soho with an inhibition and a varietistic sex instinct again--jamais de la vie. But one has to play with somebody."
Then he was so cheered that he tapped the pavements boldly with his stick and delicately touched her arm as they crossed the street. For she added: "We'll just run in and see them for a little while, and then you can take me out and buy me a Rhine wine and seltzer.... Poor Mouse, it shall have its play!"
Olympia Johns' residence consisted of four small rooms. When Istra opened the door, after tapping, the living-room was occupied by seven people, all interrupting one another and drinking fourpenny ale; seven people and a fog of cigarette smoke and a tangle of papers and books and hats. A swamp of unwashed dishes appeared on a large table in the room just beyond, divided off from the living-room by a burlap curtain to which were pinned suffrage buttons and medallions. This last he remembered afterward, thinking over the room, for the medals' glittering points of light relieved his eyes from the intolerable glances of the people as he was hastily introduced to them. He was afraid that he would be dragged into a discussion, and sat looking away from them to the medals, and to the walls, on which were posters, showing mighty fists with hammers and flaming torches, or hog-like men lolling on the chests of workmen, which they seemed to enjoy more than the workmen. By and by he ventured to scan the group.
Carson Haggerty, the American poet, was there. But the center of them all was Olympia Johns herself--spinster, thirty-four, as small and active and excitedly energetic as an ant trying to get around a match. She had much of the ant's brownness and slimness, too. Her pale hair was always falling from under her fillet of worn black velvet (with the dingy under side of the velvet showing curled up at the edges). A lock would tangle in front of her eyes, and she would impatiently shove it back with a jab of her thin rough hands, never stopping in her machine-gun volley of words.
"Yes, yes, yes, yes," she would pour out. "Don't you see? We must do something. I tell you the conditions are intolerable, simply intolerable. We must do something."