The Lost Girl

Take a mining townlet like Woodhouse, with a population of ten thousand people, and three generations behind it. This space of three generations argues a certain well-established society. The old “County” has fled from the sight of so much disembowelled coal, to flourish on mineral rights in regions still idyllic. Remains one great and inaccessible magnate, the local coal owner: three generations old, and clambering on the bottom step of the “County,” kicking off the mass below. Rule him out.

A well established society in Woodhouse, full of fine shades, ranging from the dark of coal-dust to grit of stone-mason and sawdust of timber-merchant, through the lustre of lard and butter and meat, to the perfume of the chemist and the disinfectant of the doctor, on to the serene gold-tarnish of bank-managers, cashiers for the firm, clergymen and such-like, as far as the automobile refulgence of the general-manager of all the collieries. Here the ne plus ultra. The general manager lives in the shrubberied seclusion of the so-called Manor. The genuine Hall, abandoned by the “County,” has been taken over as offices by the firm.

Here we are then: a vast substratum of colliers; a thick sprinkling of tradespeople intermingled with small employers of labour and diversified by elementary schoolmasters and nonconformist clergy; a higher layer of bank-managers, rich millers and well-to-do ironmasters, episcopal clergy and the managers of collieries, then the rich and sticky cherry of the local coal-owner glistening over all.

Such the complicated social system of a small industrial town in the Midlands of England, in this year of grace 1920. But let us go back a little. Such it was in the last calm year of plenty, 1913.

A calm year of plenty. But one chronic and dreary malady: that of the odd women. Why, in the name of all prosperity, should every class but the lowest in such a society hang overburdened with Dead Sea fruit of odd women, unmarried, unmarriageable women, called old maids? Why is it that every tradesman, every school-master, every bank-manager, and every clergyman produces one, two, three or more old maids? Do the middle-classes, particularly the lower middle-classes, give birth to more girls than boys? Or do the lower middle-class men assiduously climb up or down, in marriage, thus leaving their true partners stranded? Or are middle-class women very squeamish in their choice of husbands?

However it be, it is a tragedy. Or perhaps it is not.

Perhaps these unmarried women of the middle-classes are the famous sexless-workers of our ant-industrial society, of which we hear so much. Perhaps all they lack is an occupation: in short, a job. But perhaps we might hear their own opinion, before we lay the law down.

In Woodhouse, there was a terrible crop of old maids among the “nobs,” the tradespeople and the clergy. The whole town of women, colliers’ wives and all, held its breath as it saw a chance of one of these daughters of comfort and woe getting off. They flocked to the well-to-do weddings with an intoxication of relief. For let class-jealousy be what it may, a woman hates to see another woman left stalely on the shelf, without a chance. They all wanted the middle-class girls to find husbands. Every one wanted it, including the girls themselves. Hence the dismalness.

Now James Houghton had only one child: his daughter Alvina. Surely Alvina Houghton—

But let us retreat to the early eighties, when Alvina was a baby: or even further back, to the palmy days of James Houghton. In his palmy days, James Houghton was crême de la crême of Woodhouse society. The house of Houghton had always been well-to-do: tradespeople, we must admit; but after a few generations of affluence, tradespeople acquire a distinct cachet. Now James Houghton, at the age of twenty-eight, inherited a splendid business in Manchester goods, in Woodhouse. He was a tall, thin, elegant young man with side-whiskers, genuinely refined, somewhat in the Bulwer style. He had a taste for elegant conversation and elegant literature and elegant Christianity: a tall, thin, brittle young man, rather fluttering in his manner, full of facile ideas, and with a beautiful speaking voice: most beautiful. Withal, of course, a tradesman. He courted a small, dark woman, older than himself, daughter of a Derbyshire squire. He expected to get at least ten thousand pounds with her. In which he was disappointed, for he got only eight hundred. Being of a romantic-commercial nature, he never forgave her, but always treated her with the most elegant courtesy. To seehim peel and prepare an apple for her was an exquisite sight. But that peeled and quartered apple was her portion. This elegant Adam of commerce gave Eve her own back, nicely cored, and had no more to do with her. Meanwhile Alvina was born.

Before all this, however, before his marriage, James Houghton had built Manchester House. It was a vast square building—vast, that is, for Woodhouse—standing on the main street and high-road of the small but growing town. The lower front consisted of two fine shops, one for Manchester goods, one for silk and woollens. This was James Houghton’s commercial poem.

For James Houghton was a dreamer, and something of a poet: commercial, be it understood. He liked the novels of George Macdonald, and the fantasies of that author, extremely. He wove one continual fantasy for himself, a fantasy of commerce. He dreamed of silks and poplins, luscious in texture and of unforeseen exquisiteness: he dreamed of carriages of the “County” arrested before his windows, of exquisite women ruffling charmed, entranced to his counter. And charming, entrancing, he served them his lovely fabrics, which only he and they could sufficiently appreciate. His fame spread, until Alexandra, Princess of Wales, and Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, the two best-dressed women in Europe, floated down from heaven to the shop in Woodhouse, and sallied forth to show what could be done by purchasing from James Houghton.

