PART TWO--HOUSE OF WOMEN

## CHAPTER I

What anybody can have nobody wants; but what only one person can have there’s a queue to get.

This is an elementary principle of the frailty of human nature, and knowledge of it, and experience of its mighty truth, used to cause, during the three holiday periods of the year, a standing advertisement to appear on the front page of the Morning Post.

“High-class Ladies’ School for the Daughters of Gentlemen of the Professions has UNEXPECTED VACANCY for ONE ONLY pupil at reduced terms--Mrs. Impact, Oakwood House School, St. John’s Wood, London.”

ONE ONLY pupil! That was the magic touch.

The very first words addressed to Rosalie by a fellow boarder at Oakwood House were from a short, sharp-featured girl of her own age, which then was twelve, who said to her sharply, “You’re a One Only. I can see you are. Aren’t you a One Only?”

“Well, I’m by myself,” said Rosalie, not understanding but most anxious to say the right thing.

“Stupid, you’re not,” said the sharp girl, “because I’m with you. Did your mother see the advertisement in the Morning Post? The advertisement of this school?”

It happened that Rosalie knew her mother had seen it for Aunt Belle had shown it to her and to them all. “One of the very best schools,” Aunt Belle had said. “You see, it’s only quite by chance there was a vacancy.”

“Yes, she did,” said Rosalie.

“She’s the cat’s grandmother,” said the sharp girl. “Never say ‘she’ for a person’s name. Well, if your mother saw the advertisement then you are a One Only at reduced terms, and I knew you were directly I saw you. Now, tell me. Don’t blink--unless of course you’re an idiot; all idiots blink. Tell me. Was that dress made for you or was it cut down?”

“It was my cousin Laetitia’s,” said Rosalie.

“Of course it was,” returned the sharp girl very triumphantly. “Every One Only’s clothes are cut down for her. Poopers! Do you know what a pooper is? A pooper is half a poop and half a pauper. Every One Only’s a pooper. Well, now you know what you are. You see that girl over there. Do you know what she is?”

Rosalie said she did not.

“She’s a Red Indian.”

“Is she?” said Rosalie, much surprised, for the girl did not look in the least like a Red Indian.

“Ask her,” said the sharp girl. “Do you know what I am?”

Rosalie shook her head.

“Answer,” said the sharp girl.

“No, I don’t,” said Rosalie.

“I’m a Sultan,” said the sharp girl. “All the nice girls are Sultans and the school belongs to them. Do I look nice?”

“Very,” said Rosalie, though she did not think so.

“Then why didn’t you know I was a Sultan? The school belongs to the Sultans. The One Onlys and the Red Indians are interlopers, especially the One Onlys. Always shudder when you see a Sultan. Shudder now.”

Rosalie wriggled her shoulders.

“Again, poop.”

Rosalie repeated the wriggle.

“Vanish, poop,” said the sharp girl, and herself sprung away with mysterious crouching bounds, her head thrust forward, looking very like Gagool, the witch, in King Solomon’s Mines; and was seen by Rosalie to pounce upon another small girl who was probably a One Only and, from her forlorn aspect, certainly a sad and desolated new.

One Onlys, Red Indians, Sultans. They were the three castes into which the girls divided themselves: One Onlys the poopers brought by the advertisement; Red Indians the daughters of parents resident in India; Sultans the proud creatures who paid full fees and took their title from the nickname of the headmistress--the Sultana. This Oakwood House School in which Rosalie now found herself was one of those very big old houses with a spacious, walled-in garden that probably was occupied in the Fifties somewhere, when St. John’s Wood was out in the country, by a wealthy old City merchant who rode in to business two or three times a week, never dreaming that one day London was going to stretch miles beyond St. John’s Wood, and his imposing residence go dropping down the scale of fashion eventually to become a school for young ladies who on their crocodile walks would huddle, giggling, along the kerbstone while the dangerous traffic roared up and down the Maida Vale highway.

Those crocodiles! There was a news agent’s shop just opposite where the crocodile used to cross when it went out every morning, and one of the great excitements of the walk was to get around the corner and see what the newspaper bills had to tell. There were about forty girls at the school--a crocodile twenty files long--and on the days of sensational events the news from the placards used to come flashing back in emotional little screams from the head of the crocodile, gazing with goggling eyes, to the tail of the crocodile pressing deliriously up behind. “The Maybrick Case”; “Jack the Ripper Again”; “Death of the Duke of Clarence”; “Loss of H.M.S. Victoria”; Rosalie never afterwards could hear those terrific things referred to without recalling instantly the convulsions of the crocodile and experiencing within her own bosom the tumults that contributed their share to the convulsions. She was in the writhing tail of the crocodile when “Jack the Ripper Again” caused it almost to swoon, and she was in its weeping head when “Death of the Duke of Clarence” and “Loss of H.M.S. Victoria” struck its orderly coils into a tangled and hysterical knot.

Mrs. Impact, who kept this school, was a massive and frightening figure of doom who wore always upon her head, and was suspected of sleeping in, a strange erection having the appearance of a straw beehive. She was called the Sultana and her appearance and her habits seemed to Rosalie precisely the appearance and habits that would belong to a sultana. The Sultana appeared virtually never among the girls. The direction of the discipline and education of the pupils was in the hands of the chief of the Sultana’s staff of badly paid and much intimidated mistresses. This chief of staff, by name Miss Ough, but called the Vizier, appeared from and disappeared into the quarters occupied by the Sultana, and was popularly supposed to be kept there in a dungeon. If you were near the door through which the Vizier passed from public gaze there was unquestionably to be heard shortly afterwards a metallic clank. This was the portal of the Vizier’s dungeon being closed upon her and was very shuddering to hear. The Vizier, moreover, like one long incarcerated, was skeletonized of form, cadaverous and sallow of countenance, and grew upon her face, as all right prisoners in royal custody grow, a thick covering of greyish down.

A second known inhabitant of the Sultana’s quarters was Mr. Ponders, her butler, who sometimes slid into the classrooms in a very eerie way with messages and whom Rosalie came to know strangely well; a third, but he did not exactly live in the awful regions, was the Sultana’s husband. The Sultana’s husband lived in two rooms over the stable. From the front classroom windows he was to be seen every morning disappearing through the front gates at about eleven o’clock; very shiny top hat; very tight tail coat; very tight grey trousers; very tight yellow gloves; very tight grey-yellow moustache; very tight pasty face; curiously constricted, jerky gait as though his boots, too, were very tight. Precisely the sort of chronic, half-tipsy hanger-on one used to see in billiard rooms or eating cloves in West End bars. By association of ideas with the orientalism of Sultana he was called by the girls the Bashibazook.

Junior to Miss Ough, the vizier, were four or five other mistresses, all known by nicknames. Children are exactly like savages in their horrible sharpness at picking out physical peculiarities and labelling by them. One would imagine these governesses, judged by their nicknames, a deplorable collection of oddities. Actually they must have been a presentable enough and a capable enough set of spinsters, though sicklied o’er by the pale cast of indifferent personalities, indifferently housed, indifferently fed, indifferently paid; all anaemic, all without any prospects whatsoever, all dominated by and domineered over by the masterful personality of the Sultana.

Only one of them contributed to the life of Rosalie and this was “Keggo,” Miss Keggs, who taught mathematics. This Keggo was rather like Anna in appearance, Rosalie thought, and was most popular of all the mistresses with the girls, partly because of her bright moments in which she was a human creature and an entertaining creature; partly because of her curiously supine periods in which she would be utterly listless, allow her class to do anything they liked provided they kept perfectly quiet, and would make no attempt whatsoever to correct idleness or to impart the lesson of the hour. Miss Keggs had been known to knock over the inkpot on her desk and sit and watch the ink dripping in a pool on to the floor without making the least attempt even to upstand the vessel. No one knew why Keggo had these moods. But it was known that for her to come into class looking rather flushed was a sign foreshadowing them.

She appeared to take a fancy to Rosalie from the first, and Rosalie to her, probably by reason of the fancied resemblance to Anna. She invited Rosalie to her room and Rosalie loved to go there because the One Onlys were in a very weak and humble minority in Rosalie’s first term and were rather hunted by the Sultans who were then particularly strong in numbers and rich in apparel, in pocket money, and in friends. The poor little One Onlys led rather abashed lives and they had no chance at all around the playroom fire where the Sultans stretched their elegant legs and warmed their shapely toes.

One evening in her first few weeks Rosalie had to take an exercise up to Miss Keggs, and Miss Keggs’s room was warm, and Miss Keggs like Anna, and Rosalie lingered and was invited to linger; after that Rosalie sought and invented reasons for going up to Miss Keggs’s room and Miss Keggs would nearly always say, “Well, you may stay a little, Rosalie, as you’re here.”

Miss Keggs’s room was right at the top of the house where were also the servants’ room and the room shared by Miss Downer and Miss Frost. It was a long, narrow room with sloping ceiling and the window high up in the ceiling. In the winter it was warmed with a small oil stove which smelt terribly when you first went in but to the smell of which you almost at once got accustomed. It was curious to Rosalie that even in summer when there was no oil stove there was nearly always a very strong smell in Miss Keggs’s room. Miss Keggs used eau de Cologne for bathing her forehead and temples on account of the very bad headaches from which she said she suffered and the smell was like eau de Cologne but with an unpleasantly harsh strong tang in it, like bad eau de Cologne, Rosalie used to think. However, you almost at once got accustomed to that also. These headaches of Miss Keggs were a symptom of the very bad health from which she suffered, and on the occasions of Rosalie’s visits to her room Miss Keggs was very communicative about her ill health. It was the reason, she told Rosalie, why, alone of all the mistresses, she had a room to herself instead of sharing one. The Sultana had granted her that privilege, provided she would use this remote and rather poky attic, because it was so essential she should be quiet and undisturbed.

“Don’t you have any medicine, Miss Keggs?” said the small Rosalie, in one part genuinely sympathetic and in the other eager to discuss anything that would prolong her stay by the warm oil stove.

“Nothing does me any good,” said Miss Keggs wearily. After a minute she added, “But I really am feeling very bad to-night. Mr. Ponders very kindly gives me some medicine that relieves my bad attacks. I wonder, Rosalie, if you could find your way down to Mr. Ponders and give him this medicine bottle and ask him if he could very kindly oblige me with a little of my medicine?”

“Oh, I’m sure I could, Miss Keggs,” cried Rosalie, delighted at the opportunity of doing a service.

Miss Keggs became extraordinarily animated with the feverish animation of one who, having made up her mind after hesitation, furiously tramples hesitation under foot.

“Go right downstairs,” directed Miss Keggs, “right down below the hall into the basement. You know the basement stairs?” She proceeded with her directions, detailing them most exactly. She accompanied Rosalie to the door and when Rosalie was a little down the passage sharply called her back. “And, Rosalie! If you should meet any one--if you should meet any one, on no account say where you are going or where you have been. On no account. If it should be known how ill I continue to be, I might be sent away. They might think I am not strong enough to continue my work here. Say you have lost your way if you should be met. You are a new little girl and it is easy to lose your way in this big, rambling house. Keep the bottle in your pocket and remember, Rosalie, on no account to tell. On no account.” And so dismissed her.

A creepy business, going down to interview Mr. Ponders! The Sultana’s butler was only seen by the girls on momentous and thrilling occasions. He opened the hall door when new little girls arrived with their mothers, and he would sometimes appear in a classroom and walk thrillingly to the mistress and thrillingly whisper. This always meant that for some fortunate girl a parent or an aunt had arrived and that the presence of the fortunate girl was desired by the Sultana. He was a shortish, dingy man with a considerable moustache. As he walked between the desks to deliver his message, his eyes were always glancing from side to side as though furtively in search of something, and always as he left the room he would stand a moment with his hand on the door as though meditating some statement and then suddenly de-termining to disappear without making it. A rather mysterious and thrilling man.

Come into the basement, Rosalie walked as bid along the passage, then to the right and then past two doors to the third, whereon she tapped gently, and when a man’s voice said “Come in,” quaked rather, and went in. The walls of Mr. Ponders’ room were completely surrounded by narrow shelves. Beneath the shelves were the closed doors of low cupboards and on the shelves were ranged many glasses, china and silverware. At one end beneath the window was a sink with two taps, both dripping. On the right-hand side was a fire before which in a wicker armchair sat Mr. Ponders smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper.

“What do you want?” inquired Mr. Ponders.

Rosalie said, “If you please, Mr. Ponders, Miss Keggs is not feeling at all well and would you be so very kind as to give her some of her medicine, please?”

Mr. Ponders rose and regarded Rosalie from the hearthrug. “So it’s going to be you coming for the medicine now, is it?” he said. He looked rather a mean little man, standing there; not thrilling as when he appeared in the schoolrooms for there was an unpleasing familiarity in his air, but still decidedly mysterious, for though he smiled and looked snakily at Rosalie, he still glanced from side to side as though furtively looking for something and he still, before committing himself to an action, paused as though meditating a statement and then suddenly performed the

## action as though he had made up his mind not to speak--yet.

“You’re Rosalie, aren’t you?” inquired Ponders, putting his hands in his pockets and stretching out his stomach like one much at his ease. “Rosalie Aubyn. You come with your Auntie. What’s your Pa?”

“A clergyman, Mr. Ponders.”

“Oh, he’s a clergyman, is he?” Mr. Ponders’s eyes slid from side to side, rather as if he had somewhere in the room some confirmation or some refutation of Rosalie’s statement that he could produce if he could catch sight of it, and continued thus to slide with the same suggestion while he playfully put Rosalie through a further examination relative to her “Auntie,” her “Ma” and her brothers and sisters. He appeared then to be meditating a question of some other order but instead suddenly straightened himself, withdrew his hands from his pockets and said, “Well, you’d better be running along with the medicine.”

He took from Rosalie the bottle Miss Keggs had given her and from his pockets a bunch of keys. In the lock of one of his cupboards he fitted a key, paused a meditative moment, then with a decisive action opened the cupboard and from a tall black bottle very carefully and steadily filled the medicine bottle. The medicine was dark red. It first ran in a fine dark red cloud around the inner shoulders and sides of the bottle and then plunged in a steady stream direct from the larger receptacle to the smaller.

Rosalie, watching, was moved to say, “How well you pour it, Mr. Ponders.”

“I’ve poured a tidy drop in my time,” said Mr. Ponders, completing the operation and corking the medicine bottle. He held it towards Rosalie, paused in his mysteriously deliberative way, and then suddenly handed it to her. “And a tidy fair drop for Miss Keggs at that,” he added. He went to the door, again paused as though uncertain whether to open it, then opened it for Rosalie to pass out. “Good night,” said Mr. Ponders.

Lucky Mr. Ponders to have for his own a cosy room like that--men, always for some reason, with the best of everything again! Unpleasing Mr. Ponders to look at you like that and to speak to you like that--men, always horrible again! Rosalie, thus thinking, made a swift and unobserved climb to the attics. Miss Keggs must have heard her coming. The door was pulled sharply from Rosalie’s hand and there was Miss Keggs and the bottle almost snatched away from Rosalie. “How long you’ve been! But you’ve got it! And no one saw you?” Miss Keggs went very swiftly to the washstand and took up a small tumbler. Clear that she wanted her medicine very badly. She toppled in the contents of the bottle, its neck clinking against the glass, the dark red medicine splashing and some spilling, so differently from Mr. Ponders’s performance of a far more difficult operation, and with the bottle still in her hand held the glass to her lips and drank deeply.

Yet there was a funny thing about the draught. It seemed to Rosalie that Miss Keggs with that eager draught yet did not swallow at once but only filled her mouth to its capacity. She then swallowed very slowly and with movements of her cheeks as though she was sucking down the medicine and tasting it in every portion of her mouth. Colour came into her cheeks. The medicine certainly appeared to do her immense good.

Miss Keggs’s friendliness towards Rosalie was settled and established from that night. Thereafter it became a very regular thing for Rosalie to visit the room of Miss Keggs of an evening; and at intervals, sometimes twice a week, sometimes not three times in a month, to descend to the den of Mr. Ponders for the dark-red medicine which did Miss Keggs so much good and which she always took in that peculiar sucking way from a full mouth, one would be so long sometimes in swallowing a mouthful, beginning a sentence and then drinking and then all that time in swallowing before she completed the sentence, that she several times, by way of apology, ex-plained the reason to Rosalie. “I have to swallow it very slowly like that,” explained Miss Keggs, “because that’s the way for it to do me good. It’s my doctor’s orders.”

“It seems a business,” was Rosalie’s comment.

“Yes, it is a business,” Miss Keggs agreed.

Rosalie added, “How very lucky it is, Miss Keggs, that Mr. Ponders keeps your medicine.”

“Yes, it’s certainly very lucky,” Miss Keggs agreed.

The effect of her medicine was always to make her very complaisant.

## CHAPTER II

One seeks to give only the things in Rosalie’s life that contributed to her record, as time judges a record. Of her years at Oakwood House, so far as Oakwood House itself is concerned, only that friendship with Miss Keggs thus contributed. The rest does not matter and may be passed. Rosalie was happy there. It naturally was all very strange at first but she soon shook down and found her place and formed friendships. The thing to notice is this--that even in the strangeness of her first few weeks the place was actively felt by her to be a haven. There is to be recalled that aching desire of hers, when poor Anna lay dead, to get right away from men: men who (though still pre-eminently wonderful) caused her by their showing off to blink and have a funny feeling; and by their distasteful presence spoilt her walks and her lessons; and by the frightening things they did had brought that frightening death to Anna. Thus had accumulated that aching desire to get right away from men and be only amongst girls; and the feeling remained most lively in Rosalie at the Sultana’s, and intensified. Those men! She used to see the Bashibazook and shudder at him; and Mr. Ponders and shudder at him; and sometimes Uncle Pyke, and because of ways he had, feel quite sick to be near him. Men still were wonderful. The Bashibazook, Mr. Ponders, Uncle Pyke, Uncle Pyke’s friends--all were infinitely superior and did what they pleased; but, oh, not nice, frightening. It was safe and nice to be only with girls. Girls were in heaps of ways extraordinarily silly and unsatisfactory. Men though not nice, unquestionably did everything better and could do things. Unquestionably theirs was the best time in life. Unquestionably they were to be envied. But--not nice, frightening.

It was like that that her ideas at Oakwood House were shaping.

And all this time, most important and much contributory to the life of Rosalie--Aunt Belle. Tremendous occasions in those years were the visits to the Sultana’s of Aunt Belle. Frequently on a Saturday, kind Aunt Belle used to call at Oakwood House for Rosalie and take her to a tea shop for tea. Beautiful cousin Laetitia would accompany her, and kind Aunt Belle would always invite Rosalie to bring with her another little One Only. Kind, kind Aunt Belle! Aunt Belle used to sit by in the tea shop, affectionate and loquacious as ever, while the two schoolgirls stuffed themselves with cakes (not beautiful Laetitia who just nicely sipped a cup of tea and nicely smiled at the two gross appetites) and always kind Aunt Belle brought a small hamper of sweets and cake and apples--“The very best goodies from the Army and Navy Stores, dear child. They know us so well at the Army and Navy Stores. Your Uncle Pyke has a standing deposit account there. We can go in without a penny in our pockets and buy anything we please. Fancy that, dear child!” And always half a crown for Rosalie, as kind Aunt Belle was leaving.

Once in every term, also, Rosalie spent a week-end at the magnificent house in Pilchester Square. Such luxuries! Fire in her bedroom and palatial late dinner! Breakfast in bed on Sunday morning (“Just to let you lie as a little change from school, dear child.”) and Laetitia’s maid to do her hair! Rosalie immensely im-pressed and Aunt Belle immensely gratified at Rosalie’s awe and appreciation and gratitude.

A curious manifestation there was of Aunt Belle’s attitude in this regard. On that famous visit to the rectory she had treated every one like children. Here, in her own house, while Rosalie was still a child, twelve, thirteen and fourteen, she was treated by Aunt Belle and shown off to by her much as if she were a grown-up woman. About her servants, and about prices, and about dress, and about her dinner parties, Aunt Belle chattered to Rosalie; and about Uncle Pyke, what he liked, and what he didn’t like, and what he did in the City, and what he did at his club, and about her hosts of friends and their matrimonial experiences, Aunt Belle chattered to her, confiding in her and telling her all kinds of things she but dimly understood precisely as if she were a grown-up young woman.

Then as Rosalie grew older, sixteen, seventeen and getting on for eighteen, was reversion by Aunt Belle to the rectory manner. The child had been treated as a young woman; the budding maiden was treated precisely as if she were a small child or a small savage to be entertained by mere sight of the wonders all about her in Pilchester Square and by having them explained to her in words of one syllable.

“There, Rosalie,” (Rosalie at seventeen) “do you know you’re eating with a solid silver spoon! Feel the weight of it! Balance it in your hand, dear child. We usually only use this service for our dinner parties and your uncle Pyke keeps it locked up and carries the key about with him. Show Rosalie the key, Pyke. But I got it out for you to-day because I knew you would like to see real solid silver plate. Dear child!”

Dear thing! Lightly on her, you Brompton Cemetery stones!

Uncle Pyke never would produce the key or whatever he might be asked to show. Uncle Pyke would grunt and go on with his soup with enormous noise as though having a bath in it. Uncle Pyke never spoke at all to Rosalie on these week-end visits except, always, to put her through examination on what she was learning at school. Rosalie, though horribly frightened of Uncle Pyke, always had pretty ready answers to the examination--she did uncommonly well at school--but there never was from Uncle Pyke any other mark of appreciation than a grunt. A grunt! Those Pyke-ish, piggish men! The outstanding characteristic Rosalie came to see in Uncle Pyke and in the other husbands (his cronies) of Aunt Belle’s friends was that they thought about nothing else but their food, their wine and their cigars. They disliked having about them anybody who interfered with their enjoyment of their food, their wine and their cigars. They were affectionately regarded by their wives as tame, necessary bears to be fed and warmed and used to sit at the head of the table and awe the servants. That was what Rosalie saw in them--and shuddered at in them. Hogs!

Cousin Laetitia all this time was living at home, attending a very exclusive and expensive day school. Only twelve girls at beautiful Laetitia’s school and more masters and mistresses than pupils--mostly “visiting” masters--Italian, French, painting, singing, music, dancing. Laetitia was about two years older than Rosalie. Very pretty in an elegant, delicate fashion, and growing up decidedly beautiful in a sheltered, hothouse, Rossetti type of beauty. Always very affectionate to Rosalie and glad to see her; not patronising in the way she might have been patronising and yet, as the two grew older, patronising in a conscious effort to dissemble a conscious superiority.

