 8 Then good night alas, from ill-happ, who shall stay thee, Hector Berlioz, la damnation defaust. The drab morning stole into the drab bedroom, day after day, and week after week, and month after month, which threatened to vanish in a dwindling aspect of drab-colored years. And each day the light that was not sunshine found the same aspects. There was a certain amount of cheap furniture that made up the necessities of civilization, and gave that inexpressibly unhome-like atmosphere to the room peculiar to small bedrooms in cheap boarding-houses. There were two worn trunks giving a restless suggestion of someone who had no real abiding place in the world. And there was a grim uniformity of coloring that was yet not so much color as the effect that everything had been toned by a London fog until it became one nondescript shade. Even the few personal belongings which Winnie dared to leave about. Two maids had been dismissed for petty theft, merely accentuated the original discomforts, and made her long for more settled quarters than a safer occupation. She had lived in boarding-houses for three years, and had seen the type in which such lives developed. Sometimes she looked at her thin rosy face in the glass, and shuddered to remember the elderly females with the covetous eyes following a dish round the table, and never speaking save of food or material comfort. There comes a time in such women's existences when their blunted senses are incapable of understanding anything but some mean and petty advantage. The morning always found Winnie in bed, her fine nose generally buried in the pillow, as if she would feign cling to that refuge for those destitute of waking joy. And her face was the face of a good child. When she slowly opened her eyes from trained habit at seven o'clock, they fell on the long blank window draped with limp muslin curtains, whether it were winter or summer. And if the day were clear, she saw a section of long grey street without, the dirty stucco on the other side of the way, sheltering other lives whose background was the counterpart of her own boarding-house. It made her sick to think of it at last. The bewildering desert of homes that were not homes, the bored and lodging grudgingly paid for, and regarded with suspicion by those who thought that they were not getting their money's worth to the last farthing change. This was her life. This would always be her life. Last was at eight, because more workers than Winnie had to get to offices in the city. She was always down in time, the one bright pretty thing to look at in the dingy dining room where the slip-shod table offered her greasy bacon and inferior marmalade, kippers being sometimes a harrowingly salt alternative. Winnie's rose-hued face and hazel eyes sparkled in lieu of the silver that was never polished, and her skin was as clean as the tablecloths were soiled. It was small wonder that the masculine element present was drawn to blink at her brightness as the lower animals blink at the sun, but it did not add to her popularity with the elderly spinsters whose memories haunted her in the looking-glass. If Winnie's livelihood had not been so precarious, she would have started rooms on her own account, not furnished apartments such as Alma endured between tours, but attics such as flares only brightened with Winnie's own bright personality, but sheer necessity drove her into living as she might best gauge her expenditure, the hard sum paid down week by week, being at least on the safe side of allowing no temptation to overstep the margin. She had founded a hideous life, but she saw no least expectation of it being changed for a better alternative, unless there were three young men in the boarding-house whose manners and appearance would have recalled Dick to Frank Payton's mind, a townified Dick without the honesty of rough hair, a Dick who wore paper collars and horrible ties, a worse version, in fact, of the Dick who had called upon her in London. Winnie had started by being amused by the attentions paid her by these gentlemen, and her amusement was so genuine that it would have been difficult to restrain her irresistible laughter, even if she had not felt sure that their assurance would weather a storm of ridicule had they divined it. The actual effect, however, had been that each youth thought himself especially smiled upon and vied with his rivals to be the more facetious. It was a humor of which, even as a misunderstood comedy, Winnie wearied in six weeks. She had been enduring it now for six months, and the sickening flow of vapid buffoonery was becoming one with the sickening monotony of the long grey street and the long grey life ahead of her. Good morning, fair Maiduen, was usually the greeting she received from one of her admirers at which jocular speech his companions glared as at one who had stolen an unfair advantage, and the other women present tried to stare Winnie out of countenance. Good morning, she returned rather absently, the smile round her lips a little mechanical. By her plate lay a rough envelope addressed in a bold, masculine scrawl. She put it quietly aside to read later, not here with these prying, vicious eyes upon her. I think I heard you come in last night, Miss Dare, said a lady sitting opposite to her, on whom the bitterness of the overdrawn tea seemed to be taking effect. What half-past twelve was it not? I was going to ask you to shut your door quietly, when you are so late, if you don't mind. My room is below yours, and I sleep so lightly. It had been one of Nuzotra's meetings, and Winnie was conscious that the ill-natured speech was pure invention. I was in before eleven, Miss Jones, she said quietly, looking the speakerful in the face. But in her heart she cursed the littleness of her sex, and still more of a dreadful life that had distorted kindly womanhood to this. It would be her life, her probable degeneration also, in the long grey years past in the long grey street. She was glad to leave for the station, and go off to her work, even though it meant going out from the warm, stuffy house into the cheerless outside world. At this time in the morning, of bleak April, the day did not feel aired, and Winnie shivered as the spiteful wind met her round corners and blew dust into her eyes. She felt that the weather was a harder trial to a woman's looks than the most undoubted beauty could stand. It made her feel plain to begin with, and she thought angrily that girls were not meant for the unloveliness of daily work. The train was full of men who had learned to know her by sight, and through covert glances at the slight graceful figure. Winnie was built like a French woman, full busted, long wasted, with sloping shoulders and a certain alluring look of sex that suggested a quality utterly foreign to her. But as she did not bear her character, drawn up and signed, hanging round her neck, she misled the city gentry, one or two of whom actually dawdled past the third-class carriage where she sat, awaiting the least encouragement to enter, though they held first-class seasoned tickets, and Winnie knew it. She set her straight back against the uncushioned carriage and glared at them, with the anger in her heart seeming to concentrate itself against that unread letter which she had thrust into her breast, though there was little need to keep it warm. She felt the blood in it beat through the envelope, and when she drew it out to read it, it seemed a red-hot thing under whose scorch and shame she sat curiously passive, wondering if the honest working men who crowded the third-class with her guessed that the woman sitting next to them was asked to be. Perhaps they had daughters of her age. What would they have done to the man who proposed this? Yet she did not tear up the letter, with its passion and appeal to her to leave the long gray life and the gray world she knew, and to taste at least wants of being happy. She read it calmly, almost smiling over the faintness of his description of the colorless existence she led, compared with her actual experience. Joyless, toneless, sordid, he used dim-sounding adjectives. But what could he really know of the long gray day that began and ended in the long gray street, until the leaden skies seemed battened down over her head? The very necessities of Winnie's nature were sunshine and color and excitement. She had gone without them all through the long winters and brief summers of the best years of her life, until she shuddered to look forward and