We cannot say why James Houghton failed to become the Liberty or the Snelgrove of his day. Perhaps he had too much imagination. Be that as it may, in those early days when he brought his wife to her new home, his window on the Manchester side was a foam and a may-blossom of muslins and prints, his window on the London side was an autumn evening of silks and rich fabrics. What wife could fail to be dazzled! But she, poor darling, from her stone hall in stony Derbyshire, was a little bit repulsed by the man’s dancing in front of his stock, like David before the ark.

The home to which he brought her was a monument. In the great bedroom over the shop he had his furniture built: built of solid mahogany: oh too, too solid. No doubt he hopped or skipped himself with satisfaction into the monstrous matrimonial bed: it could only be mounted by means of a stool and chair. But the poor, secluded little woman, older than he, must have climbed up with a heavy heart, to lie and face the gloomy Bastille of mahogany, the great cupboard opposite, or to turn wearily sideways to the great cheval mirror, which performed a perpetual and hideous bow before her grace. Such furniture! It could never be removed from the room.

The little child was born in the second year. And then James Houghton decamped to a small, half-furnished bedroom at the other end of the house, where he slept on a rough board and played the anchorite for the rest of his days. His wife was left alone with her baby and the built-in furniture. She developed heart disease, as a result of nervous repressions.

But like a butterfly James fluttered over his fabrics. He was a tyrant to his shop-girls. No French marquis in a Dickens’ novel could have been more elegant and raffiné and heartless. The girls detested him. And yet, his curious refinement and enthusiasm bore them away. They submitted to him. The shop attracted much curiosity. But the poor-spirited Woodhouse people were weak buyers. They wearied James Houghton with their demand for common zephyrs, for red flannel which they would scallop with black worsted, for black alpacas and bombazines and merinos. He fluffed out his silk-striped muslins, his India cotton-prints. But the natives shied off as if he had offered them the poisoned robes of Herakles.

There was a sale. These sales contributed a good deal to Mrs. Houghton’s nervous heart-disease. They brought the first signs of wear and tear into the face of James Houghton. At first, of course, he merely marked down, with discretion, his less-expensive stock of prints and muslins, nuns-veilings and muslin delaines, with a few fancy braidings and trimmings in guimp or bronze to enliven the affair. And Woodhouse bought cautiously.

After the sale, however, James Houghton felt himself at liberty to plunge into an orgy of new stock. He flitted, with a tense look on his face, to Manchester. After which huge bundles, bales and boxes arrived in Woodhouse, and were dumped on the pavement of the shop. Friday evening came, and with it a revelation in Houghton’s window: the first piqués, the first strangely-woven and honey-combed toilet covers and bed quilts, the first frill-caps and aprons for maid-servants: a wonder in white. That was how James advertised it. “A Wonder in White.” Who knows but that he had been reading Wilkie Collins’ famous novel!

As the nine days of the wonder-in-white passed and receded, James disappeared in the direction of London. A few Fridays later he came out with his Winter Touch. Weird and wonderful winter coats, for ladies—everything James handled was for ladies, he scorned the coarser sex—: weird and wonderful winter coats for ladies, of thick, black, pockmarked cloth, stood and flourished their bear-fur cuffs in the background, while tippets, boas, muffs and winter-fancies coquetted in front of the window-space. Friday-night crowds gathered outside: the gas-lamps shone their brightest: James Houghton hovered in the background like an author on his first night in the theatre. The result was a sensation. Ten villages stared and crushed round the plate glass. It was a sensation: but what sensation! In the breasts of the crowd, wonder, admiration, fear, and ridicule. Let us stress the word fear. The inhabitants of Woodhouse were afraid lest James Houghton should impose his standards upon them. His goods were in excellent taste: but his customers were in as bad taste as possible. They stood outside and pointed, giggled, and jeered. Poor James, like an author on his first night, saw his work fall more than flat.

But still he believed in his own excellence: and quite justly. What he failed to perceive was that the crowd hated excellence. Woodhouse wanted a gently graduated progress in mediocrity, a mediocrity so stale and flat that it fell outside the imagination of any sensitive mortal. Woodhouse wanted a series of vulgar little thrills, as one tawdry mediocrity was imported from Nottingham or Birmingham to take the place of some tawdry mediocrity which Nottingham and Birmingham had already discarded. That Woodhouse, as a very condition of its own being, hated any approach to originality or real taste, this James Houghton could never learn. He thought he had not been clever enough, when he had been far, far too clever already. He always thought that Dame Fortune was a capricious and fastidious dame, a sort of Elizabeth of Austria or Alexandra, Princess of Wales, elegant beyond his grasp. Whereas Dame Fortune, even in London or Vienna, let alone in Woodhouse, was a vulgar woman of the middle and lower middle-class, ready to put her heavy foot on anything that was not vulgar, machine-made, and appropriate to the herd. When he saw his delicate originalities, as well as his faint flourishes of draper’s fantasy, squashed flat under the calm and solid foot of vulgar Dame Fortune, he fell into fits of depression bordering on mysticism, and talked to his wife in a vague way of higher influences and the angel Israfel. She, poor lady, was thoroughly scared by Israfel, and completely unhooked by the vagaries of James.