Rosalie never could remember how early in their acquaintance it was she first understood that the great aim of Laetitia’s life, and the great aim of Aunt Belle’s life for Laetitia, was to “make a good match”; but she seemed to have known it ever since she first heard of Laetitia, certainly at a point of her childhood when too young exactly to understand what “good match” meant. Later on, when Laetitia had left school and was within sight of putting up her hair, “good match” was openly spoken of by Aunt Belle in her crowded drawing-room or alone in company of the two girls and Uncle Pyke.

“And soon dear Laetitia will be making a good match, a splendid match”; and beautiful Laetitia would faintly colour and faintly smile.

There began to come to Rosalie, growing older, an acute and an odd feeling of the physical and mental difference between herself and beautiful Laetitia--a feeling in Laetitia’s company that she was a boy, a young man, in the company of one most pronouncedly a young woman. Rosalie was always very plainly dressed by comparison with Laetitia; her voice was much clearer and sharper, her air very vigorous against an air very langorous. Her hands used to feel extraordinarily big when she sat with Laetitia and her wrists extraordinarily bare. She would glance down at her lap sometimes and could have felt a sense of surprise not to see trousers on her legs.

That was how, as they grew older, Rosalie often felt with Laetitia.

Her last term came. She was nearly eighteen. She was going to earn her own living. That was decided. Exactly how was not decided; but Rosalie had decided it. There was an idea that she should remain at the Sultana’s as a junior teacher, but that was not Rosalie’s idea.

“Oh, don’t be a schoolmistress, Rosalie,” Keggo had said when Rosalie told of the suggestion (propounded, through the Sultana, by Miss Ough and warmly endorsed by Aunt Belle and grunted upon by Uncle Pyke). “Oh, Rosalie, don’t be one of us. Don’t you see how we are just drifting, drifting? Don’t do anything where you’ll just drift, Rosalie.”

“No, I’m not going to drift, Keggo,” said Rosalie. (Miss Keggs, in the little room, had been “Keggo” a long time then.) “I’m not going to drift. I’m going to have a man’s career. I’m going into business! Keggo, that’s the mystery of that book I’m always reading that you’re always asking me about: ‘Lombard Street’--Bagehot’s ‘Lombard Street.’ Oh, Keggo, thrilling.”

She began to tell Keggo her stupendous enterprise....

There is in the study of man nothing more curious or more interesting than the natural bent of an individual mind. An arrow shot to the north and another from the same bow to the south spring not apart more swiftly or more opposedly than the minds of two children brought up from one mother in the same nursery. The natural bent of each impels it. Art this one, science that; to Joe adventure, to Tom a bookish habit. Rosalie’s natural bent declared itself in “figures”; in the operations, as she discovered them, of commerce; in the mysterious powers, as they appealed to her, developed in countinghouses and exerted by countinghouses. The romance of commerce! A mind double-edged, with inquisitiveness the one edge and acquisitiveness the other (as certainly Rosalie’s) is a sword double-edged that will cut through the tough shell and into the lively heart of anything. No more is required than to give the young mind a glimpse of the lively heart that is there. Rosalie’s young mind was already beating with half-fledged wings against the shell about that side of life wherein, in her experience, (of her brothers, of Uncle Pyke, of Uncle Pyke’s friends) men did the things that earned them livelihood and gave them independence. Along, by happy chance, buried in dust in the rectory study and found one holiday, came “Lombard Street” and Bagehot, and that was the book and Bagehot was the man to give pinions to those fledgling wings. She saw romance, and thrusted for it, in the business of countinghouses. It was fascinating to her beyond anything the discovery that money was not, as she had always supposed, a thing that you took with one hand and paid away, and lost, with the other. Not at all! It was a thing that, properly handled, you never lost. Enthralling! Thrilling! You invested it and it returned to you; you expended it and propped it up with fascinating things called sinking funds, and, although you had spent it, there it was coming back to you again! It was the most mysterious and wonderful commodity in the world. She got hold of that and she went on from that.

The romance of business! That ships should go out across the seas with one cargo and sell it, not, in effect, for money, but for another and an entirely different cargo; that cheques passing between countries, and cheques circulating about the United Kingdom, should be traded off one against the other in magic conjuring palaces called Clearing Houses with the result that thousands of little streams merged into few great rivers and only differences need be paid; that money (heart and driving-force of all the mysteries) should have within itself the mysterious and astounding quality of ceaselessly reduplicating itself--“the only thing in the world,” as Rosalie quaintly put it to Miss Keggs--“the only thing m the world that people, business people, will take care of for you without charging you for storage or for trouble”--that these mysterious and extraordinary things should be thrilled Rosalie as the mysterious and extraordinary things of science or of nature or the mysterious and beautiful things of art or of literature or of music will thrill another.

That natural bent of her mind! That Bagehot that ministered to her natural bent! Fascinated by Banks, fascinated by the Exchange, fascinated by the Pool of London, where, obedient to the behests of the counting-houses, floated the wealth that the countinghouses made, fascinated by these was Rosalie as maidens of her years commonly are fascinated by palaces, by the Tower and by the Abbey. Remember, it is not what their eyes see that fascinates these romantic young misses. A dolt can see the Tower walls and see no more than crumbling bricks and stone. It is what their minds see that fascinates the ardent creatures. Well, Rosalie’s mind saw strange romance in countinghouses.

That Bagehot!

And then must be picked up--and were with time picked up--others of the magic man’s enchantments. “Literary Studies,” but she passed over that, the burning subject was not there. “Economic Studies”; it much was there. “International Coinage.” She read that! It approached the subject of a Universal Money and her thought was, “Why, what a splendid idea to have one coinage that would go everywhere!” And then, opening a new field, and yet a connected field and a field profoundly engrossing to her, “The English Constitution.” How laws came; how laws worked; the mysteriousness (her word) within the Council chambers that produced governance as the mysteriousness within the countinghouses produced wealth! The mysterious quality within precedent and necessity and change that reproduced itself in laws as the mysterious quality within money caused money to reproduce itself in wealth; the romance of governance.

It was like that that her interests were shaping.

It was very easy, it was utterly delightful, to tell all this to Keggo. It was not at all easy, it was very terrible, to tell it before Uncle Pyke. It was appalling, it was terrific, to break to the house in Notting Hill that she desired to earn her living, not as a teacher, but in business--like men.

It was at dinner at the glittering table in the splendid dining-room of the magnificent house in Notting Hill, Rosalie there on the half-term week-end of her last term, that the frightful thing was done. At dinner: Uncle Pyke Pounce bathing in his soup; beautiful Laetitia elegantly toying with hers; Aunt Belle beaming over her solid silver spoon at Rosalie. “Try that soup, dear child. It’s delicious. My cook makes such delicious soups. Lady Houldsworth Hopper--Sir Humbo Houldsworth Hopper, you know he’s in the India Office, you must have heard of him--was dining with us last week and said she had never tasted such delicious soup. It was the same as this. I asked cook specially to make it for you. Now next term, when you are one of the mistresses at Oakwood House and living at their table and you have soup, you’ll be able to say--for you must speak up when you are with them, dear child, and not be shy--you’ll be able to tell them what delicious soup you always get at your Uncle Colonel Pyke Pounce’s. Be sure to mention your Uncle by name, Colonel Pyke Pounce, R.E., not just ‘my uncle,’ and that he was a great deal in India where he was entirely responsible for the laying of the Puttapong Railway and received an illuminated address from the Rajah of Puttapongpoo, such a fine old fellow, not being allowed of course to take a present, which you have seen many times hanging in his study in his fine house in Pilchester Square, Notting Hill (some of them are sure to have heard of Pilchester Square, though never visited there, of course); your uncle will show you the address again after dinner; that will be nice, won’t it, dear? Won’t you, Pyke?”

(F-r-r-r-r-r-rup! from the splendid holder of the illuminated address from the Rajah of Puttapongpoo, bathing in his soup.)

“Be sure to speak up for yourself like that, dear child, and let them know who you are and that though you are poor and have to earn your living, you have wealthy relations (though of course we are only comfortably off and do not pretend to be rich) and are not at all like ordinary governesses. Be sure to, dear. There; now you’ve finished that soup and wasn’t it delicious, just? You will have another helping, I know you will. A second helping of soup is not usual, dear, and Laetitia or any one at any of our parties would never take it, but it’s quite different for you, and I do love to see you enjoy the nice food I get for you. More soup for Miss Aubyn, Parker.”

Now for it!

“Aunt, I won’t have any more soup. I won’t really. It was delicious. Delicious, but really no more. Really. Aunt.... About the governesses there and being one of them. I wanted to say... Aunt, I don’t want to be a pupil-teacher. Aunt...”

Fr-r-r-r-rup! Frr-r-roosh! Woosh! Fr-r-r-roosh!

It is the holder of the illuminated address from the Rajah of Puttapongpoo most terribly and fear-strikingly struggling up out of his soup. “Don’t want to be a pupil teacher? Wat d’ye mean? Wat d’ye mean?”

“Why, Rosalie, darling!” It is the exquisitely beautiful daughter of the holder of the illuminated address from the Rajah of Puttapongpoo.

“Never mind them, Rosalie. The dear child! Why, how crimson she is. Let the dear child speak. What is it, dear child?” It is kind Aunt Belle.

“Aunt Belle. Aunt Belle, I don’t want to earn my living like that. I want to earn it like--like a man. I want to--well, it’s hard to explain--to go to an office like a man--and have my pay every week, like a man--and have a chance to get on like men, like a man. I want to go into the City if I possibly could, or start in some way like going into the City. I know it sounds awful--telling it to you--but girls are doing it, a few. They’re just secretaries and clerks, of course. They’re just nothing, of course. But, oh, it’s something, and I do want it so. To have office hours and a--a desk--and a--an employer and be--be like men. I don’t mean, I don’t mean a bit, imitate men like all that talk there is now about imitating men. I hate women in stiff collars and shirts and ties and mannishness like that; and indeed I hate--I dislike men--I can’t stand them, not in that way, if you understand what I mean--”

“.Rosalie!” (Laetitia.)

“Oh, Laetitia, oh, Aunt Belle, I’m only saying that to show I don’t mean I want to be--. It is so fearfully difficult to explain, this. But Aunt, you do see what I am trying to mean. It’s just a man’s work that I mean because I’d love it and because I don’t see why--. And it’s just that

## particular kind of work--in the City. Because I believe, I do believe,

I would be sharp and good at that work. Figures and things. I love that. I’m quick at that, very quick. And I’ve read heaps about it--about business I mean--about--”

Uncle Pyke Pounce. Uncle Pyke Pounce, holding his breath because he is holding his exasperation as one holds one’s breath in performance of a delicate task. Uncle Pyke Pounce crimson, purply blotched, infuriated, kept from his food, blowing up at last at the parlour-maid: “Bring in the next course! Bring in the next course! Watyer staring at? Watyer waiting for? Watyer listening to? Rubbish. Pack of rubbish.”

The parlour-maid flies out on the gust of the explosion. Rosalie finishes her sentence while the gust inflates again.

“Read heaps about it--about business--about trade and finance and that. It fascinates me.”

The gust explodes at her.

“Wat d’yer mean read about it? Read about what?”

“Uncle, about money, about finance and things. I know it’s extraordinary I should like such things. But I do. I can’t tell why. It’s like--like a romance to me, all about money and how it is made and managed. There’s a book I found in father’s study at home. ‘Lombard Street’ by Bagehot. That’s all about it, isn’t it? I can’t tell you how I have read it and reread it.”

“Never heard of it. ‘Lombard Street?’ Bagehot? Who’s Bagehot?”

“I think he was a banker, Uncle.”

“I think he was a fool!”

It comes out of the red and swollen face of the holder of the illuminated address from the Rajah of Puttapongpoo like a plum-stone spat at her across the table. Rosalie blinked. These beastly men! Violent, vulgar, fat, rude beasts! Uncle Pyke the worst of them! But she came back bravely from her flinch. “If he wasn’t a banker, he knew all about banking. Oh, that’s what I would be more than anything--that’s what I do want to be--a banker--in a bank!”

The holder of the illuminated address from the Rajah of Puttapongpoo as if, having expectorated the plum-stone, he desired to expectorate also the taste thereof, spat out an obscene sound of contempt and disgust. “Fah! I say the man, whoever he was, was a fool. And I say this, Miss. I don’t often speak sharply, but I say that I think I know another fool--a little fool--at this table. Pah! Enough of it! What’s this? Trout?”

Aunt Belle to the rescue! If Uncle Pyke and Aunt Belle had kept house in Seven Dials instead of Notting Hill, Uncle Pyke would have beaten Aunt Belle and Aunt Belle would have taken the blows without flinching and then have wheedled Uncle Pyke with drops of gin. As it was, Uncle Pyke was merely boorish or torpidly savage towards Aunt Belle and Aunt Belle’s way with him--as with all combative men--was to rally him with a kind of boisterous chaff and to discharge it at him as an urchin with an armful of snowballs fearfully discharges them at an old gentleman in a silk hat: backing away, that is to say, before an advance and advancing before a retreat. Uncle Pyke usually retreated, either to eat or sleep.

Aunt Belle had blinked, as Rosalie had blinked, at that horrible epithet “Little fool!” across the table. The lips that uttered it were immediately stuffed with trout and Aunt Belle immediately rushed in in her rallying way to the rescue. “Why, you great, big stupid Uncle Pyke!” cried Aunt Belle vivaciously. “It’s you who don’t know what you’re talking about, you unkind old thing, you. Why, many, many girls, quite nice girls, are going into business now and being secretaries and things and doing very, very well indeed. Why, I declare it would do you good to have a lady secretary yourself in that big, dusty office of yours in the City, never dusted from one year’s end to another, I’m sure! Laetitia, wouldn’t it do your father good, the cross, grumpy old thing? Give your master some more of the sauce, Parker. Isn’t that trout delicate and nice, Pyke? Trout for a pike! And I’m sure very like a nasty, savage old pike the way you tried to gobble up poor Rosalie, the dear child. Now, Rosalie, dear child, I think that’s a very, very good idea of yours to go into business. I think it’s a splendid idea, and more and more quite nice girls will soon be doing it. Now we’ll just see what we can do and we’ll make that cross old uncle help and ask all his cross old friends in the City, just to punish him. A young Lady Clerk, or a young Lady Secretary! Now I think that’s the very, very thing for you. Just the thing, and a dear, clever child to think of it. Yes!”

Kind, kind Aunt Belle! Victory through Aunt Belle! Accomplishment! A career like a man! Aunt Belle had said it and Aunt Belle would do it! A career like a man! Oh, ecstatic joy! “Lombard Street” had been brought with her in her week-end suitcase. Directly she could get to bed she rushed up to it and took it out and read, and read. It was all underlined. She underlined it more that happy, happy night!

Ah, never underline a book till you are forty. Never memorialise what you were, your lovely innocence, your generous heart, your ardent hopes, lest the memorial be found one day by what you have become. Rosalie, finding that “Lombard Street,” unearthed from lumber, in long after years, turned over the pages and from the pages ghosts rushed up and filled the room, and filled the air, and filled her heart, and filled her eyes; and she rent the book across its perished binding and pushed it from her with both her hands on to the fire and on to the flames in the fire.

## CHAPTER III

Incredibly soon, so stealthy swift is time, came this last term of Rosalie’s at the Sultana’s. Time does not play an open game. It’s of the cloak and dagger sort. It stalks and pounces. Rosalie was astonished to think she was leaving; and now the time had come she was sorry to be going. Not very sorry; very excited; but having just enough regret to realise, on looking back, that she had been very happy at school and to realise, actively, happiness in this last term. One knows what it is. It’s always like that. One always was happy; one so seldom is. Happiness to be realised needs faint perception of sadness as needs the egg the touch of salt to manifest its flavour. Flashes of entertainment may enliven the most wretched of us; but that’s pleasure; that’s not happiness. One comes to know the only true and ideal happiness is happiness tinctured with faintest, vaguest hint of tears. It is peace; and who knows peace that has not come to it through storm, or knoweth storm ahead, or in storm past hath not lost one that would have shared this peace?

So that girl’s last term was (in her words) “tremendously jolly.” She was just eighteen, and she was leaving, and responsive to this the harness of the school was drawn off her as at the paddock gate the headstall from a colt. She was out of lessons. She did some teaching of the younger girls. She was on terms with the mistresses. She had the run of Keggo’s room.

Such talks in Keggo’s room.... She was out from the cove of childhood; she was into the bay of youth; breasting towards the sea of womanhood (that sea that’s sailed by stars and by no chart); and she was encountering tides that come to young mariners to perplex them and Keggo could talk about such things with the experience that so enraptures young mariners and of which young mariners are at the same time so confidently contemptuous, so superiorly sceptical. Nearer to press the simile, youth at the feet of experience is as one, experienced, climbing a mountain with the young thing panting behind. “Go on! Go on!” pants the growing young thing. “This is ripping. Go on. Show the way. But I don’t want your hand. I can do it easily by myself--better.” And one evening while Rosalie stumblingly explained, and eagerly received, and sceptically doubted, “But look here, Keggo,” she cried, and stopped and blushed, abashed at her use of the nickname.

Miss Keggs laughed. “Don’t mind, Rosalie. Call me Keggo. I like it. It’s much more friendly. I’m very fond of you, Rosalie.”

They were by the oil stove, Miss Keggs in her wicker armchair, Rosalie on the floor, her back propped against Miss Keggs’s knees. One of Miss Keggs’s hands was on Rosalie’s shoulder and she moved it to touch the girl’s face. “Are you fond of me, Rosalie?”

Rosalie turned towards her and spoke impulsively. “Oh, awfully--Keggo.”

The woman stooped and kissed the growing young thing, hugging her strongly, pressing her lips upon the lips of Rosalie with a great intensity. “Oh, I shall be sorry when you go, Rosalie.”

“We can still be friends, Keggo dear.”

Miss Keggs shook her head. “Ships that pass in the night.”

“O Keggo!”

Miss Keggs smiled, a wintry smile. “O Rosalie!” she mimicked. She sighed. “Oh, my dear, it’s true--true! Don’t you remember how the lines go--

‘Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing; Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness.’

Just remember that in a few years. You’ll hail again perhaps. ‘O Keggo!’ Or I--it is more likely--wilt hail ‘O Rosalie!’ Just remember it then.” Her hand came down to Rosalie and Rosalie took it. It was so cold; and on her face a strained and beaten look as though hand and face belonged to one that stood most chilled and storm-beat upon the bridge, peering through the storm. Her fingers made no motion responsive to Rosalie’s warm touch. She said strangely, as though it was to herself she spoke, “Does it mean anything to you, Rosalie, a vision like that? Can you see a black and violent night and a ship going by full speed, and one labouring, and through the wind and the blackness a hail.--and gone, and the wreck left foundering?”

Ah, that most generous and quickly moved and loving-Rosalie--then! How she twisted to her knees and stretched her arms about that poor Keggo, sitting there--so drooped! How readily into her eyes her young and warm and ardent sympathies pressed the tears, their flowers! How warm her words? How warmly spoken! “O Keggo! Keggo, dear! Keggo, why do you talk like that? How can you? After all the kindness you’ve shown me, accusing me that I’ll forget and not mind. Keggo, you shan’t. You mustn’t.”

Then Keggo responded, catching her arms about Rosalie and straining Rosalie to her as though here was some cable to hold against the driving sea. “O Rosalie!”

And after a little Rosalie said, “You won’t again say I ever shall forget, or hail and pass by. Oh, that was cruel, Keggo!”

Keggo was gently crying. “Natural. Natural.”

“Unnatural. Horrible. And you? Why do you say such things about yourself? You didn’t mean it? It’s nothing? How can you ever be a wreck, foundering?”

Keggo dried her eyes and by her voice seemed to put those things right away. “No, nothing. Of course not. Darling girl, only this--you’re young--young and so of course you are going by full sail as young things do. Full sail! O happy ship! Rosalie, go on telling. Go on asking. I love it, Rosalie.”

She was always “Keggo” after that; and the things that Rosalie told and asked!

Such things! It is to be seen that now there were bursting into blossom out of bud within that Rosalie those seeds planted in her by the extraordinary ideas of her childhood. About men. First and always predominating, about men as compared with women--their wonder, their power, their importance, their infinite superiority; then about men in their relations with women--their rather grand and noisy ways that made Rosalie blink; their interfering presence that spoilt lessons and spoilt walks; those sinister attributes of theirs, arising somehow out of their freedom to do as they liked in the world, that somehow left the world very hard for women. Grotesque ideas, but masterful ideas, masterfully shaping the child mind wherein they germinated; burrowing in clutchy roots; pressing up in strong young saplings. Agreed the child is father of the man, but much more the girl is mother of the woman. It is the man’s part to sow and ride away; conception is the woman’s office and that which she receives she tends to cherish and incorporate within her. Of her body that function is her glory; of her mind it is her millstone. Man always rides away, a tent dweller and an Arab, with a horse and with the plains about him; woman is a dweller in a city with a wall, a house dweller, storing her possessions about her in her house, abiding with them, not to be sundered from them.

So with that Rosalie. Those childhood ideas of hers were grotesque ideas but she had received them into her house and they remained with her, shorn of their grotesqueness, as garish furniture may be upholstered in a new pattern, but tincturing her life as the appointments of a room will influence the mood of one that sits therein. Father owned the world--all males had proprietorship in the world under father--all men were worshipful and giants and genii. That was the established perception and those its earliest images. The perception remained, deepening, changing only in hue, as a viscid liquid solidifies and darkens in a vessel over the fire. It remained, persisted. Time but steadied the focus as the wise oculist, seeking for his patient the perfect image, drops lenses in the frame through which the vision chart is viewed. In a little the perfect image is found. There was that Rosalie, come to maidenhood, come to the dizzy edge of leaving school, with the perfect image of her persistent obsession; with the belief no longer that men were magicians having the world for their washpot and women for their footstool, but unquestionably that they “had a better time” than women and that they secured this “better time” by virtue of their independence.