hated to look back. I must breathe, she said desperately, as she hurried from the train to her office, and the city streets pressed her on either side, with a strip of colorless, flavorless heaven to roof them in. What hope could lurk beneath such iron skies? A line of flares floated up across her memory and seemed to interpret her soul's cry. The worst of flares' work was that, as she acknowledged, it was generally bad, all but two lines. But those two lines had a trick of haunting the minds of Nuzotra, who were her most constant readers. What hope could lurk beneath such iron skies? I must breathe, once in my life I must have fresh air and color and sun, and be well fed and clothed, said Winnie, and her laughter at herself was half hysterical. I believe I would sell half my life for a series of good dinners. She turned sick at the thought of yesterday's badly cooked joint, as a worse-cooked reshaufé at the boarding-house. In the office the gray day made a gray twilight. The lamps were already a light over Winnie's table, where, soul-feminine thing amongst a dozen male, she held unwilling court if the clerks chose to persecute her. The typewriter of a certain class of city firms should start with blunted susceptibilities as part of her equipment. Perhaps even than the clerks, Winnie found those in authority, the managers and partners of her doubtful situation. Mr. Jenkins, the gentleman who admired her figure, it may be remembered, was waiting for her as she came in. Five minutes late, Miss Dare, he said, jocularly. I have been waiting for you. I am very sorry. The train was late, said Winnie briefly, hanging up her hat and slipping out of the neat coat that was too thin for the cold spring winds. Well, come into my office. I have some work to explain to you. For a minute the girl hesitated, her desperate hazel eyes looking blindly across the ill-lighted place as if in search of succor. There was none, of course. Virtue is demanded of the girl who works in the city as a sine qua non, and that she shall respect herself a vague phrase which if she keep it in its strictest sense she will, in Winnie's position assuredly lose her situation. But on the other hand, there is no certain reward even to virtue that it shall not at least touch pitch. Mr. Jenkins had a pink flower in his buttonhole, as he stood in the dangerous doorway of his own private office, smiling broadly in anticipated enjoyment. Winnie noticed the decoration, and loathed Malmas on roses from that day forth. She followed her employer with her head drawn back and an urgent masculine letter burning against her heart. To be safe from this, to go no more with trembling limbs and erased nerves into such chances of insult, the ill-omend name of a protector to a woman assumed a new mask of virtue in her eyes. She came out half an hour later, with tingling cheeks and eyes too hot for tears. Her arm was bruised, too, for she had struggled and flung herself against the hard angle of a polished secretary. She clenched her delicate, thin hands. I will not bear it. I will go out of this life, though death lies on the other side, she said. Thank God I shall not go back to the long, grey street, to ill-bred men and women, to yesterday's mutton any longer. Once I have said yes. She sat there fierce and dry-eyed, doing little work, but seeing mentally the inevitable stages by which she had come to this grey day lengthening into grey week. Grey week to grey month, until the grey years ended in a vista she could not face. She left the office early that day, careless whether her allotted work was all finished, for she was not coming back. Not coming back. The streets of the city felt as if the sun had never been there, and a cutting wind stung her through and through more keenly than in the morning. Yet the thought of the underground railway was intolerable, and she felt that her cheeks were brilliant with the fever that seemed to have seized her. It was a long way to West Kensington, on the top of an omnibus, but she was glad and not sorry for the bracing cold, and traveled slowly with a curious wonder that she knew she should come the familiar way no more again. As the busy streets gave way to the clearer roads that stretch out West, the lumbering vehicle passed other omnibuses on the same route, going east, and Winnie looked into the common jaded faces of the men and women riding outside like herself. This was a class amongst which she had lived, during the grey years behind her. Women who dragged their dirty frayed gowns and cheap finery up and down the omnibus stair, men who smoked vile tobacco which floated into her face as she sat next or behind them and spat onto the floor. Those round her were of the same type, for the better class had almost entirely disappeared at South Kensington, and as they neared the north end road, those who still remained with Winnie were dwellers in the small roads turning out of the larger thoroughfare. She wondered if the fried fish shops whose very essence seemed to pollute the air supplied these people with unchanging suppers. She had bought a paper in the city and had been listlessly turning its pages for something to do. It chanced to be one of the gazettes, and Flair had had one of her rare acceptances in it. For the verses amongst the notes were hers. Winnie read them before she realized their authorship, and with Flair's fatal gift for stabbing in the dark, they voiced the cry that had been raging in her heart all day. Cry allowed, and there was no voice, neither any to answer. Grant us, O God, a little space to taste our honey on the tongue, and meet our beauty face to face while we are young. Not much, we ask, a space to breathe, to love thine earth and live among the flowers we have not time to reave while we are young. A little while to look up straight into thine heaven serenely hung over our heads in purple state while we are young. With all our songs untouched by tears, with all our harps divinely strung, unshadowed by thy marching years, while we are young. Too soon thine ages sweep us down, thy future has a shadow flung over our present with a frown while we are young. Leave one ideal without speck. Grant us one love that has not stung. A few faiths, God, saved from the wreck while we are young. Before Winnie got down from the omnibus, she leaned over the seat before her and touched the driver on the shoulder. Would you like a paper, she said, with a fainter smile than usual, he thought, for he knew Winnie by sight, and like anything masculine he was attracted by the prettiness that fulfilled no strict cannons. Thank you, Miss, he said, and then something in her face made him mad. It's a cold night, as if no other reason could have frozen the hazel eyes and the stiff lips. Yes, said Winnie quietly. She left the gazette behind her with relief, but she could not give away the verses so easily. Grant us, O God, a little space to taste our honey on the tongue, and meet our beauty face to face while we are young. Not much we ask, a space to breathe. Flair was writing late that night, for the impulse to work had taken her by the throat, and the pen would not go fast enough. She flung the wet sheets onto the floor as she finished them, as her custom was, and R.L. came and sat on them and smudged them, thus rendering them still more illegible. The impulse was running out, and Flair was conscious that she had time to look round and would be glad to breathe before she discovered him. Then she laughed, and then, turning her eyes to the doorway, she uttered a cry. Winnie, how long have you been there? Not long. It has turned so wet. I won't come in. I'm dripping. Listen. Flair listened, which she had not done for an hour, and heard the throbbing of the raindrops against her windowpane, and the occasional slash of it as it drove in sudden gusts. That was why R.L. stayed in, she said absently. Come in, Winnie. Don't be silly. What do wet clothes matter? Will you have a change? No. A whiskey and soda? No. Flair looked at her friend's eyes and rose slowly, her hands gripping the table. What have you come to tell me, she said? I have come to say goodbye. There was a pause while Flair waited. Outside the rain made a monotonous tapping. Inside, R.L. rustled the papers as he turned over with a sigh of content. I can't bear it. Winnie's voice whispered across the still room. But it did not seem to be Winnie's. The long grey streets and the long grey life. Flair, I'm going away. It may be only six months, but I will