At last—we hurry down the slope of James’ misfortunes—the real days of Houghton’s Great Sales began. Houghton’s Great Bargain Events were really events. After some years of hanging on, he let go splendidly. He marked down his prints, his chintzes, his dimities and his veilings with a grand and lavish hand. Bang went his blue pencil through 3/11, and nobly he subscribed 1/0-3/4. Prices fell like nuts. A lofty one-and-eleven rolled down to six-three, 1/6 magically shrank into 4-3/4d, whilst good solid prints exposed themselves at 3-3/4d per yard.

Now this was really an opportunity. Moreover the goods, having become a little stale during their years of ineffectuality, were beginning to approximate to the public taste. And besides, good sound stuff it was, no matter what the pattern. And so the little Woodhouse girls went to school in petties and drawers made of material which James had destined for fair summer dresses: petties and drawers of which the little Woodhouse girls were ashamed, for all that. For if they should chance to turn up their little skirts, be sure they would raise a chorus among their companions: “Yah-h-h, yer’ve got Houghton’s threp’ny draws on!”

All this time James Houghton walked on air. He still saw the Fata Morgana snatching his fabrics round her lovely form, and pointing him to wealth untold. True, he became also Superintendent of the Sunday School. But whether this was an act of vanity, or whether it was an attempt to establish an Entente Cordiale with higher powers, who shall judge.

Meanwhile his wife became more and more an invalid; the little Alvina was a pretty, growing child. Woodhouse was really impressed by the sight of Mrs. Houghton, small, pale and withheld, taking a walk with her dainty little girl, so fresh in an ermine tippet and a muff. Mrs. Houghton in shiny black bear’s-fur, the child in the white and spotted ermine, passing silent and shadowy down the street, made an impression which the people did not forget.

But Mrs. Houghton had pains at her heart. If, during her walk, she saw two little boys having a scrimmage, she had to run to them with pence and entreaty, leaving them dumfounded, whilst she leaned blue at the lips against a wall. If she saw a carter crack his whip over the ears of the horse, as the horse laboured uphill, she had to cover her eyes and avert her face, and all her strength left her.

So she stayed more and more in her room, and the child was given to the charge of a governess. Miss Frost was a handsome, vigorous young woman of about thirty years of age, with grey-white hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. The white hair was not at all tragical: it was a family trait.

Miss Frost mattered more than any one else to Alvina Houghton, during the first long twenty-five years of the girl’s life. The governess was a strong, generous woman, a musician by nature. She had a sweet voice, and sang in the choir of the chapel, and took the first class of girls in the Sunday-School of which James Houghton was Superintendent. She disliked and rather despised James Houghton, saw in him elements of a hypocrite, detested his airy and gracious selfishness, his lack of human feeling, and most of all, his fairy fantasy. As James went further into life, he became a dreamer. Sad indeed that he died before the days of Freud. He enjoyed the most wonderful and fairy-like dreams, which he could describe perfectly, in charming, delicate language. At such times his beautifully modulated voice all but sang, his grey eyes gleamed fiercely under his bushy, hairy eyebrows, his pale face with its side-whiskers had a strange lueur, his long thin hands fluttered occasionally. He had become meagre in figure, his skimpy but genteel coat would be buttoned over his breast, as he recounted his dream-adventures, adventures that were half Edgar Allan Poe, half Andersen, with touches of Vathek and Lord Byron and George Macdonald: perhaps more than a touch of the last. Ladies were always struck by these accounts. But Miss Frost never felt so strongly moved to impatience as when she was within hearing.

For twenty years, she and James Houghton treated each other with a courteous distance. Sometimes she broke into open impatience with him, sometimes he answered her tartly: “Indeed, indeed! Oh, indeed! Well, well, I’m sorry you find it so—” as if the injury consisted in her finding it so. Then he would flit away to the Conservative Club, with a fleet, light, hurried step, as if pressed by fate. At the club he played chess—at which he was excellent—and conversed. Then he flitted back at half-past twelve, to dinner.

The whole morale of the house rested immediately on Miss Frost. She saw her line in the first year. She must defend the little Alvina, whom she loved as her own, and the nervous, petulant, heart-stricken woman, the mother, from the vagaries of James. Not that James had any vices. He did not drink or smoke, was abstemious and clean as an anchorite, and never lowered his fine tone. But still, the two unprotected ones must be sheltered from him. Miss Frost imperceptibly took into her hands the reins of the domestic government. Her rule was quiet, strong, and generous. She was not seeking her own way. She was steering the poor domestic ship of Manchester House, illuminating its dark rooms with her own sure, radiant presence: her silver-white hair, and her pale, heavy, reposeful face seemed to give off a certain radiance. She seemed to give weight, ballast, and repose to the staggering and bewildered home. She controlled the maid, and suggested the meals—meals which James ate without knowing what he ate. She brought in flowers and books, and, very rarely, a visitor. Visitors were out of place in the dark sombreness of Manchester House. Her flowers charmed the petulant invalid, her books she sometimes discussed with the airy James: after which discussions she was invariably filled with exasperation and impatience, whilst James invariably retired to the shop, and was heard raising his musical voice, which the work-girls hated, to one or other of the work-girls.