“And, Keggo,” (she is explaining it) “I’m going to be like that. I’m going to be what a man can be. Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t a woman?” She paused and then went on. “Why, that’s the thing that’s been with me all my life, ever since I can remember. I’ve always known that men were the creatures. Always. Since I was so high. Oh, I used to have the most ridiculous ideas about them. You’d scream, Keggo. And I’ve always had the same attitude towards them--towards them as contrasted with women, I mean. First awe, then envy, then, since I’ve been growing up here, just as having a desirable position in life, as having the desirable position in life, independence, a career, work, freedom, a goal--yes, and a goal that’s always and always a little bit in front of you, always something better. That’s the thing. That’s the thing, Keggo. Just look at the other side. Take a case in point. Take my painful cousin, Laetitia, sweet but in lots of ways very painful. What’s her goal? A good match! A good match! Did you ever hear anything so futile and sickening? Sickening in itself, but I’ll tell you what’s really sickening about it--why, that she’ll get it--get her goal and then it’s done, over, finished, won. Settle down then and get fat. Oh, I don’t want a goal I can win. I want a goal I can’t win. One that’s always just in front.”

She suddenly realised the intensity of her voice and laughed and shook her head sideways and back. She had just recently put her hair up and it still felt funny and tight and the laugh and the shake eased away the tightness of voice and of hair. She said thoughtfully, “You know, I believe I’m rather like a man in many ways, in points of view. It’s through always thinking them better, I daresay. The ideas I’ve had about them!” and she laughed again. She said slowly, “Though mind you, Keggo, they are better in many ways. They can get away from things. They don’t stick about on one thing. And they’re violent, not fussing. When they’re angry they bawl and hit and it’s over and they forget it. They don’t just nag on and on. Oh, yes, they’re better.”

She extended her palms to the oil flame, and watching the X-ray-like effects of the light and shadow upon her fingers, she added indifferently, as one idly letting drop a remark requiring no comment, negligently with the voice of one saying “Tomorrow is Tuesday,” or “It’s mutton today,”--“Of course they’re beasts,” she added.

“Of course they’re beasts.” It was the adjusted image to which she had brought that other perception of men which, running parallel with the perception of their superior position, had permeated her childhood years.

## CHAPTER IV

She’s left the school! She’s living in the splendid house in Pilchester Square looking for a post!

She’s found a post! She’s private secretary to Mr. Simcox!

She’s left the splendid house in Pilchester Square! She’s living an independent life! She’s going to Mr. Simcox’s office, her office, every day, just like a man! She’s living on her own salary in a boarding house in Bayswater!

What jumps! One clutches, as at flying papers in a whirlwind, at a stable moment in which to pin her down and describe her as she jumps. One can’t. The thing’s too breathless. It’s a maelstrom. It’s an earthquake. It’s a deluge. It’s a boiling pot. It’s youth. What it must be to live it! One thing pouring on to another so that it’s impossible anywhere to pick hold of a bit that isn’t changing into something else even as it is examined. That’s youth all over. Always and all the time all change. What it must be to live it!

What it must be! Why, when youth comes bursting out of tutelage there’s not a stable thing beneath its feet nor above its head a sky that stays the same for two hours together! Every stride’s a stepping-stone that tilts and throws you; every dawn a sudden midnight even while it breaks, and every night a blinding brilliance when it’s darkest. New faces, new places, new dresses, new dishes; new foes, new friends; new tasks, new triumphs; never a pause, never a platform; every day a year and every year a day--not life on a firm round world but life in the heart of a whirling avalanche. How youth can live it! And all the time, all the time while poor, dear youth is hurtling through it, there’s age, instead of streaming sympathy like oil upon those boiling waters, standing in slippered safety, in buttoned dignity, in obese repose, bawling at tumbling youth, “Why can’t you settle down! Why can’t you settle down! Why do you behave like that? Why can’t you do as I do? Why can’t you be like your wise and sober Uncle Forty? Or like your good and earnest Auntie Fifty? Why can’t you behave like your pious grandmother? Why can’t you imitate your noble grandfather? Oh, grrrr-r, why can’t you, you impious, unnatural, ill-mannered, irresponsive, irresponsible exasperating young nuisance, you!” Is it any wonder poor youth bawls back, or feels and behaves like bawling back, “How to goodness can I behave like my infernal uncle or my maddening aunt when I’m whirling along head over heels in the middle of a roaring avalanche?”

Oh, poor youth, that all have lived but none remembers!

One clings, faut au mieux, to the intention to tell of her life only the things in her life that contributed to her record, as records are judged. There shall be enormous omissions. They shall be excused by vital insertions.

She shall be glimpsed, first, in the splendid house in Pilchester Square, in the desperate business that getting a place for a woman in a business house was when women were in business houses far more rare than are silk hats in the City in 1922. It was desperate. Uncle Pyke and Uncle Pyke’s friends were the only channel of opportunity; and Uncle Pyke and Uncle Pyke’s friends refused to be a channel of opportunity. They had never heard of such a thing and they desired to bathe in their soup and smack over their wine and not be troubled with such a thing.

Aunt Belle rallied them and baited them and told them they were “great big grumpy things”; and Aunt Belle, in her crowded drawing-room, loved talking about the search for work and did talk about it. “Has to earn her own living,” Aunt Belle would chatter, “and is going into business! Oh, yes, ever so many girls who have to earn their own living are going into business now. She’ll wear a nice tailormade coat and skirt and carry a little satchel and flick about on the tops of buses, in the City at nine and out again at six and a nice plain wholesome lunch with a glass of milk in a tea shop. Oh, it’s wonderful what girls who have to earn their own living do nowadays. Quite right, you know. Quite right, (for them). Come over here, Rosalie. Come over here, dear child, and tell Mrs. Roodle-Hoops what you are going to do. The dear child!”

But nothing done.

Just that glimpse and then comes Mr. Simcox.

Mr. Simcox was first met by Rosalie while walking with Aunt Belle and beautiful cousin Laetitia in the Cromwell Road. He came along carrying a letter in his hand with the obvious air of one who will forget to post it if he puts it in his pocket and probably will forget to do so in any case. He was as obviously “a man of about fifty-six” that curiously precise figure, neither a ten nor a five, always used for men who look as Mr. Simcox looked and always continued to look while Rosalie knew him, and probably always had looked. Men of “about fifty-six”--one never says “about thirty-six” or “about sixty-six”; it would be “about thirty-five” or “about seventy”--men of “about fifty-six” are almost certainly born at that age and with that appearance and they seem to continue in it to their graves.

Mr. Simcox was like that, and was short and had two little bunchy grey whiskers, and wore always a pepper and salt jacket suit, unbuttoned, the pockets of which always bulged and the skirts of which, containing the pockets, always swayed and flapped. When he talked he was always talking--if that is understood--and when he was busy he was always frantically busy and looking at the clock or at his watch as if it were going to explode at a certain rapidly approaching hour and he must at all costs be through with what he was doing before it did explode. He talked in very rapid jerks, always seeming to be about to come to rest and then instantaneously bounding off again, rather like a man bounding along stepping-stones, red-hot stepping-stones that each time burnt his feet and set him flying off again.

He had been in the Bombay house of a firm of indigo merchants and there had known Aunt Belle and Uncle Pyke. He had retired and settled in London and he now came very briskly up to Aunt Belle, to Rosalie and to beautiful Laetitia, greeting them and bursting into full stream of chatter while he was yet some distance away; and, having been introduced to Rosalie and snatched at her hand precisely as if doing so while shooting in midair between one red-hot stepping-stone and the next, whizzed presently to “I really came out to post a letter” and flapped the letter in the air as if it were a bothersome thing stuck to his fingers and refusing absolutely to be stuffed into a post-box.

“Why, there’s a pillar-box just there; you’ve just passed it,” cried Rosalie.

“Why, so there is!” exclaimed Mr. Simcox, jumping round to stare at the pillar-box as if it had stretched out an arm and given him a sudden punch in the back, and then spinning towards Rosalie and staring at her rather as if he suspected her of having put the pillar-box there while he was not looking; and while Mr. Simcox was so exclaiming and so doing Rosalie had said, “Do let me just post it for you. Do let me,” and had snapped the obstinate letter from his fingers, and posted it and was back again smiling at Mr. Simcox, whom she rather liked and who reminded her very much of a jack-in-the-box.

Indeed with his quick ways, his shortness, his bushy little grey whiskers and his pepper and salt suit with its flapping pockets, Mr. Simcox was very like one of those funny little jack-in-the-boxes they used to sell. He said to her, regarding her with very apparent pleasure and esteem, “Well, that’s very nice of you. That really is very nice of you. And it’s most wonderful. It is indeed. Do you know, I must have walked more than a mile looking for a letter-box and I daresay I should have walked another mile and then forgotten it and taken the letter home again.” He addressed Aunt Belle: “It’s a most astonishing thing, Mrs. Pyke Pounce, but I cannot post a letter. I positively cannot post a single letter. When I say single, I do not mean I can post no letter at all. No, no. Far from it. I mean I can post no letter singly, by itself, solus. My daily correspondence, my office batch, I take out in a bundle, perhaps in a table basket. That is simple. But a single letter--as you see, a clever young lady like this has to find a box for me or I might carry the thing for days together. Astonishing that, you know. Astonishing, annoying, and mind you, sometimes serious and embarrassing.”

“Why, you busy, busy person, you!” cried Aunt Belle with her customary air towards a man of shaking her finger at him. “You very busy person! Fancy a basket full of correspondence! Why what a heap you must have!”

Mr. Simcox said he had indeed a heap. “Sometimes I think more than I can manage.”

“Indeed,” agreed Aunt Belle, “you don’t seem to have much time to spare. Why, I haven’t seen you in my drawing-room for quite a month (“You busy little creature, you,” expressed without being stated). I expect you’re getting very rich and disagreeable.” (“You rich little rascal, you!”)

Mr. Simcox declared that as to that his business wasn’t one to get rich at. “In no sense. Oh, no, in no sense. It keeps me occupied. It gives me an interest. That’s all. No more than that.” As to Mrs. Pyke Pounce’s delightful drawing-room, most certainly he had been there less than a month ago and most certainly he would present himself again on the very next opportunity. To-morrow, was it? He would without fail present himself there tomorrow, “and I hope,” said Mr. Simcox, taking his leave, “I hope I may have the pleasure of seeing my postmistress there again.” He smiled very cordially at Rosalie and went flapping away up the street at the pace and with the air, not of one who had come out to post a letter and had posted it, but of one who had come out to post a letter, had dropped it, and was flying back to look for it.

“Oh, isn’t he an ugly little monster!” cried Aunt Belle, resuming the walk.

“But I think he’s nice,” said Rosalie. “What is his business, Aunt Belle?”

Aunt Belle hadn’t an idea. “He’s an agent,” said Aunt Belle, “but an agent for what I’m sure I don’t know. He’s a very mysterious, fussy, funny little person. We knew him in Bombay where he had a very good position, but he retired and what he does now I’m sure I can’t say. But he’s very busy. You heard him say how busy he is. Rosalie, he might know of something for you. We’ll ask him, dear child. The funny, ugly little monster! We’ll ask him. He might help.”

He did help. A very short while afterwards, Rosalie received the appointment of Private Secretary to Mr. Simcox; twenty-five shillings a week; one pound five shillings a week! Office hours ten to five! Saturdays ten to one! Holiday a fortnight a year! A man’s work! A man’s weekly salary! A man’s office hours! The ecstasy of it! The ecstasy!

The matter with Mr. Simcox was that, in India a man of affairs, in England he found himself a man of no affairs and a man who had “lost touch.” On a leave from the Bombay house of the indigo firm he had been prevailed upon by his mother and his maiden sister to remain at home and look after them and he had done it and gone on doing it, and they had died and he had never married, and he had now no relatives, and by this and by that (as he told Rosalie early in her installation) he had dropped out of friendships and, as he expressed it “lost touch.” He owned and occupied one of those enormous houses in Bayswater. It had been his mother’s and he lived on in it after her death and the death of his sister, alone with a housekeeper. The housekeeper resided in the vast catacombs of the basement of the enormous house; Mr. Simcox resided in the immense reception rooms, miles above, of the first floor; the three suites above him, scowling gloomily across a square at the twin mausoleums opposite, were unoccupied and un-visited; on the first floor Mr. Simcox had his office. The business done in this office, which Rosalie was now to assist, and why it was done, was in this wise and was thus explained to Rosalie.

Mr. Simcox, more than ever dropped out and more than ever having lost touch after the deaths of his sister and mother, found himself irked more than anything else by the absence of correspondence. He had been accustomed in India to a big receipt of letters--a big dhak, as he called it, using the Hindustani word--now he received no letters at all; and he told Rosalie that when you are in the habit of getting a regular daily post, its gradual falling off and then its complete cessation is one of the most melancholy things that can befall a man. A nice bunch of letters in the morning, he said, is like a cold bath to a young man, a stimulant and an appetiser; and a similar packet by the night delivery is an entertainment to look forward to from sunset till it arrives and the finest possible digestive upon which to go to bed. Mr. Simcox found himself cut off from both these necessities of a congenial life and it depressed him beyond conception. Dressing in the morning he would hear the postman come splendidly rat tatting along the square and would hold his breath for that glorious thunder to come echoing up from his own front door--and it never did. Only the sound of the footsteps came, hurrying past--always.

Set to his solitary dinner in the evening, again would come along that glorious, reverberating music, and again Mr. Simcox would hold his breath as it approached and again--! Oh, particularly in the winter, it was awful, Mr. Simcox told Rosalie. Awful; she wouldn’t believe how awful it was. In the winter, in the dark nights, there is, Mr. Simcox said, about the sound of the postman banging along the doors something that is the sheer essence of all the mystery, and all the poetry, and all the life, and all the comfort, and all the light and all the warmth in the world. Often on winter nights Mr. Simcox would get up quickly from the table (He couldn’t help it) and go tiptoe (Why tiptoe? He didn’t know. You had to. It was the mystery and the aching atmosphere of the thing) tiptoe across the room to the window, and draw an inch of the heavy curtain and peer out into the darkness and towards the music. There would be the little round gleam of the postman’s lantern, bobbing along as he hurried. And flick! it was gone into a doorway, and rat-tat, flick, and there it was again--coming! Flick, rat-tat! Flick, flick, rat-tat! Coming, coming! Growing larger, growing brighter, growing louder! Next door now. They always get it next door. Flick, rat-tat! What a crasher! You can feel it echo! Flick! Now then! Now then! How it gleams! He’s stopped! He’s looking at his letters! He’s coming in! He is--ah, he’s passed; he’s gone; it’s over; nothing... nothing for here.... Rat-tat! That’s next door. The party wall shakes. The lustres on the mantelpiece shake. Mr. Simcox’s hands shake. He sits down, pushes his plate away....

It is absurd; it is ridiculous, of course it is; but it was pathetic, it was moving, as it was received from Mr. Simcox by that young and most warm-hearted Rosalie. Her eyes positively were caused to blink as she listened. She had an exact vision of that funny little jack-in-the-box figure up from the table and tiptoeing across the enormous dining room in his little pepper and salt suit with the pockets swaying, not flapping, as he trod along, and opening that inch of the heavy curtain and pressing out his gaze through the black window pane, and watching the gleam and the flick and then the crash and the gleam again, and then holding his breath and hearing his heart go thump, and then dropping the curtain, and back again, with his hands shaking a little and hearing the lustres tinkle....

Yes, very moving to that Rosalie in her youth and warmth. She had actually to touch her nose (high up, between her eyes) with her handkerchief and she said, “Oh, Mr. Simcox.... Yes, and then what?”

“Then what? Ah! ‘Then what’ is this.” They were seated in Mr. Simcox’s great office on the ground floor. The office of a man of many affairs. A very large writing table furnished with every conceivable facility for writing, not only note papers and envelopes racked up in half a dozen sizes, but sealing waxes in several hues, labels, string, “In” basket, “Out” basket, “Pending Decision” basket, all sorts of pens, all sorts of pencils, wafers, clips, scales, letter weights, rulers--the table obviously of a man to whom correspondence was a devotional, an engrossing, an exact art, and an art practised on an expansive, an impressive, and a lordly scale. There were also in the office a very large plain table on which were spread newspapers, a basket containing clippings from newspapers, an immense blue chalk for marking newspapers and a very long, also a very short, pair of scissors for cutting out clippings from newspapers. A range of filing cabinets stood against one wall; a library of directories and catalogues occupied shelves against another wall.

“‘Then what’ is this,” said Mr. Simcox, indicating these impressive appointments of the room with a wave of his hand. “You ask me ‘then what?’ ‘Then what’ is all this. ‘Then what’ has grown now to be you. I’ll tell you.”

It was this--the oddest, most eccentric notion (not that Rosalie it thought so). Mr. Simcox, cut off from letters, had determined that he must get letters. He would get letters. If the postman would not come of himself (so to speak) then he must be forced to come. And Mr. Simcox set about forcing him to come by answering advertisements. Not employment advertisements; no; the advertisements to which Mr. Simcox re-plied were the advertisements that offered to send you something for nothing--that implored you to permit them to send you something for nothing. They are common objects of the periodical press. Every paper is stuffed with them. “Write for free samples.” “Catalogues.” “Trial packet sent post free on application.” “Write for our beautifully illustrated art brochure.” “Descriptive booklet by return.” “Write for full

## particulars.” “Free sample bottle sufficient for seven days’ trial.”

“Approval gladly. Postpaid.” “Plans and particulars of the sole agents.” “Superbly printed art volume on receipt of postcard.”

The advertisement columns of every paper are stuffed with them and soon the letter-box of Mr. Simcox was stuffed with them. The postman who never stopped at Mr. Simcox’s house now never missed Mr. Simcox’s house. He went on a lighter and a brisker man after having dealt with Mr. Simcox’s house. The agitation with which his approach was heard was now exchanged for a superb confidence as his approach was heard. The deliveries that for Mr. Simcox had never been deliveries were now, not deliveries, but avalanches. They roared into the letter-box of Mr. Simcox. They cascaded upon the floor of the hall of Mr. Simcox.

A mail thus composed does not perhaps sound interesting. Mr. Simcox, once he had got into the full swing of the thing, discovered it to be profoundly and exhaustively interesting. It possessed in the highest degree the two primary essentials of a really good mail,--surprise and variety. There would always be two or three fascinating little parcels, there would always be two or three handsome packets, there would always be two or three imposing looking letters. No common correspondence could possibly have had the number of attractively boxed gifts, the amount of handsomely printed literary and il-lustrated matter, and certainly not the unfailing persistency of flow, that constituted the correspondence of Mr. Simcox.

The mine once discovered proved to be a mine inexhaustible and containing lodes or galleries of new and unsuspected wealth. Mr. Simcox took in but two daily papers, and two penny weekly papers, and they might well have sufficed. But an appetite whetted and an eye opened they did not suffice. There thundered from the Bayswater free library a positive babel of cries from advertisers in the score of journals there displayed, howling for Mr. Simcox graciously to permit them to contribute their toll to his letter-box; and there were at the news agents periodicals catering for every specialised class of the community and falling over themselves to put before Mr. Simcox the full range of the mysteries, the luxuries and the necessities of every trade and profession and pursuit, from shipbuilding to cycling and from ironmongery to the ownership of castles, moors, steam yachts and salmon fisheries.

Mr. Simcox, entirely happy, one of the busiest men that might be found in the metropolis, struck out new lines. Hitherto he had received his correspondence interestedly and pleasurably but passively. He began to take it up actively and sharply. He began to write back, either graciously approving or very sharply criticising his samples, his specimens and his free trials; and the advertisers responded voluminously, either abjectly with regret and enclosing further samples for Mr. Simcox’s esteemed trial, or abjectly with delight and soliciting the very great favour of utilising Mr. Simcox’s esteemed letter for publicity purposes. This, however, Mr. Simcox, courteously but firmly, invariably refused to permit.

The engagement of Rosalie was a development of Mr. Simcox’s hobby as natural as the development of any other hobby from rabbit breeding to china collecting. The craze intensifies, the scope is enlarged. To have a secretary made Mr. Simcox’s mail and the work that produced his mail even more real than already it had become to him. Following up the personal touch that had been discovered by the criticism of samples, Mr. Simcox had opened up a line that produced the personal touch in most intimate degree: personal touch with schools and with insurance companies. He created for himself sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, wards. He endowed them, severally, with ages, with backwardness, with brilliancy, with robustness, with delicacy, with qualities that were immature and required development, with absence of qualities that were desirable and required implanting, with unfortunate tendency to qualities that were undesirable and needed repression and nipping in the bud. He placed these children, thus handicapped or endowed, before the principals of selected schools; he desired that terms and full

## particulars might be placed before him to assist him in the anxious task

of right selection. They were placed before him. “Your backward nephew Robin” (to take a single example) engaged the personal attention of preparatory schoolmasters from Devonshire to Cumberland and from Norfolk to Carnarvon. Similarly with insurance companies. Again dependents and friends were created, by the dozen, by Mr. Simcox. Male and female created he them, cumbered with all imaginable risks, and darkly brooding upon all manner of contingencies; and male and female, cumbered and perplexed, they were studied and advised upon by insurance companies earnest beyond measure to show Mr. Simcox what astounding and unparalleled benefits could be obtained for them.

At the time when Rosalie joined him, Mr. Simcox’s attention was in much greatest proportion devoted to this development of his pursuit. Under the instruction of a friend, long since dropped out and lost, who had held a considerable position in a leading assurance company, he had acquired a sound working knowledge of the principles and mysteries of insurance. The subject had greatly interested him. In the phrase he used to Rosalie he had “taken it up”; and in the phrase that so often sequels and rounds off a thing suddenly “taken up” he had suddenly “dropped it.” He now, by way of the new development of his correspondence, approached it again. It received him as a former habitation receives a returned native. Mr. Simcox (if the metaphor may be pursued) roamed all about the familiar rooms and corridors of the house of the principles and mysteries of insurance. His knowledge of its possibilities enabled him to develop an astonishing ingenuity in creating cases ripe and yearning for the benefits of provision against contingencies, and as he very easily was able to prove to Rosalie, and found immense delight in proving, he had under his finger, that is to say in his exquisitely arranged filing cabinets, also in his head, a range of insurance companies’ literature which enabled him to work out for any conceivable case the most suitable office or offices and the finest possible cover for his risks. “Different companies specialize,” said Mr. Simcox, “in different classes of risk. A man should no more walk into one of the leading offices just because it happens to be one of the leading offices and there take out his policy or policies than he should walk into and take for occupation the first vacant house he sees, merely because it is, as a house, a good house. It may be a most excellent house but it may not be in the least the house most suitable to his requirements.”

Rosalie nodded intelligently. “But how is a man to find out, Mr. Simcox?”

“Why, I suppose only by going round to every company and choosing the best, just as I make out and send around these cases of mine. But of course no one does that--the trouble for one thing, and ignorance for another, and inability to realise their real requirements and to state them clearly if they do realise them for a third. That’s what it is.”