live before I am dead. And afterwards? There will be no afterwards. I shall never come back to throw myself on anyone's mercy. I didn't mean that, said Flair, simply. But one must consider one's people. You have some, haven't you? And think of the identification, if you—Flair's conventionality again. Oh, I shan't go over Westminster Bridge, said Winnie, with ghastly likeness. There are other ways. There is a submerged tenth, you see. Yes, I see, said Flair, slowly. She did not attempt argument, or to detain her friend. It is an unwritten law of Nuzotra that they shall take their own pathway unhindered by their comrades once they have made up their minds. Hilda or Magda might, however, have felt it incumbent on them to say more, to try dissuasion. But that was exactly why Winnie came to Flair. You think it is worthwhile, she said, more slowly still? Oh, how do I know? Winnie flung up her wild, graceful head with real anguish in her restlessness. All I know is that we can only be young wants, and I'm losing my youth, day by day, week by week, with nothing that I want in it. We only have one life, Flair. It's worth staking everything on the dice when we throw for happiness. Of course, if this is all, said Flair slowly, if you are sure that this is all, she paused and looked at Winnie. Flair's religion lay so deep down at the roots of her nature that it hurt her to drag it up to the light of day, and she always hesitated to give her convictions even to Nuzotra. Then it says well to get everything one can out of this life, she said. But if you think there is going to be another show, and you may get a look in, perhaps it is worth waiting for it. Winnie's eyes met hers hazily, and she answered by a quotation that cut Flair with unintentional reproach, and there was no voice, neither any to answer. Oh, Flair, I have tried to give it up. I wrote when I got home tonight, and said I wouldn't come, and it must all end. And then I sat down and looked at the letter. I felt as if I had put everything that made life worth living inside, all the warm personality, all the decencies of civilization that we call being a gentleman, the association with just one man who not only cares for me, but whose mind is sympathetic with my own, and who doesn't offend my taste. Flair, I thought it out, and I knew I couldn't give it up. There is nothing to take its place. Nothing, Flair turned away and began to gather up the loose sheets on the floor. Then you had better go, she said dolly. Suddenly Winnie threw herself on her knees by the table, and laying her head down on her arms began to cry. Flair did not attempt to touch her, or even to go near her. She went on collecting the sheets of manuscript, gently moving R.L. to gather them together, and listening all the time to the sound of the rain outside and the sobbing within. The catch of Winnie's shortened breath was as horrible as the feeling of impotence that numbed her. She felt the wilderness of the world outside suddenly around her, and as touching her, and she realized that what Winnie said was true. She had nothing to take the place of the warm humanity she must give up if she were to be conventionally moral. The world offered no compensation to the woman who walked with clean feet through the streets of experience. It meant hard living and uncongenial work and associations which seemed to degrade if they could not defile. It meant the handicap of being unable to compete with less scrupulous women in all outward show. She had no comfort to offer Winnie. At last the kneeling figure rose and came to her, still panting with those horrible sobs. Flair stood up and they faced each other. Are you going now? She said. Yes. I wired to him as I came. To meet you? Yes. Will you say good-bye to the others for me? Oh yes, said Flair hopelessly. She touched Winnie's cold cheek and mechanically fastened her cloak for her. You are wet, she said. Will you have a handsome? I can lend you some money. No, I would rather not. The tears were still running down her face, and Flair stared at her stupidly, with a sense she could not overcome, that this was not Winnie at all. Winnie always laughed. Flair had never seen her cry before, and excruciating pain at her own heart began to take the place of the numbness. It was a real physical pain that Flair had suffered before after a shock of any kind, and it distracted her attention. She saw Winnie turn from her, however, and cross the room quickly, her cloak fluttering oddly as if there were a wind. At the door she turned round again of necessity in opening it, and showed Flair her face, not Winnie's face at all, but an abstract thing, a type of all the past loneliness and dread and despair that had ever driven women to this as to an escape from their own selves. Her lips moved, and she spoke from a long way off already, though she was there on the threshold. Goodbye, dearie. The door closed, and the light tread sounded tap-tap on the steep stairs. Flair stood listening, each painful breath telling more of the agony at her heart than in her numbed soul. She pressed her clasped tans nervously over the pain, and bent a little forward. Her attitude was mere endurance, but it stood as well for listening. Winnie's feet died out on the stairs. There was silence while she reached the hall. Silence until the house echoed, to the shutting of the front door as she closed it after her, for ever, and so she went out into the darkness and the rain. END OF CHAPTER VIII. CHAPTER IX What's the use of grieving when the mother that bore you, Mary pity women, knew it all before you, Rudyard Kipling? There was no question as to what they should talk of tonight. B.A. had come down to fill an empty seat, and the hungry deer's eyes looking out of her white face seemed to accentuate the tragedy of womanhood. There was hardly a word between them all save ordinary greeting until they were assembled, and then a chance remark caused Hilda to criticize Flair's last story on the ground of it dealing too frankly with the relations between the sexes, and that seemed to lead naturally to a discussion on immorality. No one mentioned a name, but one and all tried with piteous fierceness to advance some sort of excuse, not for herself or her opinions, but for the empty chair which B.A. filled in vain. It would always be empty from tonight, and some of them felt it as a tragedy, some as a dangerous thing. Flair and her story proved no more than a text, and Hilda denounced them without personal malice. It was noticeable that Flair never troubled to defend herself while B.A., Beatrice, or Alma, were in the room, and she had throughout the discussion been leaning over Beatrice, who was sitting next to her taking less notice of the strictures passed upon herself and her work, then upon some loose sheets of manuscript on which R.L. had been lying, and which Beatrice had picked up. The two girls were really reading them together, and perhaps hardly attending to Hilda's attack. His Majesty's ship, the London, was the first of the fighting line, ten ships of war where the fast nets are, and thirty feet in the brine, and His Majesty's ship, the London, spoke out to the other nine. It ought not to be thirty, really, said Flair, explanatorily. Very few of our ships draw more than twenty-nine feet, even with all their stores on board, but owing to the exegencies of verse, I had to suppose she had culled beyond her capacities. But, Flair, how on earth do you know these things? Oh, I have a store of splendid memories, said Flair, with an odd laugh. What's that you were saying, Hilda? That I do know good with my stories? Well, here's heresy for you. It seems to be infinitely more of a responsibility on me to do the best I can, with the gift that is in me, than to hold my tongue because there are fools in the world whose weakness shall not hamper me, though I wrote a dozen harmless books, which were in artistic and full of platitudes, because I had been afraid to write better in the more unorthodox way. I should be more to blame, from my point of view, than if a book of mine which I knew was good work and true art made a dozen people break the seventh commandment. Understand me, I am emphatically not my brother's keeper, but I am the keeper of my own ten talents, and accept my responsibility. And therein, Hilda, you will observe that I disregard the Old Testament, but I faithfully hold with the new. Yes, but why must you write like that, Hilda challenged, feigned to recreate human nature like