James certainly had an irritating way of speaking of a book. He talked of incidents, and effects, and suggestions, as if the whole thing had just been a sensational-æsthetic attribute to himself. Not a grain of human feeling in the man, said Miss Frost, flushing pink with exasperation. She herself invariably took the human line.

Meanwhile the shops began to take on a hopeless and frowsy look. After ten years’ sales, spring sales, summer sales, autumn sales, winter sales, James began to give up the drapery dream. He himself could not bear any more to put the heavy, pock-holed black cloth coat, with wild bear cuffs and collar, on to the stand. He had marked it down from five guineas to one guinea, and then, oh ignoble day, to ten-and-six. He nearly kissed the gipsy woman with a basket of tin saucepan-lids, when at last she bought it for five shillings, at the end of one of his winter sales. But even she, in spite of the bitter sleety day, would not put the coat on in the shop. She carried it over her arm down to the Miners’ Arms. And later, with a shock that really hurt him, James, peeping bird-like out of his shop door, saw her sitting driving a dirty rag-and-bone cart with a green-white, mouldy pony, and flourishing her arms like some wild and hairy-decorated squaw. For the long bear-fur, wet with sleet, seemed like a chevaux de frise of long porcupine quills round her fore-arms and her neck. Yet such good, such wonderful material! James eyed it for one moment, and then fled like a rabbit to the stove in his back regions.

The higher powers did not seem to fulfil the terms of treaty which James hoped for. He began to back out from the Entente. The Sunday School was a great trial to him. Instead of being carried away by his grace and eloquence, the nasty louts of colliery boys and girls openly banged their feet and made deafening noises when he tried to speak. He said many acid and withering things, as he stood there on the rostrum. But what is the good of saying acid things to those little fiends and gall-bladders, the colliery children. The situation was saved by Miss Frost’s sweeping together all the big girls, under her surveillance, and by her organizing that the tall and handsome blacksmith who taught the lower boys should extend his influence over the upper boys. His influence was more than effectual. It consisted in gripping any recalcitrant boy just above the knee, and jesting with him in a jocular manner, in the dialect. The blacksmith’s hand was all a blacksmith’s hand need be, and his dialect was as broad as could be wished. Between the grip and the homely idiom no boy could endure without squealing. So the Sunday School paid more attention to James, whose prayers were beautiful. But then one of the boys, a protegé of Miss Frost, having been left for half an hour in the obscure room with Mrs. Houghton, gave away the secret of the blacksmith’s grip, which secret so haunted the poor lady that it marked a stage in the increase of her malady, and made Sunday afternoon a nightmare to her. And then James Houghton resented something in the coarse Scotch manner of the minister of that day. So that the superintendency of the Sunday School came to an end.

At the same time, Solomon had to divide his baby. That is, he let the London side of his shop to W. H. Johnson, the tailor and haberdasher, a parvenu little fellow whose English would not bear analysis. Bitter as it was, it had to be. Carpenters and joiners appeared, and the premises were completely severed. From her room in the shadows at the back the invalid heard the hammering and sawing, and suffered. W. H. Johnson came out with a spick-and-span window, and had his wife, a shrewd, quiet woman, and his daughter, a handsome, loud girl, to help him on Friday evenings. Men flocked in—even women, buying their husbands a sixpence-halfpenny tie. They could have bought a tie for four-three from James Houghton. But no, they would rather give sixpence-halfpenny for W.H. Johnson’s fresh but rubbishy stuff. And James, who had tried to rise to another successful sale, saw the streams pass into the other doorway, and heard the heavy feet on the hollow boards of the other shop: his shop no more.

After this cut at his pride and integrity he lay in retirement for a while, mystically inclined. Probably he would have come to Swedenborg, had not his clipt wings spread for a new flight. He hit upon the brilliant idea of working up his derelict fabrics into ready-mades: not men’s clothes, oh no: women’s, or rather, ladies’. Ladies’ Tailoring, said the new announcement.

James Houghton was happy once more. A zig-zag wooden stair-way was rigged up the high back of Manchester House. In the great lofts sewing-machines of various patterns and movements were installed. A manageress was advertised for, and work-girls were hired. So a new phase of life started. At half-past six in the morning there was a clatter of feet and of girls’ excited tongues along the back-yard and up the wooden stair-way outside the back wall. The poor invalid heard every clack and every vibration. She could never get over her nervous apprehension of an invasion. Every morning alike, she felt an invasion of some enemy was breaking in on her. And all day long the low, steady rumble of sewing-machines overhead seemed like the low drumming of a bombardment upon her weak heart. To make matters worse, James Houghton decided that he must have his sewing-machines driven by some extra-human force. He installed another plant of machinery—acetylene or some such contrivance—which was intended to drive all the little machines from one big belt. Hence a further throbbing and shaking in the upper regions, truly terrible to endure. But, fortunately or unfortunately, the acetylene plant was not a success. Girls got their thumbs pierced, and sewing machines absolutely refused to stop sewing, once they had started, and absolutely refused to start, once they had stopped. So that after a while, one loft was reserved for disused and rusty, but expensive engines.