Rosalie’s intelligent nodding had not ceased. She had a trick, when Mr. Simcox was explaining things to her, of maintaining, with eyes fixed widely upon him, a slow, affirmative movement of her head rather as though she were some engine, and her head the dial, absorbing power from a flow of energy. The dial never indicated repletion. Mr. Simcox delighted to talk to Rosalie, to watch that grave movement of her head, and to hear the short occasional “Why’s?” and comments that came like little spurts or quivers as of the engine in initial throbbings pulsing the power it stored.

She was absorbing power. The months were going on. The earlier initiation into Mr. Simcox’s business might have had a tinge of disappointment were it not that, whatever the nature of her work, manifestly work it was, paid for, with regular hours, with an office to attend, such as a man might do. The tinge of disappointment, if she had suffered it, would have stung out of the thought: Where, in this manufactured correspondence, in this pretence at a business which was in fact no business at all, where in all this was Lombard Street? Where the romance and mystery of finance? Where the touch with the power that was made in countinghouses and with the exercise of the power exerted from those countinghouses?

But it happened for Rosalie, first, that this thought could not come because she was too busy with the glorious novelty of being in an office and learning office ways; then, when the novelty had worn, that it could not come because a new and a real element arrived to nullify it. In the early days there was no realisation of sham because there was the real business, to herself, of learning business methods and the whole theory and practice of office routine. She could have had no better instructor than Mr. Simcox, she could have had no better training than the handling, the sorting and the filing of his curious and various correspondence. She had become an efficient and a singularly apt and keen office clerk when, more leisured because she had mastered her duties, she might first have had time for realisation that Lombard Street was not here nor all the romance and mystery with which she had invested the power of countinghouses within a thousand miles of this house of most elaborate pretence. And then, at once to prevent that realisation and to dissipate its cause, came Lombard Street to her in Mr. Simcox’s new absorption in (to her) the mysteries and the romance and the astounding possibilities of the business of insurance. How the mammoth companies, whose names soon were as household words to Rosalie, accumulated their enormous funds and invested them; how, while provisioning for to-day, they must calculate against liabilities falling due in a to-morrow generations ahead; how they would put their money into property the leases of which would fall in and the estate become marketable again perhaps a hundred years hence, when officers of the company yet unborn would be looking to the prudence of those now reigning to maintain the inflowing tide; how risks were calculated and vital statistics and chances and averages studied--all this, delightedly and delightfully narrated by Mr. Simcox (watching that gravely nodding head and those wide intelligent eyes) was sheer fascination to the mind that had found romance and mystery in “Lombard Street” as commonly romance and mystery are found in poetry and music.

Then one day she took a step towards applying the fascination that she found.

It was the day of the conversation that has been recorded. How, Rosalie had asked, was the seeker after insurance to find the policies best suited to his case? Rosalie had asked; and had been told--he must go round but he never does; he must know what there is to be had but he never does know; he must realise exactly what he really wants but he never does realise it; and if he does realise it he must be able to state it clearly but he never can state it clearly.

Mr. Simcox, detailing this, permitted himself an amused contempt. The public were ignoramuses, mere children; they knew nothing whatever about insurance.

Rosalie said in a voice consonant with the grave measure of her nods: “Of course, if it was a man, as you said, looking for a house, he’d go to an agent. A house agent would tell him of houses best suited to his needs that he could choose between. Well, there are insurance agents. You’ve told me about them.”

“Ah, but not the same thing, not the same thing,” corrected Mr. Simcox. “An insurance agent, the ordinary insurance agent, is agent for a

## particular company. He only knows what his own company can do and he

only wants his own company to do it. That’s no good to the kind of man in the position we’re speaking of. He wants some one who can tell him what all the companies will do for him. Some one who can hear his case, analyse it, put it before him in the right light and advise him the best way of placing it. That’s what he wants. Exactly the same as these letters I send out--as you and I send out, I should say. Why, I’ve had practical examples of it. There was a young fellow I met at your aunt’s house. There’ve been three or four cases of it for that matter but this happens to be some one you know--”

He proceeded to tell her of a visitor at Aunt Belle’s, a young man home on leave from the Indian army and recently married, with whom he had got into conversation on the subject of insurance and had most ably helped. The young man had a certain policy in view. Mr. Sim-cox had put an infinitely better before him. “If he had come to me before his marriage when he was first taking out a policy in his wife’s favour, I could have saved him and gained her hundreds, literally hundreds,” said Mr. Simcox. “He’d made a most awful mess of the business. As it was I helped him very considerably. He was very grateful, devilish grateful. He went straight to an agent of the office I recommended and did it.”

“There must be hundreds like him that would be grateful,” said Rosalie.

“Thousands,” said Mr. Simcox. “Tens of thousands. Every single soul who insures, you may say.”

“Who got the commission?” said Rosalie.

“The agent, of course,” said Mr. Simcox.

“Oh,” said Rosalie.

“Why?” said Mr. Simcox.

“Nothing,” said Rosalie. “Only ‘oh ‘.”

## CHAPTER V

There’s much virtue in an If, says Touchstone; and there’s much virtue in an “Oh”--a wise, a thoughtful, a speculative, a discerning “Oh” such as that “Oh” pronounced by Rosalie to Mr. Simcox’s information that agents, and not he, drew the commissions for the insurance policies which, out of his knowledge and experience, he had advised. There followed from that “Oh” its plain outcome: her suggestion to Mr. Simcox of why not make a business, a real business, of expert advice upon insurance, and (out of the make-believe intercourse with schools) a business, a real business, of expert advice upon schools? And there shall follow also from that “Oh” a sweeping use of the intention that has been mentioned to tell only of her life that which contributed to her life. We’ll fix her stage from first to last, then see her walk upon it.

This was her stage: Her suggestion was adopted. It has, astonishingly soon, astonishing success. Advice upon insurance, advice upon schools, commissions from each, are found wonderfully to work in together, each bringing clients to the other. Aunt Belle’s swarms of friends, their swarms of friends, the swarms of friends of those swarms of friends, and so on, snowball fashion, are the first nucleus of the thing. It succeeds. It grows. Real offices are taken. “Simcox’s.” Advertisements, clerks, banking-accounts. Appearance of Mr. Sturgiss, partner in Field and Company--“Field’s”--the bankers and agents. Field’s is a private bank. Its business is principally with persons resident in the East, soldiers, civil servants, tea planters, East India merchants. Field’s is in Lombard Street. (Lombard Street!) Later Field’s opens a West End office. Field’s is frequently asked to advise its clients and their wives on all manner of domestic matters,--schools for their children, holiday homes, homes for clients over on leave, insurance, investment, whatnot, a hundred things. Comes to this Sturgiss, partner in Field’s, an idea of great possibilities in this advisory business if developed as might be developed and run as might be run. Tremendously attracted by Rosalie as the person for the job. Makes her an offer. She declines it. Mr. Simcox’s death. Sturgiss comes along again. Ends in Rosalie going to Field’s. Lombard Street! Room of her own in the big offices. Glass

## partitioned. Huge mahogany table. Huge mahogany desk. Field’s open the

West End office, in Pall Mall. More convenient for wives of clients. Rosalie is moved there. Manager of her own side of the business. The war comes. Sturgiss goes out. Other important officers of the bank go out. Her importance increases very much in other sides of the bank’s business than her own. Press scents her out and writes her up. “The only woman banker.” “Brilliant woman financier.” Contributes articles to the reviews. Very much a leading woman of her day. Very much a most remarkable woman.

That’s her stage. Thus she walked upon it:

The beginning part--that tumult of youth, those dizzy jumps that we have seen her in--was frightfully exciting, frightfully absorbing. She was so tremendously absorbed, so terrifically intent, so tremendously eager, that the transition from the Sultana’s to Aunt Belle’s, and the start with Mr. Simcox, and the transition from Aunt Belle’s to independence in the boarding house, was done with scarcely a visit--and then a rather grudged and rather impatient visit--to the rectory home.

No, the absorption was too profound for much of that: indeed, for much of home in any form. Letters came from Rosalie’s mother three and four times a week. In the beginning, when fresh left school and at Aunt Belle’s, Rosalie always kissed the dear handwriting on the envelope, and kissed the dear signature before returning the letters to their envelopes; and she would sit up late at night writing enormously long and passionately devoted letters in reply. But she wasn’t going back; she wasn’t going down; no, not even for a week-end, “my own darling and beloved little mother,” until she had found an employment and was established on her own feet, “just like one of the boys.” Then she would come, oh, wouldn’t she just! She would have an annual holiday, “just as men have,” and she would come down to the dear, beloved old rectory and she would give her own sweet, adored little mother the most wonderful time she ever could imagine!

Rosalie would sit up late at night writing these most loving letters, pages and pages long; and her mother’s letters (which always arrived by the first post) she would carry about with her all day and read again before answering.

And yet....

The fond intention in thus carrying them on her person instead of bestowing them in her writing case was to read them a dozen times in the opportunities the day would afford. And yet... Somehow it was not done. The day of the receipt of the very first letter was generous of such opportunities and at each of them the letter was remembered... but not drawn forth. Rosalie did not attempt to analyse why not. Her repression, each time, of the suggestion that the letter should now be taken out and read again was not a deliberate repression. She merely had a negative impulse towards the action and accepted it; and so negligible was the transaction in her record of her thoughts, so mere a cypher in the petty cash of the day’s ledger, that in the evening when, gone up to bed, the letter was at last drawn out and kissed and read and answered, and then kissed and read again, no smallest feeling of remorse was suffered by her to reflect that the intended reading in the dozen opportunities of the day had not been done.

And yet... Was it, perhaps, this mere acceptance of a negative impulse, a cloud no bigger than the size of a man’s hand upon the horizon of her generous impulses? There is this to be admitted--that the letters, accumulating, began to bulk inconveniently in her writing case. What a lot dear mother wrote! Room might be made for them by removing or destroying the letters from friends who had left the Sultana’s with her, but about those letters there was a peculiar attraction; they were from other emancipated One Onlys who watched with admiration the progress in her wonderful adventure of brilliant, unconventional Rosalie, and it was nice thus to be watched. Or room for her mother’s letters might be made by removing or destroying letters that began to amass directly touching her desire for employment--from city friends of Uncle Pyke, from Mr. Simcox. But, no, unutterably precious those! Unutterably precious, too, of course, those accumulating bundles of letters from her dear mother; but precious on a different plane: they belonged to her heart; it was to her head, to the voice in her that cried “Live your life--your life--yours!” that these others belonged.

She was tingling to that voice one night, turning over the employment letters; and, tingling, put her mother’s letters from her case to her box.

Yes, upon the horizon of her generous impulses perhaps the tiniest possible cloud. And then perhaps enlarging. You see, she was so very full of her intentions, of her prospects. She had read somewhere that the perfect letter to one absent from home was a letter stuffed with home gossip,--who had been seen and who was doing what, and what had been had for dinner yesterday and whence obtained. But she did not subscribe to that view. She was from home and her mother’s letters were minutest record of the home life; but she began to skip those portions to read “afterwards.” One day the usual letter was there at breakfast and she put it away unopened so as to have “a really good, jolly read” of it “afterwards.” In a little after that she got the habit of always, and for the same reason (she told herself) keeping the letters till the evening. One day she gave the slightest possible twitch of her brows at seeing the very, very familiar handwriting. She had had a letter only the previous day and two running was not expected: more than that, this previous letter had slightly vexed her by its iteration of the longing to see her and by very many closely written lines of various little troubles. She was a little impatient at the idea of a further edition of it so soon. She forgot to open it that night. She remembered it when she was in bed; but she was in bed then... When, next day, she read the letter it was, again, an iteration of the longing to see her and, again, more, much more, of the little troubles: the residue was of the gossipy gossip that Rosalie already had formed the habit of skipping till “afterwards.” Altogether a vexatious letter.

After that, when the letters were frequent, it was frequent for Rosalie to greet the sight of them with just the swiftest, tiniest little contraction of her brows. Nothing at all really. Meaning virtually nothing and of itself absolutely nothing. Possessing a significance only by contrast, as a fine shade in silk or wool will not disclose a pronounced hue until contrasted with another. The contrast here, to give the thing significance, was between that swiftest, tiniest contraction of the brows at the sight of her mother’s letters and the eager spring to them, the quick snatching up, and the impulsive pressing to her lips when first those letters began to come. Likewise answering them, that had been an impulsive outpouring and brimming over, now was a very slightly laboured squeezing. The pen, before, had flooded love upon the page. Now the pen halted, paused, and had to think of expressions that would give pleasure.

The change did not happen at a blow. If it had, Rosalie would have noticed it. It slipped imperceptibly from stage to stage and she did not notice it.

## CHAPTER VI

There was a thing she said about men once (in the boarding house now) and often repeated. “They’re very fond of saying women are cats,” she once said. “Fools! It’s men that are the cat tribe: tame cats, tabby cats, wild cats, Cheshire cats, tomcats and stray cats! Aren’t they just? And look at them--tame cats are miserable creatures, tabby cats the sloppy creatures, wild cats ferocious creatures, Cheshire cats fool creatures, tomcats disgusting creatures, stray cats--on the whole the stray cats are the least objectionable, they are bearable: at the right time and for a short time.”

This characterisation of men as Rosalie, in sequent development of her attitude towards men, had come to regard them was delivered to the girl with whom (for cheapness) her room in the boarding house was shared. Rosalie went from Aunt Belle’s to this boarding house to assert and to achieve her greater independence. A man, Rosalie debated, would have gone into bachelor rooms; but young women did not go into bachelor rooms in those days and the singularity of Rosalie’s attitude towards life is rather well presented in the fact that she never set herself against conventions inhibitory of her sex merely because they were inhibitory of her sex. When the years brought those violent scenes and emotions of what has been called the suffragette campaign, Rosalie, who might have been expected to be a militant of the militants, took no part nor even interest in it whatever. She did not desire the privileges of men merely because they were the privileges of men; she desired a status which happened to be in the right of men and she went towards it without seeking to change the established order of things, just as, from one field desiring a flower in another field, she would have gone to fetch it without changing her dress.

A man, anxious for full independence, would have gone into bachelor rooms; but young women did not go into bachelor rooms. They achieved their independence perfectly well, and far more cheaply, by going into a boarding house. She therefore, very excitedly, went into a boarding house.

There was no difficulty about leaving Aunt Belle’s. Once Rosalie was established in business with Mr. Simcox, tied to business hours, and earning a weekly salary, she no longer occupied in Aunt Belle’s house the position of dependence which was in Aunt Belle’s house the first, and indeed the only, qualification for all who occupied her house. Aunt Belle’s guests had to be guests: wealthy guests who could be entertained from early morning tea (beautifully served) to bedtime and made graciously to admire; or if poor guests, and particularly poor relations, guests who could be even more impressed and were naturally much more enthusiastically delighted and profoundly admiring. Rosalie, in business, could not be entertained and did not sufficiently admire. She had to have a special early breakfast; she disappeared; she was not in to lunch or tea; she was not sufficiently impressed by what cook had prepared but had rather too much to say about what she had been doing, at dinner; and she excused herself away to early bed on the ground of fatigue or of having certain books to study. Rosalie, in business, was not a guest at all in Aunt Belle’s sense of the word: indeed there came an occasion--Rosalie twice in one week late for dinner--when Aunt Belle said awfully, “My house is not a hotel, Rosalie. I cannot have my nice house turned into a hotel.”

It was the nearest thing to an unkind word ever spoken by Aunt Belle to Rosalie, and it was so near that it brought Aunt Belle up to Rosalie’s bed that night--solicitude in a terrific dressing gown of crimson silk--to express the hope that Rosalie was not crying (she was not; she had been sound asleep) at anything Aunt Belle “might have said.” “But you see, dear child, there are the servants to consider, all that delicious soup and all that most tasty turbot au gratin to be kept warm for you, and there is your kind Uncle Pyke to consider; men do not like their meals to be...”

The boarding house, which Rosalie, with qualms as to its reception by Aunt Belle, had for some time been secretly meditating, came easily after that. The boarding house had moreover for Aunt Belle a double attraction. It not only removed Rosalie in her capacity of one threatening to turn Aunt Belle’s nice house into a hotel; it also restored Rosalie in her capacity of overwhelmed, grateful and admiring poor relation. Rosalie was now invited from the boarding house just as previously she had been invited from the Sultana’s; the table and the appointments of Aunt Belle’s house were now lavishly displayed in contrast to the display and the table endured by Rosalie at the boarding house; Aunt Belle was again supremely happy in Rosalie and abundantly kind; dinner each Saturday night was a standing invitation and frequently for these dinners Aunt Belle arranged “a little dinner party for you, dear child, just one or two really nice people that it is nice for you to meet and that you can tell your friends at the boarding house about, dear child.”

Aunt Belle helped Rosalie to choose the boarding house and saw that it was “nice.” Nice people went there and the proprietress, Miss Kentish, was nice. Miss Kentish had a grey, detachable fringe which became, and re-mained, semi-detached immediately after breakfast, and a mobile front tooth which came out surprisingly far when she talked and went in with a sharp click when she stopped. She had for newcomers a single conversational sentence--“My name is Kentish, though funnily enough we come from Sussex”--and, for all purposes, a single business principle, that of willingness “to come to an arrangement.” “I am afraid I cannot remedy your water not being hot at eight o’clock,” she would say to a boarder, “but I will gladly come to an arrangement with you. Ten minutes to eight or ten minutes past eight” (click). She would come to an arrangement on anything. She became very fond of Rosalie in course of time and once told her that though her duties never permitted her to attend church she had “come to an arrangement” with the vicar and felt that she had “come to an arrangement with Our Lord” (click). She came to an arrangement with Rosalie in the matter of tariff, receiving her and a Miss Salmon, who also sought arrangement, as “two friends as one.” This was two persons sharing a room at the tariff of a person and a half. Living was very cheap in those days. Rosalie, at the beginning, with Miss Salmon, paid 18/6 a week, and out of the twenty-five shillings paid her, at first, every Friday by Mr. Simcox there remained what seemed to Rosalie great wealth.

She set herself to save on it and her first purpose in thus saving was to accumulate money on which she could draw so as to be able to pay for a room private to herself. That would have taken some time. Her successive increases in her earnings, as Mr. Simcox’s hobby developed into a business, brought privacy, and in time what amounted to luxury, by much swifter process. Rosalie was a very long time at the boarding house. From being two friends as one she passed to a small remote room of her own, then to a larger and more accessible room, then to a bed-sitting-room, finally to a very delightful arrangement. There was on the second floor a fine roomy apartment having a dressing-room opening out of it. Rosalie, by then in much favour with Miss Kentish, not only secured the suite but “came to an arrangement” with Miss Kentish by which the furniture and fittings were removed from the rooms and Rosalie permitted to fit, decorate and furnish them herself. Rosalie never knew happier hours than in the furnishing of those two rooms into a little kingdom of her own: she never in all her life knew days as happy as the days there spent.

But at the beginning, two friends as one with Miss Salmon and first contact with life from the angle presented by some twenty various individuals met at meals and in the public rooms. Miss Salmon was a pale, fussy creature with pince-nez in some mysterious way set so far from her eyes that she always appeared to be running after them as if to keep them balanced. Whenever anything of which she did not approve was being said to Miss Salmon or was being done before Miss Salmon, she maintained throughout it, moving about in pursuit of her pince-nez, a rather loud, constant, tuneless humming. When her moment came she would always begin “Well, now” and then swallow forcibly as though the swallowing gave her pain. “Well, now” (gulp). This introduction was always precedent to speech by Miss Salmon, whether after humming or not. Rosalie frequently went to Sunday church service with her and there was an occasion in the Litany on which Miss Salmon, who either had been wandering or sleeping, suddenly came to herself at the correct moment and said: “Well, now”--(gulp)--“We beseech thee to hear us, O Lord.”

Miss Salmon was employed as a daily nursery governess by a family resident across the park who, not hav-ing room for her, had “come to an arrangement” with Miss Kentish for her accommodation at the boarding house; and with her fussiness, her nose pursuit, her humming and her general ineptitude of habit and of thought, she was as it were a fated companion for Rosalie; and it was the case that all the other inmates of the boarding house were, in regard to Rosalie, equally and in the same sense fated. Miss Salmon and they were fated, or fatal, to Rosalie, in the sense that it would have been well then for Rosalie, as always well for any developing young thing, to have been among companions who drew upon her sympathies and called for her consideration. The contrary was here presented to her. She was ripe to be intolerant for she was very full of purpose and purpose is a motive power of much impatience. Miss Salmon, who would have made a saint impatient, made Rosalie, who was not a saint, very impatient and the virus of this impatience was that very soon Rosalie made no attempt to conceal it. It seemed to Rosalie that whenever she projected any plan to Miss Salmon--as to “do” a pit at a theatre--or any theory--as that men and not women were manifestly the cat tribe--it seemed to her that Miss Salmon always hummed with the maddening humming denotive of disapproval, and always prefaced stupendously stubborn idiocy with the “Well, now” and the gulp that alone were sufficient to drive enthusiasm crazy.

“Mmmmm--mm. Mmm--mmmm--mm--mm,” would go Miss Salmon, following her pince-nez up and down the little bedroom. And then, the pince-nez poised, “Well, now” (gulp).

And Rosalie came to cry, “Oh, never mind. Never mind, for goodness’ sake. I know exactly what you’re going to say so what is the good of saying it?” Miss Salmon nevertheless would say it, in full measure, pressed down at intervals in solid lumps with reiterated “Well, now” (gulp). And then Rosalie would hum to show she was not listening and thus in time to the position that Rosalie, beyond the ordinary changes of everyday conversation, took not the slightest notice of Miss Salmon but busied herself in their room, or came into it or went out of it, precisely as if Miss Salmon, who with her gulps, her fussiness and her balancing was very much there, was in fact not there at all. When Rosalie for the weekly dinner at Aunt Belle’s used to dress in the evening frock of Laetitia’s given her for the purpose by Aunt Belle, she used, at first, to say to Miss Salmon, “There, how do I look, Gertrude? Can you see that mend in the lace?”

“Well, now--” (gulp).

Very soon she was dressing (at the common dressing table) with no more regard for Miss Salmon or for the continuous humming of Miss Salmon (signification of Miss Salmon’s disapproval of the monopolisation of the dressing table) than if Miss Salmon had been an automaton wound up to balance a pince-nez around the room, to hum, and at intervals to gulp.