all dear reformers, and sure in her own strong singleness of heart, that were she ruler of the universe for one week, she could improve it according to her own satisfaction, and so no doubt she could have done, for it does not follow that those who think they have found a little corner of the earth to reclaim, which has been forgotten by its creator in the multitude of business, are self-sufficient or presumptuous. If they could have their way and remedy the evils that they can see, they would be quite satisfied with their own work, and would not be taught any humiliating lesson for their honest convictions. After all, it is not God's work that they want to redo, but only man's marring of it. But Hilda must have gone back to many beginnings to make a new flair who could write other than she did. She looked up now as if she knew this, the world old eyes with their hideous wisdom fixed on Hilda. Ask my ancestors, she said, Don't you know the driving of flair? said Beatrice suddenly, looking up also from the scribbled verses. Flair didn't write it herself. It was written for her, and it's the oddest thing I ever read. What became of the author, Flair? I am sure I don't know, said Flair, cuddling down yet further into her chair, with a grunt. The manuscript is upstairs on my writing table. You don't want me to fetch it now, do you? Yes, now, said Beatrice calmly, Flair grunted again, heaved herself out of the chair and went, not because she wished to assist any more at her own vivisection, but because Beatrice had a way of putting on a soft pressure that was like water wearing the stone. No sooner had she left the room than R.L. jumped into her empty seat, and finding it warm, tucked himself into a flattened ball, and slumbered with his paw over his nose. I never see R.L. do that, but I wish I were a cat, said Frank. It's so cozy. And think of the advantage of having no backbone to speak of, and no morals put in Alma significantly. I don't think, you know, said B.A. meditatively, between luxurious clouds of tobacco, that the morals of the modern woman are any more lax than those of the past generation. It's a question of temperament largely, chimed in Flair, plunging neck deep in the discussion as she re-entered the room. The temperament of the age, not the individual. Feminine nature is hysterical just now with over-pressure, and it's working off by running a muck amongst the commandments. Just as an overrun dynamo fizzles out sparks and threatens to set the world on fire, they neither of them do it, though, properly handled. They fight fairer in America, certainly, said Frank thoughtfully. The women who compete with men don't seem to lose their position and sink into mere rivalry, nor are they treated as inferiors. But one can only judge by fiction, and the American girl of fiction in a newspaper or government office appears to have all the men fall down and worship her. She is very much of fiction, said Flair Grimly. She then writes the book of the season in six weeks and has brain fever. Her publisher says that it is a human document, and she marries the President. In between wiles she unravels mysteries, with a skill beyond that of Sherlock Holmes, and attends prize fights to obtain copy for her paper, where no man can get himself admitted. R.L., get out of my chair. There are the verses' tricks. Beatrice unfolded the manuscript in a handwriting that was not Flair's. Read it and passed it to Alma. Read it out to us, she said, as musically didactic as usual. I like it. It is not Flair's own, so she can't object. It's beastly, said Flair, with great frankness, settling herself in her old place and taking R.L. on her lap, where he growled himself into slumber again. And the worst of it is that I know what most of it means. I'm the only one who will, though. Go on, Alma. The driving of Flair read Alma very slowly and distinctly. There was laughter up in heaven when the gods drove Flair, and the scared soul scurried onward, blinded by the going sunward, to and fro and back and downward, with her wind-swept hair. It was sport enough for seven when the gods drove Flair. Zeus had tossed a laugh to Leda. See me drive this Flair. Pan would make another poet. Drive her then before she know it, and your bitter gift bestow it to a girl's despair. No relenting, for we need her. So the gods drove Flair. Said Priapas, give me leisure. I will torture Flair. See her run from what I teach her. See her inborn instinct reach her. While her larice as a preacher warns her have a care. For our profit and our pleasure, Flair shall fly from Flair. Said Apollo, smiling gaily, down the golden stair. She is praying, she is praying, that the pain should be delaying. Just a moment, is it slaying, that we risk down there? Let her breathe a while. Then daily, we will hunt this Flair. In and out across existence ran the quarry, Flair, turning like a stag at water, from the wondrous thing they taught her. Blinded broken, till they brought her to the golden stair. And with death in her resistance rose the cry of Flair. From the goal she could not even understand or dare. Racing back ere they could waft her, she leapt outward through their laughter, leapt where none might follow after, fathoms out in air, from the world's edge and the heaven. So the gods lost Flair. Is that poetry asked Magda ominously? I am sure it must be, because it's such absolute nonsense. I couldn't make out who drove what, where, and how did Flair come in? The only thing that was plain to me, Frank admitted, was the last line. Like the reader of Browning's Sordello, I found the end of the poem quite lucid. So the gods lost Flair. So did I. She was obscured by a maze of words all through. There was a good deal about driving Flair upstairs to bed, wasn't there, though? Said Hilda. I know she sits up late after we have all gone. I have always suspected it, and this confirms me. The writer is evidently somebody who knows her habits. B. A. and Beatrice looked at each other. Without speaking, Alma folded the paper in silence and handed it back to Flair. Well, I vote we end this gay and festive meeting, said Magda, with obvious dread of more poetry read over her defenseless head. Come along, B. A., you take longer than I do to titivate. This was ranked libel and B. A. grinned. The meeting broke up gradually, the girls drifting out of the room to put on their hats, lingering to talk to Flair or to each other, coming back as if they had still something to say. Before each of the original girls who attended the meetings left, they contrived to get Flair alone and ask an apparently objectless question that needed nothing to explain it, but a name for the personal pronoun. Had not Flair been the one chosen to convey news of the disaster, Magda came first, extricating herself from B. A., and looked down on the messenger with troubled blue eyes. Flair, how did she look? Like anyone else taking a leap in the dark. They go rather white and they set their lips. You know that. How awful, how awful. I couldn't have done it. I should be afraid at the last moment. Oh, marriage would scare you. It wouldn't, her. It's a question of nerve, not morality. I suppose it is. But you know my theories. You've got principles, acknowledged Flair. Good night, April. Then came Frank. Deary, couldn't you have stopped her? No, Frank, and I don't know that I should have been right to do so. Not when you know what it must come to. Mightn't there be worse? Don't judge human nature in the type, for goodness sake. Of course one does not know what her temptations were, but there must have been some better way out. Why should there? Does your experience go to prove it? Long gray years behind, long gray years ahead. Then she saw a splash of color in the present, and flung herself on it. At least if she were a gambler she gambled with splendid abandonment. But there's something beyond all this, Flair. Flair has suggested that too, but she did not say so now. She had no religion, she remarked quietly. Frank's sigh had hardly passed from Flair's ears before Alma followed her. Will she come back, Flair? She asked. She said not. If ever she did, it would be to you, Alma considered. Give her my love, and do ask her to come and see me, she said. For with Alma, love asked favors, but never sat in judgment. She would come to you rather, not to me, said Flair, with an inspiration. I should if I were in trouble. Alma passed on trailing clouds of glory unconsciously to herself, and Beatrice paused beside Flair