Dame Fortune, who had refused to be taken by fine fabrics and fancy trimmings, was just as reluctant to be captured by ready-mades. Again the good dame was thoroughly lower middle-class. James Houghton designed “robes.” Now Robes were the mode. Perhaps it was Alexandra, Princess of Wales, who gave glory to the slim, glove-fitting Princess Robe. Be that as it may, James Houghton designed robes. His work-girls, a race even more callous than shop-girls, proclaimed the fact that James tried on his own inventions upon his own elegant thin person, before the privacy of his own cheval mirror. And even if he did, why not? Miss Frost, hearing this legend, looked sideways at the enthusiast.

Let us remark in time that Miss Frost had already ceased to draw any maintenance from James Houghton. Far from it, she herself contributed to the upkeep of the domestic hearth and board. She had fully decided never to leave her two charges. She knew that a governess was an impossible item in Manchester House, as things went. And so she trudged the country, giving music lessons to the daughters of tradesmen and of colliers who boasted pianofortes. She even taught heavy-handed but dauntless colliers, who were seized with a passion to “play.” Miles she trudged, on her round from village to village: a white-haired woman with a long, quick stride, a strong figure, and a quick, handsome smile when once her face awoke behind her gold-rimmed glasses. Like many short-sighted people, she had a certain intent look of one who goes her own way.

The miners knew her, and entertained the highest respect and admiration for her. As they streamed in a grimy stream home from pit, they diverged like some magic dark river from off the pavement into the horse-way, to give her room as she approached. And the men who knew her well enough to salute her, by calling her name “Miss Frost!” giving it the proper intonation of salute, were fussy men indeed. “She’s a lady if ever there was one,” they said. And they meant it. Hearing her name, poor Miss Frost would flash a smile and a nod from behind her spectacles, but whose black face she smiled to she never, or rarely knew. If she did chance to get an inkling, then gladly she called in reply “Mr. Lamb,” or “Mr. Calladine.” In her way she was a proud woman, for she was regarded with cordial respect, touched with veneration, by at least a thousand colliers, and by perhaps as many colliers’ wives. That is something, for any woman.

Miss Frost charged fifteen shillings for thirteen weeks’ lessons, two lessons a week. And at that she was considered rather dear. She was supposed to be making money. What money she made went chiefly to support the Houghton household. In the meanwhile she drilled Alvina thoroughly in theory and pianoforte practice, for Alvina was naturally musical, and besides this she imparted to the girl the elements of a young lady’s education, including the drawing of flowers in water-colour, and the translation of a Lamartine poem.

Now incredible as it may seem, fate threw another prop to the falling house of Houghton, in the person of the manageress of the work-girls, Miss Pinnegar. James Houghton complained of Fortune, yet to what other man would Fortune have sent two such women as Miss Frost and Miss Pinnegar, gratis? Yet there they were. And doubtful if James was ever grateful for their presence.

If Miss Frost saved him from heaven knows what domestic débâcle and horror, Miss Pinnegar saved him from the workhouse. Let us not mince matters. For a dozen years Miss Frost supported the heart-stricken, nervous invalid, Clariss Houghton: for more than twenty years she cherished, tended and protected the young Alvina, shielding the child alike from a neurotic mother and a father such as James. For nearly twenty years she saw that food was set on the table, and clean sheets were spread on the beds: and all the time remained virtually in the position of an outsider, without one grain of established authority.

And then to find Miss Pinnegar! In her way, Miss Pinnegar was very different from Miss Frost. She was a rather short, stout, mouse-coloured, creepy kind of woman with a high colour in her cheeks, and dun, close hair like a cap. It was evident she was not a lady: her grammar was not without reproach. She had pale grey eyes, and a padding step, and a soft voice, and almost purplish cheeks. Mrs. Houghton, Miss Frost, and Alvina did not like her. They suffered her unwillingly.

But from the first she had a curious ascendancy over James Houghton. One would have expected his æsthetic eye to be offended. But no doubt it was her voice: her soft, near, sure voice, which seemed almost like a secret touch upon her hearer. Now many of her hearers disliked being secretly touched, as it were beneath their clothing. Miss Frost abhorred it: so did Mrs. Houghton. Miss Frost’s voice was clear and straight as a bell-note, open as the day. Yet Alvina, though in loyalty she adhered to her beloved Miss Frost, did not really mind the quiet suggestive power of Miss Pinnegar. For Miss Pinnegar was not vulgarly insinuating. On the contrary, the things she said were rather clumsy and downright. It was only that she seemed to weigh what she said, secretly, before she said it, and then she approached as if she would slip it into her hearer’s consciousness without his being aware of it. She seemed to slide her speeches unnoticed into one’s ears, so that one accepted them without the slightest challenge. That was just her manner of approach. In her own way, she was as loyal and unselfish as Miss Frost. There are such poles of opposition between honesties and loyalties.