This was a small thing, but it was an important small thing. Rosalie was entirely insensible to the opinions and the existence of Miss Salmon, and it followed that she became entirely insensible to the feelings of Miss Salmon. To begin by ignoring a person with whom you are in daily contact is certainly to end by not caring at all what happens to that person. It was the misfortune of Miss Salmon to suffer periodically and acutely from biliousness (which she called neuralgia). In an attack, she took instantly to her bed and lay there flat on her back, absurdly and unnecessarily poising her pince-nez, and looking, unquestionably, very unpleasant. Rosalie,--who believed that Miss Salmon on these occasions had overeaten herself, the attacks invariably coinciding with pork in winter and with a fruit trifle known in the boarding house as “Kentish Delight” in the summer, of both of which Miss Salmon was avowedly fond, was at first warmly sympathetic and attentive on their occurrence, anointing the fevered brows with eau-de-Cologne, nipping the unnecessary pince-nez off the pallid nose, darkening the room, and stealing about on tiptoe. In time her attitude came to be expressed by her reception of the sight of Miss Salmon prone, stricken, yellow, pince-nez, poising. “What, again?”

“Well, now----” (Gulp).

But Rosalie would be gone.

And it came to be the same with all the other fellow inmates of the boarding house, alike the men and the women. Rosalie, in a colloquialism of to-day not then coined, “had no use for them.” There was in none of them anything that aroused her esteem; there was in each of them, in degree greater or less, much that provoked her scorn. The result was as resulted from Miss Salmon--she did not bother about them; and not bothering about them she suffered an inhibition of her sympathies. To repeat the thing said, her environment here was, as it were, fated or fatal. In her eagerness for her career, her generous emotions were likely to be laid aside and to wither; and the environment of the boarding house in no way drew upon her sympathies.

This was not good for Rosalie.

Moreover, the community of the boarding house served Rosalie ill on another point. She came there with all those grotesque ideas of her childhood on the respective positions of men and women precipitated through her older years to the perception given to Keggo: women were this, women were that; in their commonest characteristics they contrasted very badly with men; men did things better than women; they had by far the better lot in life than women; unquestionably men were the creatures; of course--off-handedly--they were beasts. She came to the boarding house with these ideas and the boarding house presented these ideas to her in living fact and assured her in her ideas. She came there very susceptible to the qualities she believed to be rooted with their sex in men and women and she saw those qualities there at once. The boarding house might have been all her ideas of women and of men taken away by an artist and put into an exact picture. It was her words to Keggo in terms of actual life. Its population, little varying, was always round about twenty; the proportion in sex always in the region of fifteen women to five men. The figures were always constant and the characters, when they changed, seemed always to Rosalie to be constant; the names changed, the personalities did not change. Even the faces did not change: there are certain types of faces that either are produced by permanent residence in boarding houses or that go instinctively to boarding houses for their permanent residence. There is a boarding-house mould. There would always be two husbands with wives and three men without wives. The men were never spoken to by any of the women but with a certain archness which Rosalie detested; and they never spoke to the women but with a certain boisterousness, a kind of rubbing together of the hands and a “Ha! What miserable weather, Mrs. Keeley. How does it suit you? Ha!” which Rosalie equally detested. It was as though the women, leading boarding-house lives, knew that the men (who were never in to lunch and sometimes absent from dinner) did not lead boarding-house lives but secret, dashing and mysterious lives; and as though the men knew that they lived secret, dashing and mysterious lives but condescended to the women who lived only boarding-house lives; and the archness on the one side and the boisterousness on the other implied tribute and worthiness of tribute. This implication Rosalie also detested.

Men--as she now saw men and women--she dismissed; generally as “of course they’re beasts,” severally and in the groups to which they belonged, as cats--of the cat tribe--tame cats, wild cats, Cheshire cats, tomcats and stray cats. But she dismissed them. That was her attitude, as it developed, towards men. They had been, in her regard, owners of the earth, possessing and having dominion over the round world and all that therein is, as a stage magician owns and dominates his stage; they had next been wonderful things but apt to be troublesome and braggart things whose braggadocio caused you to blink and have a funny feeling; they had then been sinister and frightening things that caused poor Anna to say it was hard for women; they became, at last, creatures that had the best of life, that is to say the better time in life, not because they merited it, but because it was theirs by tradition and they stepped into it, or were put into it, as naturally as a man child is put into trousers; and they had, when all was reckoned up, the better qualities--largeness, tolerance, directness, explosiveness (as opposed to smouldering-ness)--not, Rosalie thought, because they were males, but because they had the position that males have, just as by the habit of command is given to small boys in the Navy and very young men in the Army the air and the poise of command.

Yes, certainly men were, as they had always been, the creatures; but the eyes that formerly saw them as magicians, as by a savage is seen only the mystery of the moving hands, the tick, and the strike of a clock, now looked inside the case and saw the works. No mystery. No exclusiveness of natural power. Nothing abnormal. Men, on their estimable qualities and position, were what they were merely because, as the works of a watch, thus and thus the wheels were made to go round. Easy. Nothing in it. On the contrary. On the contrary, men were the more despicable in that, dowered as by tradition they were dowered, they yet were--what they were! The eyes that had been caused to blink by Robert blowing smoke through his nose and by Harold pulling up his collar and speaking with a “haw!” sound, blinked from a contempt yet more profound (because now known for contempt) at the exhibition, seen all about her, of men’s unlovely side. And she dismissed them. They did not attract her in the smallest degree. All that they had in them to esteem, whether of qualities or of position, they had--here was the parallel--in common with drones in a hive. They had the best of everything; they were blundering, blustering, noisy, careless, buccaneering owners of the world, and to her--as all the roystering swarm to any individual worker bee--to her, negligible. She was a worker bee, busy, purposeful.

There is a special function belonging to drones in a hive. That special function of men in regard to women was repellant to Rosalie. All that pertained to it was repulsive to her. She loathed to think of men in that capacity and she loathed to see women ensnared in that regard by men. Beautiful cousin Laetitia and the “good match” that obviously had been found for her: she detested seeing those two together: it made her feel sick.

Men! By this and by that in passage of time she was in contact with a good number and a good variety of men. There was the frequently changing male contribution to the boarding-house community; there were clients met in the development of her work at Simcox’s; there were the men of the circle of Uncle Pyke Pounce; there were the men of the circle of cousin Laetitia, brought to the little Saturday-dinner parties. A very fair average, a rather wider than the normal average of contact with men; and she dismissed them. They had not any attraction for her at all. If, rarely, she met one whose superficial points were superficially attractive, his contribution to her attitude to men was to make her blink (inwardly) the more, albeit on a different note. That one so exceptionally dowered should find pleasure in, for instance, dalliance of sex! Contemptible! Oh, sickening and contemptible! One Harry Occleve, of Laetitia’s circle, so obviously “the good match,” was outstandingly such a case. It was thought upon him, scornful and disgusted thought, that made her, walking back from one of the Saturday-evening parties--he was always there--arrange her experiences with men in that analogy between men and cats which, as related, had been delivered to Miss Salmon.

Like a tame cat! She never had met a man she despised so much. You’d think a man like that couldn’t help but be above such things as Cousin Laetitia and Aunt Belle made of him. “Occleve.” The very name that he owned had a nice sound; and he was brilliantly clever and looked brilliantly clever. He was a barrister and Aunt Belle, who was forever talking about him, had said that evening, just before his arrival, that some famous counsel had declared of him that he was unquestionably the most brilliant of the young men of the day at the Bar. So he was talented, had a great future before him, had a strong, most taking presence, a commanding air, a voice of uncommon charm--and was in bonds to Laetitia! Looked sickly at her! Mouthed fatuous nothings with her! Was obviously marked down to be that “good match” that Laetitia was to make, and was content, was eager, to be the tame cat of her languishing glances and of Aunt Belle’s excessive gushings! Was to be seen in a future not distant mated with Laetitia and sharing with her an atmosphere of milk and silk and babies and kisses! Tame cat! What an end to which to bring such qualities! What a desecration of such qualities to set them to win such an end! Tame cat!

But they all were cats of one kind or another. Yes, men are of the cat tribe! Tabby cats--the soft, fattish kind, without any manlike qualities, that seemed to be by far the greater proportion of all the men one saw about in buses and in the streets and met in business; tabby cats--sloppy, old-womanish creatures. Cheshire cats--the kind that grinned out of vacuous minds and that never could speak to a woman without grinning; the unattached men at the boarding house invariably were of the Cheshire-cat cats. Tomcats--the beastly ones with lecherous eyes that looked at you. “Of course they’re beasts.” It had been a large experience of the tomcat cats that had made her add that final summary of men to Keggo. The Bashibazook, once or twice encountered in her last terms at the Sultana’s, though never spoken with, had looked at her in a horrible way, not understood, but felt to be frightening and horrible; Mr. Ponders, on a dreadful occasion after handing over the medicine for Miss Keggs, had horribly said, “Well, now, wouldn’t a kiss be nice? I think a nice kiss would be very nice.” She had managed to get away without being touched; the nausea in her eyes perhaps had frightened him. It was nausea she felt, not fear, a horrible physical sickness; and finally to round off the “of course they’re beasts” of men as then experienced and now to fill up the schedule of tomcat cats the friends of Uncle Pyke Pounce’s circle and Uncle Pyke Pounce himself and the men like the men of his circle--tomcats something past their prime as lechers (but at a hint only more lecherous for that) but in the full prime of their beastliness as guzzlers, who with guzzle eyes eyed their food. She had come across a word in Carlyle’s “French Revolution” that instantly brought Uncle Pyke Pounce and his friends to her mind and that always thereafter she applied to the elderly tomcat encountered or passed in the street--“atrabilious.” Atrabilious! The very word! She looked it up in the dictionary, was disappointed to find it did not mean exactly what she thought it meant, but gave it her own meaning, and applied it to them. It sounded like them. They had small beady eyes, set in yellow; no apparent eyelids either above or below, just an unblinking eye set in a puffy face like a currant in a slab of cold pudding that gloated or glared at everything and everybody as if it was a thing to be devoured; guzzlers who gloated upon their food and wallowed in their soup, always with little streaks of red veins and blue veins in their faces. Atrabilious! Tomcats!

Wild cats--the roamers, the untamed ones, the ones with cruel and with wicked faces that made you not sick, but frightened; mostly they were dressed in rough clothes, men hanging about the streets who patently were thieves or worse, who looked at you and at once looked all around as if to see if any were about that might protect you; but often dressed in gentle dress and then with the cruel and wicked look more cruel and more wicked, to make your shudder to think of a woman having to belong to that.

Stray cats--on the whole the only really bearable ones; the lonely ones that seemed to have lost something or to be lost, that seemed to need looking after, that made you have a funny tender feeling towards them, a wanting as it were to pick them up and carry them home and be sharp with them because they couldn’t take care of themselves, and to be kind to them also because they couldn’t take care of themselves; yes, the only bearable ones: Mr. Simcox was precisely one.

All cats, of the cat tribe. There wasn’t one you couldn’t place. There wasn’t one, save dear little Mr. Simcox and the stray cat ones you sometimes saw, that was not in some trait contemptible. The only thing to be said for them was that it was their nature. They were created like that. You just shrugged your shoulders at them and let them go at that, negligible entities. Active disgust was only felt of them when one of their traits was manifested directly towards you; or, much more, when the sight was given of such a one as this Harry Occleve making such an exhibition of himself and enjoying it, delighting in it, asking nothing better than to be philandering with Laetitia, or escorting Laetitia, or gazing at Laetitia. That did make you angry enough with a man to hate a man. It was like seeing a good book--as it might be “Lombard Street”--used to prop a table leg; or a jolly dog--as the dearest Scotch terrier once brought to the boarding house--led for a walk on a leash by an old maiden mistress and wearing a lapdog’s flannel coat with ribbon bows at the corner. Her aversion to Harry Occleve was such that, in their rare passages together, she was almost openly rude to him. It seemed there was even no physical quality he had but he used it to abase himself or to make an exhibition of himself. He had noticeably long, strong-looking arms, but the sickening thing to see him once using those arms to hold silk for Laetitia while she wound it! He had a striking face that she named, from a line in Browning, a “marching” face--“one who never turned his back but marched breast forward”--but to see that face bent fatuously towards Laetitia! There radiated from the corners of his eyes towards his temples those little lines that sailors often have, “horizon tracks,” she called them; but to see them deeply marked while he mouthed earnest nothings with Laetitia! There was an odd, nice smell about him, of peat, of tobacco, of soap, of heather with the wind across it, of things like that most agreeably mixed, and actually she had heard Laetitia say to him in the babyish way she spoke to him, “You smoke too much. You do.” And he, like a moon calf: “Oh, you’re not going to ask me to give up smoking, are you?” And she with a trailing eye and hint of a blush, “Perhaps I shall--some day.” And he--a sigh! Positively a love-sick sigh straight out of a novel! Ah, positively she could detest the man! She came to discover it as an odd thing that, while commonly she was entirely indifferent to men, always after a Saturday meeting with Laetitia’s Harry she had for quite a day or two an active detestation of them.

But it was the women at the boarding house--to instance the boarding house--the fifteen women, the immense, straggling army of women as they looked to be, when they came trooping in to dinner or went trailing out again, that had Rosalie’s sharpest observation and that best pointed her youthful estimates. Unlike men who had fallen woefully from her childhood estimate of them, the women maintained and intensified her early estimate of women. The women in the boarding house showed Rosalie what women come to. A few were emphatically old; the rest, with the single exception of Miss Salmon, were emphatically not old; on the other hand they were emphatically not young. They were at pains to let you see they were not old and the pains they were at rather dreadfully (to Rosalie) emphasised the fact that they were not young. The thing about them, the warning, the proof that they exhibited of all Rosalie’s ideas about the inferiority of women, was that they were, in her phrase, derelicts--not wanted; abandoned; homeless; or they would not be here. Yes, derelict; and what was worse, derelict not in the sense of desuetude of powers or of powers outworn, but with the suggestion of never having had any powers, of having been always the mere vessels of another’s powers--some man’s; and now, with that power withdrawn--the man, whether father, brother, lover or husband, gone--derelict as a ship, abandoned of crew, rudderless and dismasted, is derelict; as an obscure habitation, cold of hearth, crazy of walls, abandoned to decay, is derelict. She summed them all up as having arrived at what they were precisely because in their earlier years they had been what in her childhood she had supposed women to be: inferior creatures at the disposal and for the benefit and service of men. What a warning never to be that! There they were--manless. And therefore derelict. And because derelict for such a reason, therefore testimony to a social condition that was abominable, and because seen to be abominable never, never herself should enfold. Never! Manless. Husbandless. There they were, the straggling mob of them,--deserted by husbands, semi-detached from husbands, relict of husbands fallen out with a stitch in the side in the race for husbands. Urh!

She was very young, Rosalie.

“Despised and rejected of men,” she said to Miss Salmon, holding forth in their bedroom on her subject. “That’s what I call them. Despised and rejected of men. Oh, don’t hum louder than ever. It’s not irreverent to say that. It describes a condition, that’s all, and I’m using it because it describes this condition, their condition, exactly. It does. You can hum; but it does. They’ve never done anything, they’ve never meant to do anything, they’ve never tried to do anything except hang round after some man. That’s all. They’ve either caught him and now lost him; or they’ve missed him and now go on missing him. That’s their lives. That’s nearly any woman’s life. It’s not going to be mine. If anything were wanted to make the whole idea of marriage and all that repulsive to me--and nothing is wanted--that would. Despised and rejected of men! I used to think and to say I intended to be like a man and to do a man’s work and have a man’s share. I tell you that even getting so close to a man as that--I mean as close as intentional emulation of him--even getting as close as that makes me feel sick now. It’s my own life I’m going to have, my own place, my own share; not modelled on any one else’s. If it were conceivable that I ever met a man I cared tuppence about--but it isn’t conceivable; that’s a quality that’s been left clean out of me, thank goodness--but if it were conceivable, what I’d offer would be just to share; to go on living my own way and he his--Oh, your humming! I mean after marriage, of course; I think this free-love business they talk about is even more detestable than the lawful kind--just animalism. That’s all I’d do. Me my life; he his life; meeting, as equals, when it was convenient to meet. I’d like to bring all these poets and people who write about love into our dining-room to see those people. That’d teach them!

Man’s love is of his life a thing apart; ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.

What an existence!”

“Well, now--” (gulp).

## CHAPTER VII

“You have pretended to dislike and to despise men, but it was a pretence to deceive me and you are a liar.”

This was the astounding opening of an astounding letter, pages and pages, to Rosalie from Miss Salmon. Pages and pages, having the appearance, each one, of a battlefield or of a riot: a welter of thick, black underscores strewn about like coffins or like corpses, and a bristling pin-cushionful (black pins) of notes of exclamation leaping about like war-dancing Zulus or staggering about like drunken or like wounded men. A welter you had to pick your way through with epithets rushing against you at every step like units of a surging mob hounding and charging against an unfortunate pedestrian caught in the trouble.

Miss Salmon had two months before introduced “a gentleman friend” to the boarding house. He was a clerk in some big business firm. His name was Upsmith and he bore upon a fattish face a troubled, beseeching look, rather as though something internal and not to be mentioned was severely incommoding him and might at any moment become acute. Miss Salmon called him Boo, which Rosalie considered grotesque but not unsuitable, and it was communicated to the boarding house that the twain were at a mysterious point of affinity called, not an engagement, but an understanding.

Rosalie had by this time taken the second step in her upward progression of comfort in the boarding house. She had moved into a separate room, leaving Miss Salmon to become half of another two friends as one, and she and Miss Salmon therefore saw much less of each other. But Rosalie still sat at the same table as Miss Salmon at dinner and there Mr. Upsmith joined them.

The thing may be hurried along to its astounding conclusion in the astounding letter. It was not in itself an event of any sort of moment to Rosalie. She was in no way outraged by being called a liar. There is no hurt at all in being called a liar when you know you are not a liar. The accusation has sting only if you are a liar; and indeed it is comforting evidence of some inner self within us that only when we have ourselves debased that inner self become we open to wounds from without. That citadel is never taken by storm; only by treachery. No, the significance of the astounding letter reposed in the fact that her reception of it opened to Rosalie a glimpse of a quality rising beneath her to carry her forward as a wave beneath a swimmer. It has been perceived in her but Rosalie had not perceived it.

A great triumph and a great happiness swelled within Miss Salmon with the arrival of Mr. Upsmith and with the circulation about the boarding house that there was an understanding between herself and Mr. Upsmith. Her humming took on a loud, defiant quality, as of triumph; she pursued her pince-nez with a certain eagerness, as of confidence of balance and certitude of capture. Her note and her air seemed to say that she was Boo’s and Boo hers and she gloried in it with that exalted and yet something fearful glory that is to be seen, pathetically, on the faces of very plain young women, or of distinctly ageing young women, who have got a Boo but for whom the Boos of this world are elusive to capture and slippery to hold. The look is to be seen a dozen times on any Sunday afternoon when the young couples are out.

At dinner time Miss Salmon would talk much to Boo in whispers and then would look up and hum across at Rosalie in triumph, as of one that knew things that Rosalie could not know and that had a thing that Rosalie did not possess. Mr. Upsmith looked also much at Rosalie, in no triumph, but in an apparent great excess of his unfortunate complaint. He stared, troubled and beseeching, at her at meals, and he stared, troubled and beseeching, at her when he encountered her away from meals. The longer he sojourned in the boarding house the more troubled and beseeching, when Rosalie happened to notice him, did his fattish countenance appear to become. That was all. There scarcely ever was exchanged between them even the courtesies customary between dwellers beneath the same roof; they never, that Rosalie could remember, were a minute alone together and yet on a day in an August, Miss Salmon a week away on a month at the seaside with the family to which she was nursery governess, Rosalie was being told in the violent opening sentence of one letter that she had pretended to despise and dislike men but had only done it to deceive Miss Salmon and was a liar; and in the impassioned sentences of another which had been enclosed and had fallen and to which bewildered she stooped and then read, that the heart of Boo was at her feet (“your proud, sweet little feet that I would kiss in my adorance”) that he had adored her ever since he had first set eyes on her, that he treasured “like pearls before swine” every encouragement she had given him from her divine eyes and from her proud little lips, that he had had no sleep for a fortnight and felt he would go mad unless he wrote these few lines (nine pages), that he earned “good money,” and that he was, in conclusion, to which Rosalie amazedly skipped, “ever and ever and imperishably always her imperishably adoring Boo.”

Two days previously Rosalie had received, but not read, another slightly mysterious letter. It had been in her receptacle in the letter rack in the hall, addressed to her in an unfamiliar writing and deposited by hand, not through the post. It had begun “Dear Miss Salmon, re our friendship I have to inform you--” Rosalie had turned to the end, “B. Upsmith.” She had replaced it in its envelope, written upon the envelope, “This is evidently for you, but addressed to me, as you see--R.” and had placed it in another stamped wrapper to be forwarded by Miss Kentish. She had only thought of it as in funny style for a love letter, proper no doubt to the niceties of an “understanding.” And what had happened was that the vile, egregious, and infamous Boo, writing to break off one understanding and establish another, had placed them in the wrong envelopes. The outpourings of his bursting heart to Rosalie had been received by Miss Salmon; the information “re our friendship” had gone to Rosalie.

Of itself, as has been said, the whole incident was nothing at all in the life of Rosalie. It came with the crash, but only startling and quite harmless crash, of an unexpected clap of thunder, and it passed as completely and as passively, doing no damage, leaving no mark. Miss Salmon never returned to the boarding house; the vile, egregious and infamous Boo haply incisively informed by Miss Salmon of what he had done, incontinently, and without speech to Rosalie, fled from the boarding house. They were gone, they were nothing to Rosalie; the correspondence was destroyed, it was nothing to Rosalie.

But the significance of the matter was here. There was in Miss Salmon’s letter to Rosalie one paragraph that Rosalie read a second time. She had received the letter when coming in just before dinner. Not at all injured nor in any way discommoded by the hurtling epithets, the terrific underscores intended to be as bludgeons, or the leaping exclamatory notes set there for stabs, she had put the thing away in a drawer and gone down to her meal. The passage alluded to came more than once into her mind. When she was about to get into bed that night she destroyed the letter, first reading that paragraph, and only that, again. Sole in the violent welter of those sheets it had no underscores nor any exclamations. It was added as a postscript. It said:

“Well, now; Boo and I met the first time in a crowd watching a horse that had fallen down. It kicked and I stepped back quickly and trod on his foot. It made him put his hands on my arms and I looked around to apologise and there was his dear face smiling at me, although in great pain, for I had trodden on a corn he has; and I knew at once it was the face I had looked for and longed for all my life and had found at last; and I loved him from the first and we went out of the crowd and talked. Well, now; I clung to him in all our happy, happy months together, in a way you can never understand, because I loved him, and because I am not the sort that men like because I am only plain, and I knew that if ever he left me I could never get another. Well, now; you have taken him away from me. You could get dozens and dozens of men to love you, but you have taken mine, and I never, never can get another.”