in an indefinite shadowy way of her own. Did you ever see him, she asked? No. Do you think she was much in love? Oh, love, said Flair, called a cut scornfully. Love is a mere matter of spoiled clothes and indigestion. I can't judge of it beyond. Beatrice's dark gravity broke into smiles. How funny you are, Flair, she said, but Flair did not resent Magda's comment in Beatrice's mouth, for it had gained a comprehension. Tell me what you mean. Well, I never met any girl who was engaged and whose clothes kept their pristine freshness, did you? Years ago, when we wore big sleeves, a girl who was depositiously in love always had at least one sleeve crumpled, and they worry and worry and can neither eat nor sleep. A nervous affection like love always upsets one's stomach. Beatrice vanished as she came, with the same appearance of not having paused with any purpose. Last of all came Hilda. You have nothing more definite to go upon than what you told me, Flair? Nothing. I wish I could have helped her. She wanted someone to be strong for her, perhaps, and I did not even know. Do you think she had thought of this for long? I think she must have refused many times, many weary times, and yet she did not refuse at last. Perhaps he guessed that she could be won over. Perhaps there was a pause. The hardest thing in the world is to learn to say no, said Flair Caldecott. It is also the noblest, said Hilda, quietly. So great and God so small, that hides the stars and magnifies the grass. Oh, is the darkness too a lying glass, or undistracted? Do you find truth there? What of the darkness? Is it very fair? Richard Legalien The cheapest breakfast you could have outside cereals or mere bread and marmalade is a tin of sardines, particularly if you do not like them. For the smallest size in some brands costs three pence half penny, and contains some twelve sardines. Worked out this comes to a farthing and eight forty-fifths, or one one point six, as you please, per breakfast. Because it is morally certain that if you do not like the fishy, salt, oily flavor of the creature, you will only eat one at a sitting. Therefore your breakfast is but a fraction over the farthing for its principal dish, and even bacon will not work out cheaper while kippers are dried up luxuries. Beatrice Varley had been living on small tins of sardines ever since she found that they lasted out better than other things, and eating a poor breakfast in consequence. It would have been as cheap or cheaper to keep to bread and butter and marmalade, but as school began at nine-fifteen, and she had half an hour's walk first, she was prone to a hollow cavity inside her chest sometimes, about eleven o'clock, and for the sake of keeping herself in health she decided that a good breakfast was a necessity and inconsistently ate a bad one. Her deduction was false, and her calculation disprovable by a child of eight, but mathematics had never been her specialty, and B.A. flatly told her that she was weak in logic. After the sardine breakfast she had a scramble that landed her, tired and tingling at the schoolhouse door by nine o'clock. Having begun a hard day by a mile or two's breathless walking, plump on top of ill digested food, Beatrice was distinctly extravagant and cannot be commended. She would walk beyond her strength to save a penny omnibus fare, and then would spend the penny on a bunch of violence or some other lovely indulgence. That seemed a necessity to her nature. The school where she worked was a private enterprise, and not a large one at that, though it numbered fifty girls, day-pupils, and weekly borders of the lower middle class. They were mostly the daughters of small tradesmen who wanted them to attain to an imitation of the education and a smattering of the accomplishments of a higher social grade. Beatrice was junior mistress, but she undertook to start even the older girls in music, and her quivering soul was harrowed by some five or six lessons a day, at various degrees of attainment, but all tending to the same horrid end, for the ambition of the girls' parents was that Violet or Daisy or Rose should learn to play a piece. Whether or no it was incorrectly played did not matter. Honest scales were pushed aside for something with a tune and variations that could be strummed before visitors, with crimson cheeks and sticky hands, and Beatrice trying to forget that she was a musician, guided them patiently through each dreary stage of practice until the thumped-out rhythm became mechanical, and only the bass went wrong. Her woes did not stop at the actual tuition. They were increased by a personal proximity that tormented her to the last strain of endurance. The piano was her spear, whether as teacher or accompanist, and she not only played the marches for the musical drill on certain days in the week, but had to be present during violin lessons and sometimes play the accompaniment for those pupils who learned the instrument. The school prided itself on the fact that it had two masters as well as mistresses for drawing and music. The art master was a jovial little fat man who was popular with girls because he made jokes and was even capable of the familiarities of practical joking when the headmistress was not present. He was a wise man in his own sphere and could count upon his pupil's giggling adherents. On the other hand, the music master did not seek for popularity and carried his head too high to see if a school girl eyed him with favor. He was irascible over a false note and he was curt in manner rather than ingratiating. Had he been mincing or effeminate, the school might have worked off its resentment in vulgar nicknames and private lampoons. But as he happened to be a broad-shouldered young man, with a very English appearance, and nothing artistic about him save his temper, there was war between master and pupils, a war which resulted in intentional blank stupidity on the part of the girls and a curbed wrath for which the music master could find no outlet save on the small dark head of the music mistress. Beatrice dreaded Wednesday and Friday with a special kind of fascination. On these days she had to attend four violin lessons and endure fine sarcasms from the music master, which passed harmlessly over the pupil's head, but made her rive. Had she not played for the learner during the long tedious hours of her practice, and was she not plainly responsible for the horrible jangle of harmonies which the scraping bow evolved, she used to sit with her big moony eyes and white face apparently as unaffected as the fiddler, while every nerve in her slight body felt raw and twanged to the cat-gut, sometimes in the quietest of her silvery tones she would give back one of the taunts flung at her by the exasperated teacher, who would then shrug his shoulders as if Miss Varley's temper were a known curse in the establishment. And two or three hours afterwards Beatrice would fling herself face downwards on the hard black couch in her own small room and cry her heart out, because she had been stung beyond endurance. How can he? How can anyone like me? He says I have a beastly tongue. He told me so straight out one day. She panted to herself, her morbid, unbalanced nature torturing itself. He doesn't like to look at me even. I am dark and ugly, and I can't even be civil and indifferent. Justice might have pleaded for her that the music master had not always been civil and indifferent, either, though he looked like the football playing beef-eating young Englishman who teaches boxing rather than music. He had all the impulses as well as the irritability of the artist. He played the heart out of Beatrice when he drew the bow over the strings of his own violin, and sometimes they forgot their animosities in mutual tastes and natural affinity. Perhaps half their cruelty to each other was caused by the strange love of power which lurks at the root of human nature in a sexual attraction, a power that loves to show how it can hurt as well as heal. Beatrice knew that she could irritate the music master as no one else in the school could do, for as a rule he was a very indifferent young man who felt himself out of his sphere amongst the daughters of small tradesmen and their governesses, and he knew equally well that he could make the small, grave-eyed girl wince with his carefully chosen sneers. A reaction from this petty warfare was all the more dangerous because it was a surprise to both of them. They neither of them meant to capitulate, and