Miss Pinnegar had the second class of girls in the Sunday School, and she took second, subservient place in Manchester House. By force of nature, Miss Frost took first place. Only when Miss Pinnegar spoke to Mr. Houghton—nay, the very way she addressed herself to him—“What do you think, Mr. Houghton?”—then there seemed to be assumed an immediacy of correspondence between the two, and an unquestioned priority in their unison, his and hers, which was a cruel thorn in Miss Frost’s outspoken breast. This sort of secret intimacy and secret exulting in having, really, the chief power, was most repugnant to the white-haired woman. Not that there was, in fact, any secrecy, or any form of unwarranted correspondence between James Houghton and Miss Pinnegar. Far from it. Each of them would have found any suggestion of such a possibility repulsive in the extreme. It was simply an implicit correspondence between their two psyches, an immediacy of understanding which preceded all expression, tacit, wireless.

Miss Pinnegar lived in: so that the household consisted of the invalid, who mostly sat, in her black dress with a white lace collar fastened by a twisted gold brooch, in her own dim room, doing nothing, nervous and heart-suffering; then James, and the thin young Alvina, who adhered to her beloved Miss Frost, and then these two strange women. Miss Pinnegar never lifted up her voice in household affairs: she seemed, by her silence, to admit her own inadequacy in culture and intellect, when topics of interest were being discussed, only coming out now and then with defiant platitudes and truisms—for almost defiantly she took the commonplace, vulgarian point of view; yet after everything she would turn with her quiet, triumphant assurance to James Houghton, and start on some point of business, soft, assured, ascendant. The others shut their ears.

Now Miss Pinnegar had to get her footing slowly. She had to let James run the gamut of his creations. Each Friday night new wonders, robes and ladies’ “suits”—the phrase was very new—garnished the window of Houghton’s shop. It was one of the sights of the place, Houghton’s window on Friday night. Young or old, no individual, certainly no female left Woodhouse without spending an excited and usually hilarious ten minutes on the pavement under the window. Muffled shrieks of young damsels who had just got their first view, guffaws of sympathetic youths, continued giggling and expostulation and “Eh, but what price the umbrella skirt, my girl!” and “You’d like to marry me in that, my boy—what? not half!”—or else “Eh, now, if you’d seen me in that you’d have fallen in love with me at first sight, shouldn’t you?”—with a probable answer “I should have fallen over myself making haste to get away”—loud guffaws:—all this was the regular Friday night’s entertainment in Woodhouse. James Houghton’s shop was regarded as a weekly comic issue. His piqué costumes with glass buttons and sort of steel-trimming collars and cuffs were immortal.

But why, once more, drag it out. Miss Pinnegar served in the shop on Friday nights. She stood by her man. Sometimes when the shrieks grew loudest she came to the shop door and looked with her pale grey eyes at the ridiculous mob of lasses in tam-o-shanters and youths half buried in caps. And she imposed a silence. They edged away.

Meanwhile Miss Pinnegar pursued the sober and even tenor of her own way. Whilst James lashed out, to use the local phrase, in robes and “suits,” Miss Pinnegar steadily ground away, producing strong, indestructible shirts and singlets for the colliers, sound, serviceable aprons for the colliers’ wives, good print dresses for servants, and so on. She executed no flights of fancy. She had her goods made to suit her people. And so, underneath the foam and froth of James’ creative adventure flowed a slow but steady stream of output and income. The women of Woodhouse came at last to depend on Miss Pinnegar. Growing lads in the pit reduce their garments to shreds with amazing expedition. “I’ll go to Miss Pinnegar for thy shirts this time, my lad,” said the harassed mothers, “and see if they’ll stand thee.” It was almost like a threat. But it served Manchester House.

James bought very little stock in these days: just remnants and pieces for his immortal robes. It was Miss Pinnegar who saw the travellers and ordered the unions and calicoes and grey flannel. James hovered round and said the last word, of course. But what was his last word but an echo of Miss Pinnegar’s penultimate! He was not interested in unions and twills.

His own stock remained on hand. Time, like a slow whirlpool churned it over into sight and out of sight, like a mass of dead sea-weed in a backwash. There was a regular series of sales fortnightly. The display of “creations” fell off. The new entertainment was the Friday-night’s sale. James would attack some portion of his stock, make a wild jumble of it, spend a delirious Wednesday and Thursday marking down, and then open on Friday afternoon. In the evening there was a crush. A good moiré underskirt for one-and-eleven-three was not to be neglected, and a handsome string-lace collarette for six-three would iron out and be worth at least three-and-six. That was how it went: it would nearly all of it iron out into something really nice, poor James’ crumpled stock. His fine, semi-transparent face flushed pink, his eyes flashed as he took in the sixpences and handed back knots of tape or packets of pins for the notorious farthings. What matter if the farthing change had originally cost him a halfpenny! His shop was crowded with women peeping and pawing and turning things over and commenting in loud, unfeeling tones. For there were still many comic items. Once, for example, he suddenly heaped up piles of hats, trimmed and untrimmed, the weirdest, sauciest, most screaming shapes. Woodhouse enjoyed itself that night.

And all the time, in her quiet, polite, think-the-more fashion Miss Pinnegar waited on the people, showing them considerable forbearance and just a tinge of contempt. She became very tired those evenings—her hair under its invisible hairnet became flatter, her cheeks hung down purplish and mottled. But while James stood she stood. The people did not like her, yet she influenced them. And the stock slowly wilted, withered. Some was scrapped. The shop seemed to have digested some of its indigestible contents.