The thoughts of Rosalie, not sequent, but going about and amounting thusly, were thus: “That is very pathetic. That is horribly sad and pathetic. Coming at the end like that and without any strokes and flourishes, it is as if she was exhausted of her hate and rage and just put out an utterly tired hand and set this here like a sigh. That’s pathetic, the mere look of it and that thought of it. And then what she says. The dreadfully simple naivete of the beginning of it. Staring at a fallen horse in the street. It’s just where they would be, both of them. They’d stand there for hours and just stare and stare. And then she steps back on his foot and there’s ‘his dear face’ smiling at her; ah, it’s pathetic, it’s poignant! I can see it absolutely. Yes, I can. As if I were in the crowd around the horse, watching them. There they are, the horse between us, and all the doltish, staring faces round about; and their two dull and stupid faces; and as their eyes meet that sudden look upon their foolish faces, as of irradiation out of heaven, that would make a clown’s face beautiful and cause the hardest heart to twist. But it doesn’t cause mine to twist. That’s the odd thing. I remember perfectly when a thing like that would have given me a little blinky kind of feeling. I’ve always been awfully quick to notice things like that. I’ve often seen them. Quite recently, so little, I believe, as a year ago, things like that, things like this, would have moved me a lot. They somehow do not now. That frightful ending of hers: ‘You could get dozens and dozens of men to love you, but you have taken mine and I can never, never get another.’ That is most terribly pathetic. I think that is the most poignant thing I have ever heard. Well, I can realise its utter pathos; I can realise it but I cannot feel it. It does not move me. ‘And I never, never can get another.’ It’s frightful. I could cry. But I do not a bit want to cry. I must have somehow changed. I am not a bit sorry if I have changed. I would be sorry to go back and be as, if I have changed, I must have been--sentimental. I have changed. I believe I can look back and see it. About the time I left the Sultana’s, mother’s letters, and keeping them and answering them, began to be--yes they did begin to be a little, tiny bit of a nuisance to me. Yes, it was beginning then, this. And I expect earlier, if I worked it out. There’s nothing in it to regret. It’s just a growing out of a thing. It’s not, when I see a thing that’s pathetic, that I’ve grown blunt or blind and can’t see it for pathetic. It’s just--I know what it is--it’s just that it doesn’t appeal to me in the same way. It’s like seeing a dish of most tempting food in front of you, not that I ever remember my mouth, as they say, watering at anything; but say strawberries and cream--I’m fond of strawberries and cream--it’s like seeing a dish of strawberries and cream in front of you, and knowing it’s good and knowing it’s delicious, and knowing you’re awfully fond of it--and just not being hungry; turning away and leaving it there, not because it’s not everything that it ought to be, but just because--you don’t want it. I should say that’s how it is with me about these--these pathetic things. I know they’re pathetic. I don’t want them.”

That is how it was, how it had become, with Rosalie. That was just her first recognition of it, as the swimmer, intent on his own making of his progression, recognises not, till he has been borne some distance by it, the current that also is carrying him along.

Visits home to the Rectory were further manifestations to her of this arising symptom.

There were appeals that should have arisen to her out of her home; and they did arise; and she recognised them; but they did not appeal to her--not in the old way. She went home very rarely for occasional week-ends, always for her annual holidays, always for Christmas; and the discovery she made was that she liked her home very much better when she was away from it than when she was in it. When a visit was in prospect she desired her home, that is to say her mother, most frightfully. But when the visit was in being the joy she had promised herself she would spread somehow was not at her command; the love she had yearned to show somehow was chilled within her and not forthcoming. It was the tempting dish in a new illustration--rushing eagerly to it, avid of its delights; coming to it and finding, after all, one was not hungry.

Strange!

Her mother was ageing rapidly. She could have wept to see the ageing signs; but somehow, seeing them, did not weep; was not moved; received the impression but was not sensitive to it; felt the tug but did not respond to the pull. Rather, indeed, was apt to be a little impatient. Returned to London and to her engrossing work and longed to be back with her mother; came back to her mother--and was not hungry.

Strange!

Then she began to analyse the strangeness of it and found it was not, after all, so strange; at least it was not a thing to be distressed about, nor bearing conviction of unnatural qualities, of hardness, of unkindness. There was a line she knew that came in a verse:

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, The earth, and every common thing To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore. Turn wheresoe’er I may By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

“The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” That was the line. “The things which used to appeal to me now appeal no more--or rather not quite in the same way. I think I used to be very sentimental. It is stupid and useless to be sentimental. People must grow old. There’s nothing sad in that. It is natural. It is life. It is life and one must accept life. The unnatural thing, the foolish and wrong thing, is to remain a sentimental child for ever, with a child’s ready foolish tears at what are common, necessary facts of life. I can be much kinder, much more really kind, by seeing things clearly--and in their right perspective than by occluding them with false compassions. I am always my dear, my darling mother’s devoted daughter, ever at her disposal, and she knows it and loves me for it. When I am to her or to any friend but as ships that pass in the night--Keggo’s phrase--then let me take myself to task.”

Keggo’s phrase! Keggo was being intermittently seen at this time and these thoughts of Rosalie’s were very close to the occasion when finally she lost sight of Keggo. It could be said like this--that Keggo here made a contribution to Rosalie’s life that passed Rosalie on her way.

They had kept touch for quite a time after their separation as governess and pupil. They then lost touch.

“Why, it must be more than a year!” cried Rosalie, suddenly encountering Miss Keggs near the Marble Arch one evening and delightedly greeting her. It was in the summer and Rosalie had gone out from the boarding house after dinner for some fresh air in the park. She was enormously glad to see Keggo again and carried her greeting straight on into excuses for her share in their long sundering. “More than a year! You know, the fact is, Keggo, that when I first left the Sultana’s, and for quite a time afterwards, I used to gush. I did! I was so frightfully full of all I was doing and it was all so new and so wonderful and I was so excited about it that it was sheer letting off steam--gush--to write you reams and reams of letters about it as I used to do. Then it got normal and the--the tumultuousness of it wore off and I was just--I am, you know--just absolutely absorbed in it and there was no more steam to let off; all the energy went into the work, I suppose. So gradually, I suppose, without quite realising it, I gave up writing. But, oh, if you knew how glad I am to see you now!”

Miss Keggs to all this presented only a fixed smile. A smile belongs much more to the eyes than to the lips. The lips, but not the eyes, can counterfeit a smile. False coin is “uttered” as they say in law; and the lips utter. Not so the eyes. All metal that the mouth issues is to be tested there. The expression in Miss Keggs’s eyes was not at all in consonance with that of her mouth. The expression of her eyes was rather oddly vacant as you may see on the face of a person who is apparently attending to what you are saying but really is listening to another conversation in the same room. “Not listening” as it is called. “An absent look” as they say.

Nevertheless she joined dove-tailed response to Rosalie’s words. “To tell you the truth,” said Miss Keggs, speaking very slowly and repeating the preamble. “To tell you the truth I wouldn’t have received your letters if you had written them.”

“You wouldn’t? Why not?”

“To tell you the truth--” there had been a pause before she first spoke; a pause again before this reply and then again a beginning with this phrase about which there was nothing odd in itself but something odd in the manner of its use by Miss Keggs. “To tell you the truth, I’ve left the school.”

“Left the Sultana’s!”

Miss Keggs nodded with slow inclinations, like grave bows, of her head.

“Whatever for? Keggo, when, why?” And then Rosalie, impelled by some apprehension that suddenly pressed her, put a quick hand on Keggo’s arm and cried sharply, “Keggo! There is something very strange about you. What has happened to you? Something has happened. You can’t keep it from me.”

But Keggo could. At that quick gesture of suspicion of Rosalie’s, animation sprung to meet it as a cat, at a sudden start, will leap from profound slumber to a place of safety and to arched defence. Miss Keggs, in their first exchanges, might have been as one drowsily answering questions from a bed. She was suddenly, in her instant casting away of her absent air, as that one flinging away the bedclothes and leaping upright to the floor. What had she been saying? She had been quite lost in something she was thinking of when Rosalie came up. She scarcely had recollected her. She had been very, very ill with “this influenza” and still was only convalescent. Why, how very, very glad she was to see her dear Rosalie again! And how Rosalie had developed!

“Why, Rosalie, you are beautiful! You are! And you don’t blush or simper to hear it! Yes, you are beautiful.”

There was a little room in a street somewhere off the Harrow Road that Miss Keggs now occupied. It was a forbidding street. It was one of those derelict streets frequent in certain quarters of London, in Holloway, in Kentish Town, in Kilburn and all over South London, all about which life teems and roars but where, along their own pavements, no life is. They are most characteristic of themselves, these streets, when, as often to be seen, there is no soul along them but a sad drab that is an itinerant singer that drifts along wailing, at every few paces shuffling her body in complete turns to scan the windows she has passed and the immediate windows on either hand. She has no home and these are not homes to which she wails. There is no flicker of life at any window. She’s a sad drab, repulsive within; and they are sad drabs, not nice within. At night, but not before dusk, forlorn things flicker in and out of them like drab ghosts had on the strings of a puppet show. By day there sometimes is an old man crawling in or crawling out; sometimes a woman, always with a parcel or a net bag, fleeting along, expressionless. The high houses, all of one pattern, appear to have no pattern. They are like dead walls and the place they enclose like a vault, and the itinerant drab like a thing in drab cerements (they trail the dust) that ought to be dead wailing for entrance to things, tombed in those walls, that are dead. There is no life at all in these streets. There is nothing active or positive. There is just passivity and negation. There is just nothingness. They are not habitations, which connote life; they are repositories, which connote desuetude. They are the repositories of creatures, not that have done with life, for the sheer fact of living acknowledges service to life, but with whom life has done.

These came to be Rosalie’s thoughts of this street--Limpen Street--but they could not have been hers when she was first going there to spend evenings with Miss Keggs, for it was in her earlier visits there to Keggo that she cried there. When she could cry for pure compassion for another she was still too--too ardent for Limpen Street to be seen as it has been presented. From the first it affected her disagreeably but she would have felt, then, a sympathy for its state, and a belief that it could be aroused out of its state, and a wish so to arouse it; and in her earlier visits she had ardently this sympathy, but it was raised to a profound compassion; this belief, but it was a conviction; and this wish, but it was a resolution, in regard to Keggo.

For Keggo was drinking.

Keggo had been drinking for years and years and now Keggo had walled herself away in Limpen Street to drink and drink, still secretly with the sharp cunning of the secret drinker, but now with cunning only necessary when of her own wish she met the world. At the Sultana’s, (only Mr. Ponders in her secret, and in her pay; “that vile man” as, after the revelation, she always spoke of him to Rosalie) at the Sultana’s and in all her life of that period she was, as it were, as one whose life is threatened, dwelling among spies; that breastplate of her cunning never could be laid off then; now, as one threatened, but secure in a castle, the breastplate only was needed when sallies forth were made. There was at the Sultana’s the need of constant care to inhibit her cravings; there now was none to save her--unless Rosalie did.

There is no need at all to tell all this and all that by which Rosalie was led to this most terrible discovery and Keggo impelled to her most painful revelation. There was deceit and its exposure; lies and their crumpling in the hand; mystifications and their sinister interpretations; contingencies and their ugly dissolutions. These would be all beastly to tell. Beastly is a vile word but this is a vile thing. There was about it all, all the time, a tainted and unwholesome atmosphere. There was always in the little room in Limpen Street that strange disagreeable smell of bad eau-de-Cologne that always had hung about the little room at the Sultana’s.

Beastly things....

But they were not felt to be beastly by Rosalie, then. They are said here to be beastly, for they were beastly, only in excuse for Rosalie afterwards. They only were to her, then, intensely sad, most deeply pitiful, intensely increasing of her love for Keggo as pure love is increased by seeing its object in tortures that may not be helped because they will not be confessed. If only Keggo would tell her! Once or twice she said to Keggo, speaking with an entreaty that must have made obvious to Keggo her knowledge, “Keggo, haven’t you something to tell me; something that you’d like to tell me?” The occasion was always when she was leaving after a visit that had found Keggo very unwell, very dejected of spirits, and that Keggo had at last terminated by saying, “I think perhaps you had better go, Rosalie. I think perhaps I’d be better lying down.” But Keggo’s answer always was, “Something to tell you? No, nothing at all! What should I have to tell you?”

And then one day something said brought them very near to the matter between them. Miss Keggs came nearer yet. She said, “The fact is, Rosalie, I sometimes get so I simply cannot make an effort, the smallest effort. I believe when I’m like that if a thousand pounds were offered me for the going out and asking of it, and God knows I want it badly enough, I simply could not make the effort to do it. I’d simply let it pass and know that I was letting it pass and not care. That’s how it’s got with me, how it is sometimes with me, Rosalie.”

Rosalie said with extraordinary emphasis, leaning forward on the chair in which she sat facing Keggo. “Why is it, Keggo?”

If Keggo had answered, the thing would not have happened. Keggo did not answer. She was sitting with her hands crossed, one palm upon the other, and resting on her lap, her eyes to the ground. Quite a long time passed. Rosalie said, “You’re drinking, aren’t you, Keggo?”

“Yes, drinking, Rosalie.”

“Oh, Keggo!”

It was then that Rosalie cried.

## CHAPTER VIII

Sne cried. Her sympathies, though drying and slower now to be aroused, still then were such that she could weep for pity. It is a glimpse of her not to be seen again. There was she on her knees by Keggo, and with her arms about Keggo’s waist, and with her head on Keggo’s lap, crying for Keggo; and in the pauses of Keggo’s unfolding of her story entreating her, as one that cried responses to a litany, “Don’t mind, Keggo! Keggo, don’t mind now! Dear Keggo, poor Keggo, it’s all right now.”

And presently all the tale told: what Mr. Ponders’ medicine was; and all the humiliation suffered in keeping in with “that vile man”; and that vile man’s betrayal of her to the Sultana, and her dismissal; and all the earlier dreadfulness of her first steps down into her dreadful malady; and all the dreadful secrecy of all those years; and all the horrible humiliation secretly to get her poison; and all the horrible humiliations when her poison got. All the dark tale of that presently told; and her head bowed down to Rosalie’s, and Rosalie’s wet face against her face, and her face also wet; and just her murmurs, murmured at intervals, as though her heart that had discharged its grievous load ran slowly now, slowly to rise and then to well with, “God bless you, Rosalie; oh, Rosalie, God bless you”; and for a long time just seated thus, cheek to cheek, hand to hand, heart to heart; weakness bound about with strength, sorrow in pity’s arms, travail in sanctuary....

It is desired that one should try to see that picture. Its counterpart was not again in the life of Rosalie, hardening.

There were, after that, such happy evenings in Keggo’s room. Keggo, with one to help her, fighting for herself; Rosalie, with one to help, elevated upon that high happiness that comes with fighting for another. For a short time there seemed to be no lapses in Keggo’s struggle. When they came (as Rosalie knew afterwards) the practised cunning of years of secrecy had no difficulty in concealing them from the unsuspecting eyes of Rosalie. Ill that it was so! Rosalie was harder when came the lapse that cunning could not hide. She did not cry. Her eyes were hard. She said with thin lips, “Why, even all this time you have been deceiving me!” the which egged on, in that vile way in which exchanges of a quarrel are as knives sharpening one against the other, Keggo’s enflamed retort, “The more fool you! Little fool!”

But at first, while the lapses were few and the cunning was equal to them, only a closer friendship was set afoot between the woman that was grown and the woman that was burgeoning, and there were such very happy evenings in the room in Limpen Street. Such jolly talks.

There was one talk that, forgotten with the very evening of its passage, afterwards very strongly returned to Rosalie and abode with her. It had in it rather vital things for Rosalie.

She loved to talk about her work with intelligent and sympathetic Keggo, and she had been on this occasion expounding to her the mysteries and interest of life insurance: in particular explaining the “romance” of vital statistics; in particular, again, the curious fact that, though women in the United Kingdom largely outnumbered men, many more male children were born than female. The disproportion “the other way about” in maturity, said Rosalie, was because the death rate among men was much higher--due to risks of their occupations. “A certain number of house painters,” said Rosalie sagely, “fall off ladders every year and are killed; women don’t paint houses, so they don’t fall off ladders and get killed. Similarly on railways, Keggo. The death rate among railway men is much higher in proportion, over an average, than the rate in any other occupation. Porters doing shunting, for instance, are always getting killed. Well, women don’t shunt trains so they don’t get killed while shunting trains, so there you are again, so to speak. The thing in a nutshell, Keggo, is that, by contrast, men lead dangerous lives.”

Keggo, who always was very alert in response, was here very long in responding. Then she responded an extraordinary thing that Rosalie afterwards remembered. She said slowly, “Oh, but Rosalie, it’s very dangerous to be a woman.”

Rosalie questioned her.

Keggo said, “Rosalie, you’ve great ideas, and I think very shrewd and very striking ideas, about the difference between men and women, but there’s this difference I think you haven’t thought of--the danger that women carry in themselves; right in them, here”--she had a hand against her breast and she pressed it there--“born in them, inerradicable, and that men have not. Men go into dangers but they come out of them and go home to tea. That’s what it is with men, Rosalie. They can always get out. They can always come back. They never belong to a thing, body and soul and heart and mind. Rosalie, women do. That’s their danger. That’s why it is so very, very dangerous being a woman. Women can’t come back. They can’t, Rosalie. Look at me. They take to a thing and it becomes a craze, it becomes an obsession, it becomes a drug. Look at me. They take to a thing--anything; a poison like mine, or a pursuit like some one else’s, or an idea like some other’s, or a--a career in life like, like yours, Rosalie,--they take to it and go deep enough, and they’re its; they never will get away from it, they never, never will be able to come out of it. Never.”

She was extraordinarily vehement. It was embarrassing for Rosalie. Rosalie desired to contest, as vehemently, these theories. She did not believe them a bit. They were founded, she felt, on the tragedy of Keggo’s own case. Keggo was unfairly, though very naturally, arguing from the particular to the general, from the personal to the abstract. But how could she reply to Keggo, “Of course you say that?”

She was silent; but she betrayed perhaps her thoughts in a gesture, her difficulty in some expression of her face.

Keggo said very intensely, “But, Rosalie, if you only knew! With me it’s drink and you’ll say--. But I say to you, Rosalie, never, never let anything get the mastery of you. With me it’s drink and you’ll say that is a matter altogether different, with which parallels are not to be drawn. Oh, do not believe it, Rosalie. A woman should in all things be desperately temperate--watchfully, desperately temperate. A man--nearly every man--seems somehow to have his life and all his interests in compartments. He can be immersed in one while he is in it, and can get out of it and distribute himself over his others and close it and forget it. Rosalie, a woman can’t. Men have hobbies. They don’t have attachments; they have detachments. They detach themselves and turn to a thing and they detach themselves from it and turn back again. Rosalie, women don’t turn to a thing; they go to it. They don’t have hobbies, they have obsessions. They don’t trifle, they plunge. They cannot sip, they drain. It’s in their bone. They never would have occupied the place they do occupy if it were not that from the beginning they have given themselves over, or they were given over, to mastery. They are the weaker vessel. Rosalie, I tell you this, when a woman gives herself, forgets moderation and gives herself to anything, she is its captive for ever. She may think she can come back, but she can’t come back. For a woman there is no comeback. They don’t issue return tickets to women. For women there is only departure; there is no return.”

Rosalie said, “Keggo, I think I could argue, but I won’t. But what I can’t imagine is the application of it in hundreds of cases--in by far the great majority of cases. Take mine. You’re not warning me, are you? I don’t see the possibility--”

Keggo said, “Darling, I’m not warning you and yet I am. I am warning you because you are a woman; and because you are a woman you are susceptible to danger. It’s what I’ve said; it’s what I would have you remember for a day perhaps to come, that it is dangerous being a woman. I’m not warning you, because there’s nothing to--well, but isn’t there? You’ve got a theory of life and you are bent upon a career in life. There’s--”

Rosalie cried, “Well, but there you are, Keggo. No comeback, no return tickets--well, I don’t want to come back; I don’t want a return ticket.”

“You might. You never know. Suppose you ever did?”

“But you can’t suppose it. Why ever should I?”

“Suppose you wanted to marry?”

Rosalie laughed. The thing immediately lost reality. “Well, suppose the incredible. Suppose I did. There’d be no comeback wanted there. I could perfectly well marry and still keep my theory of life; I could perfectly well marry and still keep on in my career--and most certainly I would still keep on. Why, that is my theory of life, as you call it, or a very outstanding principle of it. There’s nothing to me more detestable in the whole business than the idea that because a woman marries she therefore must give up her work. That’s what is the reason the boarding house and every boarding house and every home and street and city swarms with derelicts--with derelict women--just because their lives are all planned as blind alley occupations, marriage at the end of the alley, no need to do anything, no need to be anything because it’s only a blind alley you’re in. When you reach the end--you reach the end! That’s it, Keggo. You reach the end. You’re a woman, therefore for you--the end!”

She laughed again. She was returning Keggo’s vehemence without embarrassment upon the subject that had made return difficult. She cried, “I’ve got you now, Keggo. I really have. You say they don’t issue return tickets to women. No. Perhaps they don’t; but I’ll tell you where they book them all to--from the cradle to a terminus.”

Keggo smiled and would have spoken. But Rosalie was pleased with her adroit turning of metaphors. She repeated “To a terminus. Well, I’ve booked beyond, Keggo.” She laughed again. “And then the idea of marriage for me! I’ve granted the preposterous just for the sake of the argument and just to floor the argument. But you know, you know perfectly well from all our talks, even so far back as at the Sultana’s, that it’s simply too grotesque! Marriage, for me! Why, if a million men came to me on their bended knees, each with a million pounds on their backs you know perfectly well that I’d just feel sick. Tame cats, tabby cats, tomcats, Cheshire cats, wild cats, stray cats,--I’m not going to set up a cats’ home. No thanks.”

So Rosalie had the laugh of that evening.

## CHAPTER IX

But this was not to continue. Keggo began to lapse; Rosalie began to weary of helping Keggo. She had herself to think of. Those who go down in life, whether by age or by misfortune, are prone, engulfed, to cry to those ascending, “You could help me!” There is a correct answer to this. It is, “I have done (or I do) a great deal for you. I cannot do more. It is not fair to ask me to do more. I have a duty to myself. I have myself to think of.” Our generation endorses this.