they had both at various times been taken unawares. There was a wonderful spring twilight in Beatrice's memory when the room smelt of carnations. Perhaps someone had made the headmistress a present, or one of the weekly boarders who was a daughter of a florist had brought them. The pupil had not jarred her teacher's nerves as much as usual during the violin lesson, and had been commended, and further the music master had condescended to remark that her progress was probably because Miss Barley had seen that she practiced intelligently. If she would only try to see that it was so always, it would make their joint task so much easier. But I do try, said poor Beatrice, stooping to pick up a fallen piece of music. I have set through hour after hour trying to prepare them for your lessons. You don't know. The injustice of the accusation, coming after the strain on her patience, choked her. She groped for the music sheets through a mist, and two large tears gathered in her tragic dark eyes. The pupil had rushed off the instant she was released, and there was no one to see her humiliation save the cause of it. Let me help you, said the music master, with mechanical courtesy, for he was a gentleman. And he knelt down beside her to gather up the music also, and found two great tears fallen like jewels upon the title page. I am sorry. I did not mean that. Don't think I underrate your work. I know how much I owe you, he said. He shot a quick glance at her. Beatrice's heavy hair had fallen forward to blind her more than the tears, and it was dark, groping under the piano. She thought, but would not let herself think clearly that someone was stroking her hair. Then a confused and broken sentence touched her hearing, and she was lifted up, and stood in the circle of arms, and was ringed with fire. The two hot, passionate natures flamed up, and met for an instant. The girl drifting in an infinite dream, where she was kissed and caressed and called pretty names. The man hardly more responsible, as he fondled the feminine thing he had found too near his own manhood. The few rose-colored minutes stood out like holy fire against the long dull background of drudgery during weeks and months and years. They were always rose-colored minutes to Beatrice, scented with carnations. Then the long weeks folded down again in a gray veil which she was always unconsciously hoping would lift and show her a rose-colored world. And the long days were only sections of lessons. Nine to ten, history, ten to eleven, geography, eleven to twelve, music, et cetera, et cetera, punctuated by the giggling of the girls, the pettinesses of the mistresses, the bursts of ill temper from the musicmaster. For he was as variable and reliable to moods as Beatrice herself, and she did not find the uncertainty any more bearable in another than her world found it in her. Of all the society, Magda and Beatrice were the two most likely to take offense, or to come within sight of quarreling. There were weeks, indeed, during which Magda was injured, and Beatrice sulked with one or other of the easier going of their friends, that it never came to a quarrel was due to the strenuous reality of their lives. Nuzotra learned to pass over anything more trivial than the problem of bread-getting and have little time for fancied slights or resented actions in the fight for existence. They have looked so hard into the Medusa face of life that they have grown impervious to pinpricks, and if they have lost some feminine graces, they have also slipped the swaddling bands of their sex, besides which their friendship for each other is a proven thing, tested in the furnace of the struggle for existence, and triumphant even over the instinct of self-preservation. Nevertheless, Beatrice was not easy to live with as yet. She was young enough for the blood to be hot in her veins, and experience had not tamed her into that endurance, whose end has never been reached save in death, which is an attribute of women. The music master told her brutally that she had a pose for every day of her life. She acted to herself for lack of any more interested audience. The half-truth of his taunt drove Beatrice into stupid silence in his presence for some time afterwards, and made him bring a new accusation of obstinate rudeness. Sometimes after a bout with him, she wondered that she could care in the least what he thought or said, and her whole slim body felt bruised with her pent-up rage, but though she could hate him, she could never school herself to indifference. It is almost impossible for a woman to hate the only personality that brings any interest into her life and stands to her for color and harmony and light in a toneless world. Of all professions that of a teacher or governess is most narrowing. She has a routine of work which strains the interest she might otherwise take in her profession, yet she is probably so situated that she never hears of anything else. Those who teach talk shop to a greater degree than is the case in any other calling, except perhaps that of the stage, and it is shop of the most limited description, being generally bounded by the walls of the school, which at the moment makes the world to them. It is seldom that there is any masculine element sufficiently emphatic in their lives to leaven the feminine lump, and so monotony grinds the youth out of them until the mighty universe, of which they know so much, becomes only a theory on a blackboard. But Beatrice was worse off than the majority in that she did not even take an interest in the details of her employment, being so weary of it. She had once in a moment of mistaken enthusiasm asked three or four of her fellow mistresses to tea, under the impression that once they were all together, and away from the school, she would get beyond the routine and technique of the daily grind, and discover their real tastes. As it happened, their real tastes, fortunately for them, were bounded by their profession, and to Beatrice dismay, she had no sooner started the Science Mistress and the French Mistress on tea and muffins than they plunged straight into the iniquities and capabilities of their respective pupils. I say, what does Maud Smith do in your class? said the French Mistress desperately, stretching her long limbs before Beatrice fire, and evidently regarding the present as an excellent opportunity to compare notes with her companion, for to the teacher who loves her work the child in her hands is the malleable clay on which she imprints her capabilities by success or the reverse. The French Mistress was a long, lazy girl with a handsome face and an emotional nature. Beatrice, sitting by in increasing silence, discovered suddenly that she had always faintly disliked her. She doesn't do anything, said the Science Mistress disgustedly, except set her clothes alight in the chemical laboratory, or cut her fingers with the razors at the botany class. As to brains, she hasn't any. She can be painstaking and get hold of a fact by memory, and then when she has made herself stupid with learning it, she is surprised and injured that I am not satisfied. Whose that broke in the arithmetic Mistress? Maud Smith? Oh, come, she's not so bad. She can do a little, though she's not brilliant. Hmm, sums are evidently her forte, said Science Grimly. All I can tell you is that she'll never pass her senior Oxford. Had Miss Seaton the head Mistress, we'll think I am no crammer. Beatrice, who hated the said Maud Smith because of many hours of hopeless tuition in Zarina, and the Cavalaria Rusticana, felt as if she heard those splay fingers once more thumping out the a-natural in the Massacred Intermezzo. She changed the subject to books, and in a pause of conversation with French, who had plainly one ear on the others, she heard Science say to Arithmetic, Oh, they are in a school, and Arithmetic answered, Well, even if we are on B, you are bound to give three hours to Science, and you'll have to have an assistant, for you can't do it. After that Beatrice tried no more experiments in dissociating her fellow victims from the school. They did not want to be dissociated. They were far more interested in the extending capacity of Maud Smith's brain and what it could take in than in what George Meredith and Thomas Hardy could turn out. It added another bitterness to Beatrice Lott that she felt herself a pariah even in her profession, and cut off from the comradeship of mutual interest. B.A. was the only woman she knew in the teacher's world