James accumulated sixpences in a miserly fashion. Luckily for her work-girls, Miss Pinnegar took her own orders, and received payments for her own productions. Some of her regular customers paid her a shilling a week—or less. But it made a small, steady income. She reserved her own modest share, paid the expenses of her department, and left the residue to James.

James had accumulated sixpences, and made a little space in his shop. He had desisted from “creations.” Time now for a new flight. He decided it was better to be a manufacturer than a tradesman. His shop, already only half its original size, was again too big. It might be split once more. Rents had risen in Woodhouse. Why not cut off another shop from his premises?

No sooner said than done. In came the architect, with whom he had played many a game of chess. Best, said the architect, take off one good-sized shop, rather than halve the premises. James would be left a little cramped, a little tight, with only one-third of his present space. But as we age we dwindle.

More hammering and alterations, and James found himself cooped in a long, long narrow shop, very dark at the back, with a high oblong window and a door that came in at a pinched corner. Next door to him was a cheerful new grocer of the cheap and florid type. The new grocer whistled “Just Like the Ivy,” and shouted boisterously to his shop-boy. In his doorway, protruding on James’ sensitive vision, was a pyramid of sixpence-halfpenny tins of salmon, red, shiny tins with pink halved salmons depicted, and another yellow pyramid of four-pence-halfpenny tins of pineapple. Bacon dangled in pale rolls almost over James’ doorway, whilst straw and paper, redolent of cheese, lard, and stale eggs filtered through the threshold.

This was coming down in the world, with a vengeance. But what James lost downstairs he tried to recover upstairs. Heaven knows what he would have done, but for Miss Pinnegar. She kept her own work-rooms against him, with a soft, heavy, silent tenacity that would have beaten stronger men than James. But his strength lay in his pliability. He rummaged in the empty lofts, and among the discarded machinery. He rigged up the engines afresh, bought two new machines, and started an elastic department, making elastic for garters and for hat-chins.

He was immensely proud of his first cards of elastic, and saw Dame Fortune this time fast in his yielding hands. But, becoming used to disillusionment, he almost welcomed it. Within six months he realized that every inch of elastic cost him exactly sixty per cent. more than he could sell it for, and so he scrapped his new department. Luckily, he sold one machine and even gained two pounds on it.

After this, he made one last effort. This was hosiery webbing, which could be cut up and made into as-yet-unheard-of garments. Miss Pinnegar kept her thumb on this enterprise, so that it was not much more than abortive. And then James left her alone.

Meanwhile the shop slowly churned its oddments. Every Thursday afternoon James sorted out tangles of bits and bobs, antique garments and occasional finds. With these he trimmed his window, so that it looked like a historical museum, rather soiled and scrappy. Indoors he made baskets of assortments: threepenny, sixpenny, ninepenny and shilling baskets, rather like a bran pie in which everything was a plum. And then, on Friday evening, thin and alert he hovered behind the counter, his coat shabbily buttoned over his narrow chest, his face agitated. He had shaved his side-whiskers, so that they only grew becomingly as low as his ears. His rather large, grey moustache was brushed off his mouth. His hair, gone very thin, was brushed frail and floating over his baldness. But still a gentleman, still courteous, with a charming voice he suggested the possibilities of a pad of green parrots’ tail-feathers, or of a few yards of pink-pearl trimming or of old chenille fringe. The women would pinch the thick, exquisite old chenille fringe, delicate and faded, curious to feel its softness. But they wouldn’t give threepence for it. Tapes, ribbons, braids, buttons, feathers, jabots, bussels, appliqués, fringes, jet-trimmings, bugle-trimmings, bundles of old coloured machine-lace, many bundles of strange cord, in all colours, for old-fashioned braid-patterning, ribbons with H.M.S. Birkenhead, for boys’ sailor caps—everything that nobody wanted, did the women turn over and over, till they chanced on a find. And James’ quick eyes watched the slow surge of his flotsam, as the pot boiled but did not boil away. Wonderful that he did not think of the days when these bits and bobs were new treasures. But he did not.

And at his side Miss Pinnegar quietly took orders for shirts, discussed and agreed, made measurements and received instalments.

The shop was now only opened on Friday afternoons and evenings, so every day, twice a day, James was seen dithering bare-headed and hastily down the street, as if pressed by fate, to the Conservative Club, and twice a day he was seen as hastily returning, to his meals. He was becoming an old man: his daughter was a young woman: but in his own mind he was just the same, and his daughter was a little child, his wife a young invalid whom he must charm by some few delicate attentions—such as the peeled apple.

At the club he got into more mischief. He met men who wanted to extend a brickfield down by the railway. The brickfield was called Klondyke. James had now a new direction to run in: down hill towards Bagthorpe, to Klondyke. Big penny-daisies grew in tufts on the brink of the yellow clay at Klondyke, yellow eggs-and-bacon spread their midsummer mats of flower. James came home with clay smeared all over him, discoursing brilliantly on grit and paste and presses and kilns and stamps. He carried home a rough and pinkish brick, and gloated over it. It was a hard brick, it was a non-porous brick. It was an ugly brick, painfully heavy and parched-looking.