Rosalie had herself to think of. By stages that need not be detailed, they are the common facts of life, the thing passes from that picture of those two with Rosalie’s strong young arms about the other to a new picture, the last, between them.

The stages show Rosalie’s enormous, ardent plans for the rescue and rehabilitation of Keggo, and they show the projection and the failure of the plans. They show work found for Keggo (through Simcox’s scholastic side) and lost and found again and again lost and still again. They show Keggo’s remorse and they show Rosalie’s forgiveness. They show it repeated and repeated. They show by degrees the gradual, and then the rapid, staling of Rosalie’s fond sympathies. They show her finally, immersed in her own purposeful interests, discovering to herself feelings in regard to Keggo on a plane with feelings discovered to herself in regard to her mother. It has been written: “Her mother was ageing rapidly. Rosalie could have wept to see the ageing signs; but somehow, seeing them, did not weep; was not moved; received the impression but was not sensitive to it; felt the tug but did not respond to the pull. Rather, indeed, was apt to be a little impatient.” It is not necessary to expand. Keggo was fast going downhill. Rosalie could have wept to see the downhill signs; but somehow, seeing them, did not weep; was not moved... rather, indeed... impatient. She had herself to think of.

Youth’s an excuse for youth as childhood’s an excuse for childishness. Youth, still, like childhood, but unlike maturity, can be lost in its emotions, absorbed in them to the exclusion of all else, abandoned to them with all else pitched away as a swimmer discards his every stitch and joyously plunges in the stream. Youth is not accountable for its

## actions then: it is too happy or it is too sad. One oughtn’t to blame

youth, immersed.

There was outstandingly one such day of absorption in delight, of abandonment to ecstasy for Rosalie, and it was the day on which she made her third advance in the social grade of Miss Kentish’s boarding house and moved into the two rooms en suite, furnished and decorated by herself to her own taste. She awoke to this great day, long anticipated; and with the vigorous action of throwing off the clothes and jumping out of bed, she plunged into it and was lost in it. The excitement and the elation of taking possession of that enchanting, that significant apartment of her own! She was excited; she was elated. Moving in was the cumulative excitement of all the long-drawn, anxious excitements of peering round the antique dealers and picking up the bits of furniture and of placing them and moving them a shade to this side and then a shade to that till was found the one and only exact position that suited them and that they suited; and the terrible excitements of watching the decorators at work, her scheme developing beneath their hands, and the awful knowledge that now it was being done it was done for good or bad--no altering it now!--and the agonizing excitements of putting down the carpets--how can you tell exactly how a carpet is going to look until you see it actually down upon its floor and between its walls?--and the increasing excitement all the time of the knowledge that everything was harmonising and was looking just as in dreams of the ideal it had been made to look; and now all ready! The bed-sitting-room slept in last night for the last time; the two utterly perfect rooms and all that their possession connoted, to be occupied that evening for the first time! Yes, in all the tumultuous pride and engrossment of that, there was no place--how could there be place?--for tiresome things of other people’s worlds, if such should offer.

And in this tremendous day there was stuff more tremendous yet. This also was the day on whose evening was made the tremendous tribute to her work and to her talent, the evening of the dazzling offer that, like a door swung open on a treasure house, disclosed to her new fields to which her career had brought her, new triumphs that her career, in its stride, might make her own--the evening when Mr. Sturgiss of Field’s Bank leant across the dinner table in his house (at his request only she and himself left in the room) and said in his quiet voice, “Well, look here--to come to the point--the reason I’ve got you up here to-night--it’s this: we want you, Field and Company, the Bank, we want you to join us. We want you in Lombard Street.”

Lombard Street!

Cumulative also was this thrill, for it had begun some few days previously when Mr. Sturgiss, calling at Simcox’s for a chat with Mr. Simcox, an old friend, had come into her room and after mysteriously fidgetting with business and conversational trifles, had issued the invitation to dinner at his house at Cricklewood in language mysteriously couched. “My wife would like to meet you,” said Mr. Sturgiss. “She’s heard a lot from me, and from Field, of what an astonishingly clever young person we think you and she’d--she’d like to meet you. And more than that.” Mr. Sturgiss’s halting speech suddenly became direct and definitive like a flag that had been fluttering suddenly streaming upon the breeze. “And more than that. The fact is, there’s a proposition I want to put up to you. A proposition. We could go into it quietly and discuss it. I rather think it would interest you. I’m sure it will. You’ll come? Good. I’m very glad. Very glad.”

A proposition! From Mr. Sturgiss! Of Field and Company! What could it be?

But Rosalie was not of the sort to tread the succeeding days on the enchanted air of fond surmises. She told herself that the mysterious proposition might be everything or might be nothing: the fact that outstood was that she had brought her aspirations to this--that a partner in a London bank recognised in her stuff sufficient to invite her to a confidential meeting, there to go into something with her “quietly together,” to meet together over something and “discuss it.” She had determined to establish herself and she was establishing herself. And was it not an omen propitious and significant that this recognition of her parts was to fall on the very day on which the exercise of those parts brought her into the dignity and comfort of that delicious, that significant apartment of her own?

This solid stuff, and no mere daydreams, was the delight absorbing her and the ecstasy to which she was abandoned when that great day came. In the morning she put the last of her possessions, the equipment of her dressing table, into the new apartment; after the day spent at Simcox’s, she returned to dress for the first time before the noble cheval glass purchased for the bedroom. She decided to go up in a hat; it could be removed or not for dinner as Mrs. Sturgiss might seem to indicate. She put on an evening bodice of black silk and net with a simple skirt in keeping. She gave last approving glances about the delightful rooms and set out, immersed in eager happiness, for Cricklewood.

One of those old red buses that vied with the white Putney buses as being the best horsed on the London routes took her there. Up the Edgware Road; past the junction with the Harrow Road that led to Keggo’s street--she only had for it the thought that it was weeks since she had seen Keggo, almost months; along broad Maida Vale and past the turning that led to the Sultana’s with the corner where often the crocodile had huddled--and she was so engrossed in her happy achievements that she passed it without thinking of it. The bus terminated its journey at the foot of Shoot Up Hill. Rosalie, called upon to alight, came out of her thoughts into her surroundings. She realised that she must have passed Crocodile Corner without noticing and the realisation caused her to give a little note of amused indifference. The indifference was not directed precisely at the Sultana’s; it was at the idea, which came to her, that, normally to human predilections, she ought to have given--ought now to give--a sentimental thought to memories of the Sultana years. Well, she did not. Funny! Yes, it was funny. As she sometimes thought of her mother and of all her home ties; of Miss Salmon and that cry of hers of never being able to find another lover; of Keggo now so seldom seen and known to be going from bad to worse,--so with memories of Crocodile Corner and the Sultana’s, she could see and appreciate the call of all these attachments, but somehow, seeing and appreciating, did not respond to them. What a very curious attitude! It was not unfeeling for she could feel. It was not insensibility for she was sensitive to such things. Sensitive! No, a better word than that. She was in such matters sensible. She saw, as one should see, these things in their right perspective. They were touching (as of her mother) or they were sad (as of Keggo) or they were appealing (as the happy schoolgirl memories) but they must not touch or sadden or appeal too closely. They must be estimated in their degree and in their place; they must not be assumed, be shouldered, be permitted to cumber. No good could be done to them by encumbrance with them. That was the point. What good could it do them? No good. Yes, that was sensible.

She abated, in these thoughts, nothing of the eagerness with which she was living this great day--the day whose points of suspension (on which it tumultuously revolved) were the taking over of the significant apartment from which she had just come and the entering upon the significant invitation to which now her feet were taking her. These thoughts, this analysis of her attitude to sentimental appeals, she tossed upon her eager happiness that was her being as an airball tossed upon laughing breath that yet is used, breathing, to support life. And she was aware that this was so. And she enjoyed a flash of approval of herself that it could be so; it was admirable, it was sensible, thus to be able to detach and look upon a portion of her mind while her main mind deflected not a shade from its occupation with the main chance. That faculty was perhaps the secret of her success, the quality, that, in exercise, had brought her to the significant apartment and to the significant invitation.

She was at the gate of Mr. Sturgiss’s house and she most happily passed up the short drive, ascended the steps and rang the bell.

Mr. Sturgiss’s house was almost on the summit of Shoot Up Hill. It was one of those houses standing a few miles along the main thoroughfares out of London that, now in decay or displaced by busy shops, packed villas, or monstrous flats, were then the distinctly impressive residences of distinctly well-to-do business people. Mr. Sturgiss was a distinctly well-to-do business person. The house, double-fronted, had that third sitting-room which confers such an immense superiority over houses of but two sitting-rooms--“Such a convenience in so many ways” as those newly promoted from two to three nowadays remark with languid triumph to visitors still immured in two. Houses--new, two sitting-roomed houses--extended beyond it and around it, and now stretch miles beyond and about, but Mrs. Sturgiss told Rosalie that when they first came there they actually had cows grazing and horses ploughing in fields adjoining their garden.

Mrs. Sturgiss told Rosalie this while personally attending Rosalie’s removal of her hat (it was “no hat”; Rosalie felt so glad she had come dressed for either indication) and Mrs. Sturgiss sighed pleasantly as she said it. “Things are going ahead at such a pace now!” said Mrs. Sturgiss. “It’s all very different from what it used to be. Why, the very fact of your coming here, not as my guest but as my husband’s, ‘on business!’ The idea of women being in business, or even knowing anything about business, when I was a girl, why, I can’t tell you how, how positively shocking it would have been considered.”

Rosalie laughed. She liked Mrs. Sturgiss, who was motherly and seemed to have her own dear mother’s gentle ways--this personally attending her in her bedroom, for instance. “Oh, there are getting to be heaps of women in business now, Mrs. Sturgiss,” she smiled.

Mrs. Sturgiss returned brightly, “Oh, I know it. I know it well.” She paused and her voice had a thoughtful note. “But even then.... Use the long mirror, my dear; the light is better. Even then, there can be few as,--as much in it as you. You know, my husband has an immense idea of your abilities. He has spoken of you so much. Do you know, you are a great surprise to me, now I see you. I could only imagine from all John’s idea of you a rather terrible looking blue-stocking, as we used to call the clever women.” She came and stood by Rosalie, regarding the image in the glass that Rosalie regarded. She said simply, “But you are beautiful.”

A very odd feeling, akin to tears--but for what on earth tears?--quickened in Rosalie. She turned sharply from the mirror. “I am quite ready now.” She pretended she had not heard.

Mrs. Sturgiss said, “My dear, do you like it, being what you are?”

It was a great rescue for Rosalie to be able to spring away from that odd feeling (in her bosom and in her throat) by swift animation. “Oh, I love it. I simply love it. It is everything to me, everything in the world!”

Mrs. Sturgiss opened the door. “No, you go first, my dear. But if I had had a dear girl, such as you, I would have wished her to stay with me at home.”

She had made with her hand the gesture of her wish that Rosalie should precede her from the room. Rosalie impulsively touched the extended fingers. “But, Mrs. Sturgiss, don’t you see, that’s just it, the idea there is now. If you had had a daughter and she had stayed at home--well, let that go, while you were with her. But when you died and left her, what would there be--don’t you see it?--what would there be for her then?”

Mrs. Sturgiss pressed the warm young hand. “But I would have left her married, a dear wife and a dear mother.”

“Oh, that!” cried Rosalie and her stronger personality carried off the exchanges in a laugh. Mrs. Sturgiss thought the expression and the tone meant, happily, that marriage might happen to any one, in the market as much as in the home. Rosalie, with all the fierce contempt that her “Oh, that!” conveyed to her secret self, was ridden strongly away from emotionalism in the conversation. Her thought as they went downstairs was, “If I were to instruct her in the cat-men! Her horror!”

There was downstairs a surprise that was very annoying, but that was made to produce compensations. An unexpected fourth person, presuming--so Rosalie was given to understand--on a long standing, indefinite invitation, had dropped in to dinner. She recognised him directly they entered the drawing-room and could not stop the emblem of a swift vexation about her mouth and in her eyes. He caught it, she was sure; and she hoped he did. It was Harry Occleve--Laetitia’s futile slave! He had already informed his host that he knew her. She greeted him with a mere touch of her hand, a touch made cold by intent, and with “With a free evening off one would have expected you would spend it with Laetitia,” said disdainfully. It was a rude and inept thing to say (in the tone she said it) for the feeble creature, as she stigmatised him, had not yet screwed his fatuous idolatry to the point of proposal of marriage. But she intended it to be rude and to discomfort him and she was glad to see some twinge at the flick pass across his face. She hated his presence there. The presence of any man, in the capacity of a monkey to entertain and to be entertained, was always, not to put too fine a point upon it, repulsive to her. This man was of all men obnoxious to her. When he approached her for their brief greeting (she turned instantly away at its conclusion) she savoured immediately that odd, nice smell there was about him, of mingled soap and peat and fresh tobacco smoke and tweed; and that annoyed her. It was a reminder, emanated from him and therefore not to be escaped, of a distinction he had different from, and above common men. She always granted him his distinction of looks, of air, of talent. It was why she so much disdained him. To be dowered so well and so fatuously to betray his dowry! Tame cat!

But she made him, through the meal, pay compensations for his presence. At the table of Aunt Belle, in his presence she was accustomed to sit largely silent. Beautiful Laetitia was there the star; and while he mouthed and languished in that star’s rays Aunt Belle and Uncle Pyke, (stealing about him to capture him as a farmer and his wife with mincing steps and tempting morsel towards a fatted calf) fawned, flattered and deferred to him, he returning it. There was no place for her, and she would have shuddered to have held a place, in that society for mutual admiration. She sat apart. She was very much the poor relation (Aunt Belle could not comprehend her business success and Uncle Pyke would not admit it) and especially odious to her was the Occleve’s polite interest in her direction when Aunt Belle, poor-relationing her, would turn to her from coquettish raillery of him with, “Dear child, you’re eating nothing.” He would smile towards her and, fatuously anxious to please, offer some remark that might draw her into the conversation. She never would be so drawn. She scarcely ever exchanged words with him. She made herself to be unconscious of his presence. He was so occupied with his adoration of Laetitia that to be insensible of his presence was easy. When sometimes she glanced towards him it was with the thought, “Fancy being one of the rising young men at the Bar, being the rising young man--the Bar, with silk and ermine and, why not? the Woolsack before you--and being that, doing that! Fatted calf; dilly, dilly, come and be killed, goose; tame cat!”

Here, at the table of Mr. Sturgiss, it was very different. Intolerable that he should be here, but she was able to make him provide her compensation for his presumption. For the first time in her life, she found herself with sufficient interest in a man to enjoy, nay, to seek, a triumph over him. And she had that triumph. She was as certain as that she sat there that Mr. Sturgiss, in the period before her arrival in the drawing-room, had been telling him of her abilities and of his high regard for her. There was an interest in his look at her across the table that assured her he had been informed. There was, much more, a conviction within her, from Mr. Sturgiss’s manner and from his choice of subjects--confined almost entirely and to the absolute exclusion of Mrs. Sturgiss to the political situation and to markets, exchanges and the general tendency in the City--and particularly from the openings in these subjects with which continuously he presented her--a conviction arising out of these that Mr. Sturgiss, proud of her, of his discovery of her, was bent upon showing her off to his second guest, bent upon proving to his second guest what unquestionably he had said to him about her.

She most admirably responded. If she were indeed the subject of a challenge she most admirably flattered her backer. She is not to be imagined as a pundit excavating from within herself slabs of profound wisdom, nor yet as a pupil astoundingly instructing her masters, nor even as one of Mrs. Sturgiss’s blue stockings, packed with surprising lore. Rosalie was nothing so foolishly impossible, but she displayed herself knowledgeable. She was profoundly interested in the matters under notice and therefore (for it follows) she was interesting in her contributions to them; she was fascinated--the old fascination of “Lombard Street” and of “The English Constitution” now intensified as desire intensifies by gratification--and therefore she fascinated; she was never silly--Rosalie could not be silly--but she was frequently in her remarks ingenuous, but her ingenuousness, causing Mr. Sturgiss more than once to laugh delightedly (Occleve, curiously grave, no doubt because surprised, did not laugh) was born out of a shrewd touch towards the heart of the matter, as the best schoolboy howlers are never the work of the dullard but of him that has perceptions. Of her in her childhood it has been said that she was never the wonder-child of fiction who at ten has read all that its author probably had not read at thirty. So now of her budding maturity she was not the wonder-woman of fiction, causing by her brilliance her hearers, like Cortez’s men, to stare at each other with a wild surmise. No, nothing so unlikely. But she was intelligent and she was ardent; and there are not boundaries to the distance one may go with that equipment. She was admirable and she felt that she was effective. She had a consciousness of confidence amounting almost to a feeling of being tuned up and now let go; to a feeling of power, as of inspiration. And this strange animation that she had, came, she knew, from the triumph over that man, from the feeling, stated grimly, that she was giving him one.

It is much more important, all that, than, when it came, the great reason of the great invitation that had brought Rosalie to take part in it. The great reason already has been disclosed--Mr. Sturgiss, bending across the tablecloth, they two left alone, “Well, look here--to come to the point--the reason why I’ve got you up here tonight--it’s this: we want you--Field and Company, the Bank,--we want you to come to us--we want you in Lombard Street.”

She was beautiful to see in her proud happiness at that. Startled and tremulous, she was; like some lovely fawn burst from thicket and at breathless poise upon the crest of unsuspected pastures; within her eyes the cloud of dreams passing like veils upon the gleam of her first ecstasy; upon her face, shadowed as she sinks somewhat back, the tide of colour (her rosy joy) flooding above her sudden pallor; her lips slightly parted; her hand that had been plucking at the cloth caught to her bosom where her heart had leapt.

It may be left at that. It is enough; too much. What, in the reconstruction of a life, are, in retrospect, its triumphs but empty shards, drained and discarded, the litter of a picnic party that has fed and passed along?

Mr. Sturgiss bent farther across the tablecloth, expanding his proposal: She knew, said he, what he represented, what the firm was. Field and Company. A private bank. Well, the days of private banks were drawing in. These huge joint-stock leviathans swallowing them up like pike among the troutlings. But not swallowing up Field and Company! Not much! If the old private houses were tumbling into the joint-stock maw, the greater the chances for those that stood out and remained. The private banks were tumbling in because they stood rooted in the old, solid, stolid banking business and the leviathans came along and pounced while they dozed. There was no dozing at Field’s. They were very much awake. They were enterprising.

“Look at this very matter between us. The idea of bringing a woman into a bank! Even old Field himself was startled at first. Why? In America, women are entering banking seriously and successfully. They’re going to in England. At Field’s. You.” He wasn’t proposing to bring her in for fun or for a chance that might turn up, like the man who picked up a dog biscuit from the road on the chance that some one would give him a dog before it got mildewed; no, he was bringing her in to develop an enterprise that should be the parent of other and greater enterprises. Her knowledge of insurance, her knowledge of schools, these, with her sex, on the one side of the counter and all their clients--the Anglo-Indian crowd who were the backbone of the business--on the other side of the counter. Field’s, for cash, and, while it was drawing, for advice, was always the first port of call of the wives and the mothers home from India, to say nothing of the husbands and the fathers,--“well, Field’s, you, shall be the fount of all that domestic advice that is just what all those people, cut off from home, are constantly and distractingly in need of.” She didn’t suppose, as it was, that Field’s did no more, for them than bank their money? Field’s were their agents. Field’s saw that they booked their passages, and that their baggage got aboard; and when they arrived this end or the other, or when they broke their journeys coming or going, Field’s representatives were there to meet them and take over all their baggage troubles for them. “Very well. Now Field’s--you--are going to look after their domestic troubles for them--find them rooms, find them houses, find them schools for their children. When people know what we can do for them, people will come to us to bank with us because we can do it. When people come to us to bank with us--we go ahead.”

Mr. Sturgiss ended and drew back and looked at her. He lit a cigarette and took a sip at his coffee. “We thought of offering you three--” he set down his cup and looked at her again--“four hundred a year.”

She declined the post. She was girlish, and delighted him, in her expression of her enormous sense of the compliment he paid her; she was a woman of uncommon purposefulness, and increased his admiration for her by the directness and decision with which uncompromisingly she said him no. She owed a loyalty which she could never fully pay to Simcox’s, to Mr. Simcox; that was the beginning and the end of her refusal. Simcox’s was her own, her idea, her child that daily she saw growing and that daily absorbed her more: that was the material that filled in and stiffened out the joints of her refusal. “But if you knew how proud I am, Mr. Sturgiss! You don’t mind my refusing?”

He laughed and rose to take her to the drawing-room. “I don’t mind a bit. This is only what they call preliminary overtures. I shall ask you again. We mean to have you.”

Between the two rooms he said, “Yes, mean to. It’s a big thing. I’m certain of it. We shall keep it open for you. We shan’t fill it.” He put his hand on the drawing-room door and opened it. “We can’t.”

She went in radiant.

She was on the red bus again, going home. She had stayed but the briefest time after dinner. She was too elevated, too buoyant, too possessed possibly to remain in company; excitedly desirous to be alone with her excited thoughts,--especially to be alone with them in that significant apartment of hers. Significant! Why upon the very day of entering it had come this most triumphant sign of its significance! Significant!...

She had a front seat on the outside of the omnibus. She gazed before her along a path of night that the lamps jewelled in chains of gold, and streamed along it her tumultuous thoughts, terrible as an army with banners. It was very strange, and it vexed her, robbing her of her proud consciousness of them, that there obtruded among them, as one plucking at her skirt--as captain of them she rode before them--the figure of Laetitia’s Harry. Similarly he had obtruded and been like to spoil the pleasure of her visit; but he had been made to provide compensations and he obtruded now only in rebirth of a passage with him that, rehearsed again, much pleased her even while, annoyed, she cut him down.

Taking her leave, she had been seen from the threshold by Mr. Sturgiss and by Laetitia’s Harry. It was pitchy dark, emerging from the brightness of the interior, and he had stepped with her to conduct her to the gate. “It was an extraordinary coincidence, meeting you here,” he had said.

She did not reply. His voice was most strangely grave for an observation so trite; he might have been speaking some deeply meditated thing, profound, heavy with meaning, charged with fate. Fatuous! It was extraordinary that there was not an action of his but aroused her animosity. This vibrant gravity of tone--an organ used for a jig, just as his gifts were used for his Laetitia moon-calfings--caused newly a disturbance within her against him. She would have liked to whistle or in some equal way to express indifference to his presence.

They were at the gate and he stooped to the latch and appeared to have some trouble with it. “Sturgiss has been telling me what a wonderful person you are.”