who could cheerfully talk shop or with equal intelligence and interest discuss the whole wide world of art, as though education did not exist. But then B.A. was rather exceptional in all ways, and Nuzotra cherished her accordingly. As things were in Beatrice's existence it was the music master who kept her at least stingingly alive by the friction of their intercourse. The world was bitter by reason of him, but not sterile. The term usually ended in a dreadful afternoon function called the breaking up when the parents of the girls made the familiar schoolrooms seem horribly underbred as well as sordid. Beatrice loathed the very atmosphere of these ceremonies, as well as the people who attended. And it was with abject apologies that, as the governesses were allowed to ask a friend, she had sometimes begged Alma or Hilda or Winnie to come and support her. They did so cheerfully, in borrowed plumes, for it is a point of honor among Nuzotra to look nice when backing each other up. And as somebody is generally at a low ebb in finance, and has not all the intricate details that go to make up a woman's appearance at a party, it becomes necessary for those who have to lend to those who have not. On one historical occasion Winnie went to a journalistic at home, with Magda, in a skirt of Hilda's, a blouse of her own, Alma's hat, Frank's gloves, and Beatrice Umbrella. It was no use borrowing anything of Flair except ready money, because her possessions consisted mainly in a black silk evening gown and a blue-surge skirt. Alma said she collected blue-surge skirts. She had so many in various stages of decay, and it is certain that as fast as one wore out she bought another, without being able to bring herself depart with the discarded garment. The black silk crock had appeared in comedy when Alma played near London, and had dined at quite respectable suburban tables when Frank was asked out. But for that matter evening clothes were so general a property that sometimes the girls were themselves ignorant as to who had been the original owner. The breaking up party following on the twilight that was scented with carnations was, however, an event to which Beatrice looked forward in secret, not because the tradesmen papas and perspiring mamas would be more possible, or of a different class, not because there would be any outsiders who would be more desirable, or bread and butter and cake of a kinder quality, not because Daisy or Rose or Violet would strum out the two familiar pieces with less sticky fingers, or because she hoped that her patient tuition would show any marked success in any pupil. She looked forward to the breaking up for the simply feminine reason that one pair of eyes would see her in a setting that was not ink-stained, or so native to every day that he thought last term's blouse and skirt the same as this. In fact, the music master would be present. And as it was the summer term, Beatrice had an excuse for wearing muslin, the something pretty of her wistful taste, how she hated ugly things, and how keenly she appreciated the daintiness of delicate fabrics and the froth of frills, until it seemed to her that her love of such things was almost a vice in itself. She was not going to borrow this year. She was animated to the extravagance of buying a whole white muslin gown that would not be so very serviceable afterwards and having it made for her in order to look well for wants in one man's sulky blue eyes. And she decked herself for sacrifice as woman has since the beginning of creation. It was a dream dress, and Beatrice enjoyed herself in it in anticipation, as she could have done on no real occasion, though she had been able to choose and decree every minute of her own happiness. It had a very slight train, more a whisper of skirts over the floor than a train, and was fluffed with frills. There were lace and chiffon about her slight bust that disguised her thinness, and into the broad satin ribbon at her waist she tucked a bunch of carnations in perspective. The memory of their scent alone was something to enjoy beforehand. Beatrice had had so few dresses that had given her any pleasure, and the feminine trade in her was so strong that that one long white muslin gown became a real thing to her, a thing that wrapped her future in its folds, and was magic and mysterious. It happened that the evening before the break-up of the school she sat in her own rooms, putting the last finishing touches to the fateful dress. Such intimate and personal trifles as no dressmaker could do, while she dreamed over it at the same time. But anyone who had looked closely at the young face in the July evening might have thought that in some fantastic painter's brain it could have belonged either to a bride with her wedding dress, or a maiden sewing her shroud, for the touch of the tragic was on Beatrice at all times, and the end of the term had left her dragged enough to make her face suggest the verge of illness. The veins stood out too sharply on her temples, and if her face had not been so young and round, it would have looked haggard. Sardine breakfasts and overwork, coupled with the mental strain engendered by the music master, had not agreed with Beatrice. Hilda had spoken privately to Alma about her, only the last time the society had met. But Alma's remedy sounded a doubtful one. I know. I think she will break down if she goes on with this school life, she said. I want her to use her voice. I have spoken to Buttermann and Clark about her, and she must go up and have her voice tried the next time they have a batch of girls singing for chorus. Hilda drew her eyebrows together and considered the subject. She knew Beatrice's temperament, probably better than the rest of Newzotra, and stage life from Alma's experience did not seem the cure for neurotic ailments. Nonetheless, the suggestion had appealed to Beatrice herself, though merely as a means of escape. Her voice was rather exceptional, and had long represented a stairway of hope in her life, whereby she might climb from uncongenial drudgery to something at least enjoyable in spite of hard work. Anything was better than the atmosphere and the employment against which she chafed at present, and she had an honest little desire to get away from the dangers of carnations and summer twilight. The fact that she was fundamentally loath to leave the school drove her into doing so, if possible, from the common sense which had been drilled into her, since the days of the charitable institution where her education was begun. She did not particularly look forward to the associations and the privations of stage life, for Alma had taken her behind the scenes too genuinely for that. But she did long for movement and change, as one longs for an anesthetic, to ease one of a too familiar pain. It was of this possible change in her existence that Beatrice was thinking as she sat sewing at her dainty white gown, rather than of the music master who had been more cross-grained than ever during the past week. It had become more pain than pleasure to think of him, and she resolutely turned her mind to the impersonal subject. For Buttermann and Clark were trying voices for a comic opera, to go out on an autumn tour, and Beatrice had decided to take her courage in both hands and see if they would engage her for chorus at the magnificent salary of some twenty-five shillings a week. Perhaps if she were lucky she might even get thirty, but she had learned to starve, and the prospect of a low wage did not trouble her much. Unfortunately Alma could not go with her to her ordeal, for she was taking a special week at Brighton, and the trial of voices came off at the Sovereignty Theatre the day after the school breaking up. She grew really absorbed in her speculations and did not hear the doorbell ring or her landlady's foot on the stairs. When there came a tap on the door she said, Come in, in her pretty soft voice and did not glance up. The door had been opened and shut before she realized that the music master was in the room, in her room for the first time, looking at her across the snowy pile of muslin on her lap, with a half amusement, half apology, in his vexed blue eyes. I've come round to arrange about the accompaniments with you, if you don't mind, he said. Beatrice was as composed as if she were chaperoning a violin lesson, and the pupils were giggling, on which occasions there was always a faint irony in her downcast eyes and quiet lips. No, I don't mind, she said, and only glanced from the work on her lap to indicate a chair. Won't you sit down? She suggested. The music master sat down, a little embarrassed out of his dignity by the novel's situation. He had never seen Beatrice under domestic influences before, and the white muslin frills seemed to make the soft feminine look of her more apparent than usual. He did not feel at all inclined to be irritated as he sat in the shabby armchair opposite to her, but he wished she would speak. The little soft dark head seemed to be bent by its own masses of hair, and the white face was as a match to the tinder of his eyes. In her tortured heart the girl was praying to some god to rescue her. Why has he come? Why is this thing happening to me? Now, she thought wildly, and then the overwrought, overtired woman's soul cried out for judgment against her lot. My punishment is greater than I can bear. Well, she said leconically, for it was Beatrice cursed that the crisis of a lifetime would not loosen her tongue, or give her the power to help her own cause. Well, echoed the music master, the trifle pettishly. Are you going to play them, or am I? I will, of course, if you wish it, said Beatrice. With the touch of bitterness she would have given ten years of her life to have avoided. But I thought that as it is such an important occasion you would perhaps prefer to see your pupils through their task yourself. As if I cared. He wriggled his broad shoulders discontentedly against the old leather chair, and his shaven lips took a ride twist. You and I know the inevitable torture of such exhibitions, and their real native value. Then, on the whole, you would prefer me to share the torture? For the life of her she could not help it. But by a saving grace of fate she looked up and smiled after the words, and though he frowned he met the misty brown eyes and forgot to be cross. Yes, he nodded. Of course I should prefer you to be tortured. The emphasis made the words almost a caress, and the scent of long dead carnations seemed to hover ghostlike in the air. Beatrice went on sewing, and the music master asked permission to smoke. He took out an old briar and proceeded to give a vaguely masculine flavor to Beatrice's room and even to her gown for the party. And she sat there in a happy dream of which the blue spiral fumes of the tobacco seemed to part, and she knew that it would all pass too soon, but she played that it would last, just as she had always done about the things she most desired in life. When Beatrice was a little girl she had played at going to children's parties because she never went to one. Later she had played at going to dances and would tell Flair or Alma all about these dream occasions and what she had worn and which partner she liked best, even what they said to her if coaxed. She had never been disappointed of a pleasure, but the angel of her imagination have whispered its ideal possibilities to comfort her. It was all a game, well, life itself had seemed a sorrier game to Beatrice than her dreams of happiness. And it is probable that the music master enjoyed himself, for men loved to see the feminine creature which has interested them in a proper domestic setting. So he talked about music and even let slip a hint or two of his private ambitions and aspirations, while Beatrice felt that the confidence raised her to a level she had never touched before by reason of a sense of honoured delight. When the July evening darkened into dusk and she lit a lamp he did not move, but a clock striking made him start at last. Ten by Joe, and I've been gassing here for hours. Why didn't you turn me out, Miss Barley? Perhaps I did not want to, said Beatrice, but so indifferently that the truth did not startle either of them. She smiled her inscrutable smile in the shadow of her rich hair, and he thought her eyes were like those of some martyrs in a shrine. Haven't you finished with that finery yet, he said, half teasingly? You have been at it all evening, and you are now trying to beautify it still more. How women do love their clothes. I have so few, you see, said Beatrice imperturbably. When I do have anything pretty, it becomes an event in my life. And you like pretty things? His voice was actually a caress now, as he stood up to say goodbye. You ought always to have pretty things, too, oughtn't you? Something in her face and swaying figure put him in mind of Souvet's song, and a line of the faraway haunting melody was really in his brain as they shook hands. Souvet's song that means many things to different people, but to the music master just then meant shadowy hair and brown eyes with black lashes. God watch over thee at the dawn of each day, the dawn of each day. God bless thee every time that thou kneelest to pray, thou kneelest to pray. Perhaps Greek is responsible for what followed. I would not blame the music master, who I suppose was only a man, in that drearest of excuses usually offered to God for being lower than the beasts which perish. Possibly the Creator and the Created regard that only from a different standpoint. It is certain that they look for different results. Beatrice wandered after her guest to the doorway as if her restless feet strayed against her will. Outside in the passage the dingy gas lamp had not been lit, and there was a decent darkness to hide the ugliness of the surroundings. The man drew the door nearly shut behind them, the effect being as if he put out the lamp in the room they had just left, and took the girl in his arms, letting her rest against the reality of his broad chest and feeling for her eyes with his lips to close them with kisses. Beatrice reached her hand up to his neck in her turn, remembering how tanned he was, for he had cycled all the summer with a typical love of fresh air and exercise. Both of them kissed the memory of what they could not actually see. The man's tanned face and the girl's eyes and hair, seeming to each in turn the reason of their desire. It was very good to cling and kiss even in the narrow darkness of a London lodging house, and they had no wish for a less material bliss at the moment, nor did they repent of the natural impulse and cry shame. Shame comes when the apple is eaten and nothing is left but the core. Beatrice did not flinch from her fruit-gathering as yet, or ask pardon. She dozed through that night, lying in her small, narrow bed, face to face with the bare window, until the London dawn came past the chimney-pots to wake her from her fitful sleep, and she opened her unwilling eyes to meet the day, for even the joy to come and the wearing of a white gown for one pair of vexed blue eyes could not altogether rival the feverish pleasure of those dreams which were scented with carnations and alive with kisses. The morning was a hazy golden vision, during which she helped to make the monotonous schoolrooms as tolerable to party eyes as might be, for lessons were set aside on this momentous occasion, and the schoolgirls thought of their frocks and ribbons as much or more than the teachers. Beatrice sang softly as she arranged flowers and placed the refreshment tables, and hardly cared to eat a scrappy luncheon before rushing back to her room to change her dress. Clothes are the comedy of the rich and the tragedy of the poor. When a woman with unlimited pin-money is dissatisfied with her own choice, it gives her at least the interest of choosing all over again and of shopping afresh. But when her sister of the meager dress allowance makes a mistake, she must abide by it. If Beatrice extravagance in the way of white muslin had been a failure, it would have hampered her for some months without even the ephemeral pleasure for which she had risked it. She certainly could not have replaced it, even by something more serviceable. But by grace of providence the gallon was a success, from its tucked and chiffon bodice to the last snowy frill on the graceful skirt, or was there a grin on the face of fate as she arrayed herself in it and looked at herself in the glass. She had parted her hair at the side as Nuzotra loved it and tucked the carnations into her waistband, and the effect was all and more than she had planned. Only the details of her appearance were borrowed, Alma's seed-pearls round her throat, Frank's pretty slippers on her feet, a high tortoise-shell comb of flares supporting the heavily masked hair. The reflection in the glass was the last good gift that life held in store for Beatrice and beyond lay sorrow, but she turned away, unknowing.