Again that immense gravity of tone. She was astonished at the sudden surge of her animosity that it caused within her. She had desired to express indifference. She desired now to assail. She made a sneer of her voice. “I should have thought you had ears for the wonder of no one but Laetitia.”

“Why do you say that?”

She felt her lip curl with her malevolence. “To see you raise your eyes and hear you breathe ‘Ah, Laetitia!’”

He opened the gate and she passed out, tingling.

It astounded her to find herself a hundred yards gone from the house, nay, now upon the bus a mile and more away, recalling it, trembling and with her breath quickened. It was as if she had been engaged in a contest of wills, very fierce; nay, in a contest physical, a wrestling. She had not known, she told herself, that it was possible to hate so. That man! These men! She put her eye upon the bus driver, strapped on his perch so near to her that she could have touched him, and absurdly in her repugnance of his sex hated him and shrank farther away from him.

It was enormously, sickeningly real to her, her repugnance. Even on detached consideration of her ridiculous shrinking from the bus driver she could not have laughed at it. People who had an uncontrollable antipathy to cats did not laugh at the grotesque puerilities to which it carried them. Nor she at her antipathy. “Of course they’re beasts.” Yes, the right word! It was the beastliness of sex that bottomed her loathing.

She could not have laughed; but she could and did with a conscious intention of her will put that intruder on her animation finally out of her mind. This very joyous uplifting of her spirit, was it not because, in this world dominated by men, based for its fundamental principle upon play of sex as commerce is based upon the principle of barter, she was assured of position, of privilege, and of power that raised her independent of such conventions and such laws?

She was her own! All her proud joys, her glad imaginings, her delighted hopes, arose amain and anew, tuned to this cumulative paean as a nourish of trumpets at the climax of a proclamation. She was intoxicated on her happiness.

They were come to the lighted shops and the crowded pavements. The bus drew up at the thronged corner adjacent to the divigation of the Harrow Road and she leaned over and watched the scene, smilingly (for sheer happiness) looking down upon it, as smilingly (for her triumphant altitude) she felt that she looked down upon the world. She would not have changed place with any life living or that could be lived; she was so much abandoned to her happiness that she made the intention she would sit up in her significant apartment all that night, not to lose a moment of it. She grudged that even sleep upon her happiness should intrude.

There came one in the traffic beneath her that caught her attention: a woman whom people stood aside to let pass and turned to look upon with grins; two or three urchins danced about the woman, pointing at her and calling at her. Her dress was disordered, muddy all up one side as if she had fallen; her face flushed; her hat awry; her hair escaped and wisped about her eyes and on her shoulders. She was drunk. An obscene and horrible spectacle, the mock of her beholders. A horrible woman.

It was Keggo.

Rosalie caught her breath. She made to rise but did not rise. Keggo stopped and lifted all around a vacant gaze. Her eyes met Rosalie’s straight above her. She lurched a step and stopped and swayed and looked again, battling perhaps with hints within her fumy brain of recognition. Rosalie made again to rise to go to her and again did not rise. The bus moved forward. That wretched woman, making as if to pursue her aroused be-fuddlement, turned about to follow and came a few steps, lurching like a ship that foundered. The light blazed down upon her upturned face. She lurched into some shadow and, as wreckage swallowed up in the trough of the sea, her face was gone.

Lurching... as a ship... that foundered. There was in Rosalie’s mind some dim memory struggling. Lurching... as a ship... in the darkness... in the night. And her face... seen and gone... as a ship... labouring... as a ship...

Ah!

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing; Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness.

It came to Rosalie complete and word for word; and with perfect clearness, as though she saw and sensed them, all its attendant circumstances: the attic room at the Sultana’s, the strange smell mingled with the smell of the oil lamp, Keggo in the wicker chair, she beside her, her head against Keggo’s knee; and Keggo’s voice reciting the lines and her young, protesting, loving cry, “O Keggo!”

She saw it, sensed it, heard it--and stonily regarded it. A thing to weep at, she knew it; but did not weep. A thing to stab her, it ought to; but did not stab. What good could she do? Suppose she had got up and gone down; suppose she now got up and went down and went back? What good? All sentimentality that. Be sensible! If a thousand pounds would do Keggo any good, and if she had a thousand pounds, freely and gladly she would give the last penny of it. But to get down, to have got down, what could she have done? Why should she worry about her? Keggo had had her chance. Everybody had their chance. She now had hers. Why should she...

She never saw Keggo again.

## CHAPTER X

She had not good health in the week immediately following that great day. She did not feel well. She did not look very well. Mr. Simcox, profoundly sympathetic to every mood of her who was at once his protege and his support, told her he thought she had been overdoing it. She seized upon that excuse and tried to persuade herself that perhaps she had; or, which amounted to the same thing, that she was suffering from the revulsion of those huge excitements. But she did not persuade herself. Her malaise, whatever it was, was not of that kind. Its manifestations were not in lassitude or sense of disability. They were in a curious dis-ease whose occasion was not to be defined; in a consuming restlessness beneath whose goad even the significant apartment had not power to charm and hold her; in a certain feverishness whose exsiccative heat, leaving her palms and temples cool (she sometimes felt them and had surprise) caused inwardly a dry burning that made her long for quiet places.

She could not settle to anything. Her limbs, and they had their way, desired not to rest; her mind, and it deposed her captaincy, would cast no anchor.

Mr. Simcox, as the week drew on, suggested a weekend at home. It had occurred to her, very attractively, but she had negatived it. Aunt Belle (before the idea had come to her) had written an invitation to one of the Saturday dinners in which she had “most particularly, my dear child” desired her presence. Something most delightful was going to happen and she must be there. She had accepted and she later told herself she did not like to refuse. She knew, instantly as she read, what was the identity of this delightful thing that was to happen and she decided, with a sharp turn within her of some emotion, that certainly she would be there. To whet her scorn! She was thereafter much aggravated that her drifting mind, against her wish, swayed constantly towards it sometimes with that same sharp turn of that same emotion (nameless to her and without meaning) always with aggravation of her restlessness, of her fever, of her dis-ease. When came Mr. Simcox’s suggestion of the week-end at home she decided, as swiftly as she had first accepted, to revoke her acceptance. She would not be there! She would not--waste her scorn!

Impatient for movement, she that evening went to the splendid house in Pilchester Square to tell her withdrawal. This most exasperating dis-ease of hers! Now that she was come to change her mind she did not want to change her mind. It was like going to the dentist with an aching tooth. On his doorstep the tooth does not ache. Her governance of herself was by her malaise so shaken that positively, as she came into Aunt Belle’s presence, she did not know whether she was going to withdraw or to confirm her acceptance of the invitation.

Most comfortingly, Aunt Belle saved her the decision. “My dear child! How unexpected! How opportune! I was just writing to you. Our little dinner is put off! Sit here while I tell you. Now would you like anything, dear child? A piece of cake? Some nice fruit? To please me. Really, no? Well, now; our dinner that I so especially wanted you for--did you guess?”

She began to tell.

She told what Rosalie had perfectly well known. The delightful thing expected to happen was Harry Occleve’s proposal of marriage to darling Laetitia. There had been certain signs and portents. They had come at last. Their meaning was perfectly clear. There was not the least doubt that at the next meeting Harry would ask Laetitia’s hand. Not the shadow of a doubt! Aunt Belle knew all the signs! Every woman of Aunt Belle’s experience knew them, dear child. So Harry had been asked for this dinner; a meaningly written letter, dear child, to encourage him, the dear, poor fellow! And had accepted, in terms so meaning too, the dear, devoted fellow. Then--

“But, Aunt Belle--”

“Listen, dear child. Then he suddenly wrote saying he found he had made a mistake--”

“Made a mistake!” The words went out from Rosalie in a small cry.

“Dear child, it is nothing. How sweet to be so concerned! It is nothing, it is the best of signs. Made a mistake that he was disengaged for Saturday. The dear, devoted fellow was so absurdly vague about it. Unavoidable circumstances prevented him; that was all; his writing and all the appearance of his letter so delightfully distracted! How amused we were, your Uncle Pyke and I! How amused, and how we felt for the dear, devoted fellow! Screwing up his courage! How we remembered our own courtship! You should hear your Uncle Pyke tell how he had to screw up his courage to propose to me and how many times it failed him and he fled. Dear, child, you’ve no idea how ridiculous these poor men are in their love! How timorous! How they suffer! The dear, poor fellows. Your Uncle Pyke wrote him at once a most kind and meaning letter--accepting his unforeseen circumstances (he had to, of course) and positively fixing him for Monday instead. ‘Laetitia is expecting you,’ your Uncle Pyke wrote. The dear fellow! How happy it will make him! So it is Monday, dear child. Monday, instead. We do so want you to be there. I do so want you, and so does my darling, to be the first to congratulate her. And you shall be a bridesmaid! Won’t that be nice? Kiss me, dear child. I shall never forget your sweet concern before I told you his excuse meant nothing. Dear child, you look startled yet.”

There was only a faint voice that came to Rosalie’s lips. “Really nothing, Aunt Belle?”

“Dear child, nothing at all.”

She went down to the Rectory on Saturday and found herself more glad to be there and to be with her mother than she had ever been. When she greeted her mother, “Kiss me again, dear, small mother,” she cried and put her cheek against her mother’s and held it there some moments, rather fiercely and with her eyes closed, as though there were in that contact some febrifuge that abated her inward fever, some mooring whereto, adrift, her mind made fast.

What beset her? What was the matter with her? What worked within her? Feverishly she inquired of herself, seeking to analyse her case; but she could by no means inform herself; her case was not within what diagnosis she could summon. What? Near as she could get she had the feeling, nay, the wild longing, to get out: out of what? She did not know. To get away: away from what? She could not say.

She found in herself a great and an unusual tenderness towards the home life. Only her mother and her father were now at home. Harold was at a branch of his bank in Shanghai. Robert was in Canada. Flora was in India, married, with two small children. Hilda was in Devonshire, married to a doctor. These things had happened, these flights been winged, and she had taken but the smallest interest in them. She had had her own af-fairs. She had had herself to think of. She had lost touch with her brothers and sisters. She scarcely ever thought about them. Now she wanted very much to hear about them. What news of them was there? How were they getting on? She did want--she could fix that much of her state, or it presented a relief for her state--she did want to feel that she belonged to them and they to her. She noticed with a large whelming of pity how very small her mother seemed to have grown She was always small, but now--much smaller, fallen in, very fragile. She noticed with a quick pang how all her father’s violent blackness of hair, and violent red of colouring, and violent glint of eye and violent energy of gesture were faded, greyed, dimmed, devitalized to a hue and to an air that was all one and lustreless, as if he had gone in a pond covered, not with duckweed but with lichen, and had come out, not dripping, but limp and shrouded head to foot in scaly grey. Was it possible that all this had been so when she was last here? She had not noticed it. She noticed that both her dear mother and her father walked on the flat soles of their feet, and touched articles of furniture as they trod, heavily, across the room. A most frightful tenderness towards them possessed her. She wanted like anything to show them devotion and, most frightfully, to receive from them signs of devotion to her--to be able to feel she was theirs, and they hers. She wanted it terribly.

But what else did she want? What? They gave her, all the home talk, but soon it flagged and whatever in her desired satisfaction still gnawed within her and was unsatisfied; she ministered to them and they were pleased but they seemed very quickly tired; they had their accustomed hours and habits, and whatever it was in her that found relief in solicitude still tossed within her and was not relieved. What beset her? What?

Monday came. She was at this dinner, this festival for the consummation and celebration of the betrothal of beautiful Laetitia and Laetitia’s darling Harry. That sick dis-ease of hers had wonderfully vanished when she came into the house, when she was hugged fit to crack her to Aunt Belle’s bosom with “Dear child! Dear child! He’s just arrived! He’s with your uncle downstairs. Look at Laetitia! Lovely! Isn’t she lovely? Kiss me again, again, dear child!” When she was floated to by Laetitia, exquisitely arrayed, pink and white, doll-faced, doll-headed, squeaking with coquettish glee, “Rosalie! Darling! Isn’t this awful? Imagine it for me, Rosalie! It oughtn’t to have been planned like this, ought it? Do tell darling mamma it ought not to have been! I’m trembling. Wouldn’t you be?”

Yes, gone that sick dis-ease. How at this spectacle suffer dis-ease, or any other disturbance of the emotions save only disgust, contempt at such a horrid preparation for such a horrid rite. Excited responsiveness to their most friendly excitation was not needed in her for it was not expected. “The shy, quiet thing you always are, dear child,” Aunt Belle often used to say to her and said now. (And within the week was to beat her breast in that same drawing-room and cry with an exceeding bitter cry, “Shy! We thought her shy! Sly! Sly! Sly to the tips of her fingers, the wicked girl!”)

So she need respond with no more than her normal quiet smile, her normal tone, in their presence, of poor-relation deference and awe. So behind that mask could curl her lip and shudder in the refinements of her views at this most horrid preparation for this most horrid rite. And did. That dis-ease strangely fled, there came to her the swift belief that here, and she had not known it!--was that dis-ease’s cause. It was the anticipation of this exhibition of all the things she hated most, of the most glaring presentiment of outrage of all her strongest principles. This Laetitia, embodiment of useless woman-hood, launching herself on that disgusting dependence on a man that soon would strand her among the derelicts; and that Laetitia’s Harry, that might have been a man among men, coming to the apotheosis of his languishing to--oh, wreathed, fatted calf with gilded horns!

Yes, it was this had vexed her so; and suddenly informed of the seat of her injury she turned upon it disgust and scorn such as never before had she felt (and she, had felt it always) for the whole order of things for which it stood. She felt her very blood run acid, causing her to twist, in her acid contempt for the subservience of women, and most of all for that Laetitia’s subservience, floated on that ghastly coquetry like a shifting cargo that in the first gale will capsize the ship; she felt her very temples throb, and almost thought they must be heard, in her fierce detestation of all the masculinity of men and most of all--yes, with a flash of eye she could not stay and hoped that he could see--that fatuous Harry’s masculinity.

He came into the room--looked pale--poor calf!--and went, with a nervous halt in his walk--sick fool!--to his Laetitia; and looked across at Rosalie and made a half-step to her; and she thought with all her force, to send it to him, her last words to him: that most malevolent, “to see you raise your eyes and hear you breathe, ‘Ah, Laetitia’”; and surely sent it, for on that half-step towards her he stopped, hesitated, and turned and engaged Laetitia again.

She had told herself, leaving the Sturgiss’s house that night a week ago, that she had not believed it possible to hate a man so. Now! Why that was not hate; that, compared with the inimity that now consumed her, was a mere chill indifference. And it had made her tremble! She was rigid now. Stiff with hate! He personified for her all in life against which she was in rebellion, all in life that her soul abhorred; and while, in the moments before dinner, grunting Uncle Pyke and rallying Aunt Belle and coquetting Laetitia crowded about him, leaving her alone and far apart, she, for the reason that it gave to her hate, and for the example that stood before her eyes, reviewed again her theories of life and again pledged herself in their support....

“Dinner is served.” That group went laughing to the door, she followed. “No, no, my boy. Don’t stand on ceremony. Pass along as we come. Why, hang it, man, we regard you as one of the family! Ha! ha! haw!” Down the stairs in a body, she following. There is, from their conversation, something the wreathed calf is to get from his coat to bring to show them, a letter or a token or something. The dining-room is to the front on the ground floor. The coats hang in the hall, a narrow passage there, that runs back to Uncle Pyke’s study. They are down. “Shall I get it now?” “Yes, bring it along; bring it along, my boy.” “And Rosalie” (Aunt Belle), “my fan, dear child. Dear child, I left it on the table in Uncle Pyke’s den. You will? Dear child!”

They pass in. The gilded calf turns from them for what it is he is to fetch from his coat; she slips by him to the study and takes up the fan and comes with it again.

It is dim in the passage. A condition on which generous Uncle Pyke years before installed this wonderful electric light that you flick on and flick off as you require it was that it should always be flicked off when you did not require it. Now as Rosalie came from the study the passage was lit only by the shaft of light that gleamed from the dining-room door; its only sound Aunt Belle’s noisy chatter from the waiting table.

He was fumbling at the coats, standing there sharply outlined against the stream of light, his face cut on it in a perfect silhouette. She had to pass him. That hateful he. She was seized with a fit of that same trembling that had shaken her after the passage between them at the gate on Shoot Up Hill. It shook her now, dreadfully. Her knees trembled. She felt faint. Awful to hate so! She was quite close, almost touching him. It was necessary he should move, forward or back, to give her room. But he did not move. His hands, outstretched before him on the coats, and sharp against the light, appeared to her to be shaking; but that was the hallucination of this frightful trembling that possessed her. She tried to say, “If you please--,” but, dreadfully, had no voice; but made some sound; and he, most slowly, drew back. It was before him that she had to pass.

She advanced; and felt, as if she saw it, the intensity of the gaze of his eyes upon her; and saw, as if the place were light and her look not averted, his “marching” face and those lines radiating to his temples (horizon tracks) where the faint touch of greyness was; and suddenly had upon her senses, with an extraordinary pungency, causing them to swim, that odd, nice smell there was about him of mingled peat and soap and fresh tobacco, of tweed and heather and the sea.

She caught her breath...

The thing’s too poignant for the words a man has.

She was caught in his arms, terribly enfolding her. He was crying in her ears, passionately, triumphantly, “Rosalie! Rosalie!” She was in his arms. Those long, strong arms of his were round her; and she was caught against his heart, her face upturned to his, his face against her own; and she was swooning, falling through incredible spaces, drowning in incredible seas, sinking through incredible blackness; and in her ears his voice, coming to her in her extremity like the beat of a wing in the night, like the first pulsing roll of music enormously remote, “Rosalie! Rosalie!”

The thing’s too poignant for the words one has. This girl’s extremity was very great, not to be set in words. Words cannot bring to earth that which, ethereal, defies our comprehension as life and death defy it and, like life and death, to our comprehension only sublimely IS. Words only can say her spirit, bursting from bondage, streamed up to cleave to his; how tell the anguish, how the ecstasy? Words only can say her spirit, like a live part of her drawn out of her, seemed to be rushing upwards from her body to her lips; words cannot tell the anguish that was bliss, the rapture that was pain. Only can say that she was in his arms, her heart to his, his lips against her own, and cannot tell--

But also it is to be accounted to her for her extremity that herein all her life’s habit was delivered over by her to betrayal.

## CHAPTER XI

He was saying, “We must go in. Can you go in?” She breathed, “I can.”

That dinner! That after-dinner in the drawing-room upstairs! It is a nightmare to be imagined, not to be described. Imagine walking from the darkness and the frightful secret of the passage into the blazing dazzle and the glittering eyes of the resplendent dinner party! They, in Harry’s absence, have been exchanging the last private nods and flashes. “Soon! Soon!” they have been nodding to one another. Uncle Pyke, licking his chops anticipatorily of his bath in his soup, has been licking them also in relish of working off his daughter in this excellent match; Aunt Belle, kind, kind Aunt Belle, with a last satisfied eye about the appointments of the table, has patted her Laetitia’s hand and conveyed to her, “Soon, soon, darling; soon, soon!” Beautiful Laetitia has given a gentle, glad squeeze to the patting hand and smiled a lovely, happy, certain smile. “Soon! Soon!” has gone the jolly signal--and it is not going to be soon, nor late; it is never, never going to happen; and worse than never happen!

Worse than never happen! That’s it. That is the awful knowledge of awful guilt with which Rosalie sits there and freezes in guilty agony at every pause in the conversation and could scream to notice how the pauses grow longer and longer, more frequent and more frequent yet. There’s a frightful constraint, a chilly, creepy dreadfulness steals about the party. They go upstairs--Aunt Belle and Rosalie and beautiful Laetitia--and the constraint goes with them. They sit and stare and hardly a word said. Something’s up! What’s up? What’s the matter with everything? Why is everything hanging like this! What’s up? And the men come in--Uncle Pyke swollen with food, swollen with indigestion, swollen with baffled perplexity and ferocious irritation; and Harry--she dare not look at Harry--and the thing is worse, the awfulness more awful. Glances go shooting round the awful silences--Uncle Pyke’s atrabilious eye in the burning fiery furnace of his swollen face is a stupendous note of interrogation directed upon Aunt Belle; Aunt Belle’s eyebrows arch to scalp and appear likely to disappear into her scalp and remain there in the effort to express, “I don’t know! I can’t imagine!”; Laetitia--Laetitia’s eyes upon her mother are as a spaniel’s upon one devouring meat at table.

Frightfulness more frightful, awfulness more awful; in Rosalie almost now beyond control the desire to scream, or to burst into tears or wildly into laughter. Then she knows herself upon her feet and hears her voice: “Aunt Belle. I must go, I think. I think I am very tired to-night.”

They suffer her to go.

That’s all a nightmare; but, when the door is closed upon them, like a nightmare gone. She was alone upon the staircase and then down in the hall--by those coats!--and, as though no ghastly interval had been, the amazing and beloved moment was returned to her. Out of a nightmare into a dream! She stood in her dream a moment--two moments--three--by the hall door. Who till that evening never had thought of love, astonishingly was invested with all love’s darling cunning. She felt somehow he would see her again before she left; and love’s dear cunning told her right. He came swiftly down the stairs. She never knew on what pretext he had left the room. He came to her. Love loves these snatched moments and always makes them snatched to breathlessness. She opened the door and must be gone. She said to him, speaking first, “Oh, we were vile in there! How vile we were!”

It was, the intimacy and the abruptness of it, the perfect comprehension that their thoughts were shared, as if they had known and loved for years.

He caught her hand. “My conspirator! My secret-sharer!”

She gave him her heart in her eyes.

He said, “To-morrow, I will come to you.”

She disengaged her hand.

He gave a swift look all about and caught her in his arms. “You must tell me, my Rosalie. Tell me.”

She breathed, “You knew, before I knew, that I loved you.”

When she was home and got to her room she undressed, suffering her clothes to lie as they slipped from her. She got into bed, moving there and then lying there as one in trance.

Cataclysm! All she had been, all she had determined--all, all gone; all nothing, surrendered all. At a touch, in a moment, without a cry, without a shot, without a stroke, all her life’s habit swept away. All she had been, all she’d designed, all she had built within herself and walled about herself, all she had scorned, all that with a violent antipathy she had shuddered from or with curled lip spurned away,--all, all betrayed, breached, mined, calamitously riven, tumultously sundered, burst away.

She turned her face to the pillow and began to cry--most frightfully.

It was very terrible for Rosalie.