This time he was sure: Dame Fortune would rise like Persephone out of the earth. He was all the more sure, because other men of the town were in with him at this venture: sound, moneyed grocers and plumbers. They were all going to become rich.

Klondyke lasted a year and a half, and was not so bad, for in the end, all things considered, James had lost not more than five per cent. of his money. In fact, all things considered, he was about square. And yet he felt Klondyke as the greatest blow of all. Miss Pinnegar would have aided and abetted him in another scheme, if it would but have cheered him. Even Miss Frost was nice with him. But to no purpose. In the year after Klondyke he became an old man, he seemed to have lost all his feathers, he acquired a plucked, tottering look.

Yet he roused up, after a coal-strike. Throttle-Ha’penny put new life into him. During a coal-strike the miners themselves began digging in the fields, just near the houses, for the surface coal. They found a plentiful seam of drossy, yellowish coal behind the Methodist New Connection Chapel. The seam was opened in the side of a bank, and approached by a footrill, a sloping shaft down which the men walked. When the strike was over, two or three miners still remained working the soft, drossy coal, which they sold for eight-and-sixpence a ton—or sixpence a hundredweight. But a mining population scorned such dirt, as they called it.

James Houghton, however, was seized with a desire to work the Connection Meadow seam, as he called it. He gathered two miner partners—he trotted endlessly up to the field, he talked, as he had never talked before, with inumerable colliers. Everybody he met he stopped, to talk Connection Meadow.

And so at last he sank a shaft, sixty feet deep, rigged up a corrugated-iron engine-house with a winding-engine, and lowered his men one at a time down the shaft, in a big bucket. The whole affair was ricketty, amateurish, and twopenny. The name Connection Meadow was forgotten within three months. Everybody knew the place as Throttle-Ha’penny. “What!” said a collier to his wife: “have we got no coal? You’d better get a bit from Throttle-Ha’penny.” “Nay,” replied the wife, “I’m sure I shan’t. I’m sure I shan’t burn that muck, and smother myself with white ash.”

It was in the early Throttle-Ha’penny days that Mrs. Houghton died. James Houghton cried, and put a black band on his Sunday silk hat. But he was too feverishly busy at Throttle-Ha’penny, selling his hundredweights of ash-pit fodder, as the natives called it, to realize anything else.

He had three men and two boys working his pit, besides a superannuated old man driving the winding engine. And in spite of all jeering, he flourished. Shabby old coal-carts rambled up behind the New Connection, and filled from the pit-bank. The coal improved a little in quality: it was cheap and it was handy. James could sell at last fifty or sixty tons a week: for the stuff was easy getting. And now at last he was actually handling money. He saw millions ahead.

This went on for more than a year. A year after the death of Mrs. Houghton, Miss Frost became ill and suddenly died. Again James Houghton cried and trembled. But it was Throttle-Ha’penny that made him tremble. He trembled in all his limbs, at the touch of success. He saw himself making noble provision for his only daughter.

But alas—it is wearying to repeat the same thing over and over. First the Board of Trade began to make difficulties. Then there was a fault in the seam. Then the roof of Throttle-Ha’penny was so loose and soft, James could not afford timber to hold it up. In short, when his daughter Alvina was about twenty-seven years old, Throttle-Ha’penny closed down. There was a sale of poor machinery, and James Houghton came home to the dark, gloomy house—to Miss Pinnegar and Alvina.

It was a pinched, dreary house. James seemed down for the last time. But Miss Pinnegar persuaded him to take the shop again on Friday evening. For the rest, faded and peaked, he hurried shadowily down to the club.

The heroine of this story is Alvina Houghton. If we leave her out of the first chapter of her own story it is because, during the first twenty-five years of her life, she really was left out of count, or so overshadowed as to be negligible. She and her mother were the phantom passengers in the ship of James Houghton’s fortunes.

In Manchester House, every voice lowered its tone. And so from the first Alvina spoke with a quiet, refined, almost convent voice. She was a thin child with delicate limbs and face, and wide, grey-blue, ironic eyes. Even as a small girl she had that odd ironic tilt of the eyelids which gave her a look as if she were hanging back in mockery. If she were, she was quite unaware of it, for under Miss Frost’s care she received no education in irony or mockery. Miss Frost was straightforward, good-humoured, and a little earnest. Consequently Alvina, or Vina as she was called, understood only the explicit mode of good-humoured straightforwardness.

It was doubtful which shadow was greater over the child: that of Manchester House, gloomy and a little sinister, or that of Miss Frost, benevolent and protective. Sufficient that the girl herself worshipped Miss Frost: or believed she did.

Alvina never went to school. She had her lessons from her beloved governess, she worked at the piano, she took her walks, and for social life she went to the Congregational Chapel, and to the functions connected with the chapel. While she was little, she went to Sunday School twice and to Chapel once on Sundays. Then occasionally there was a magic lantern or a penny reading, to which Miss Frost accompanied her. As she grew older she entered the choir at chapel, she attended Christian Endeavour and P.S.A., and the Literary Society on Monday evenings. Chapel provided her with a whole social activity, in the course of which she met certain groups of people, made certain friends, found opportunity for strolls into the country and jaunts to the local entertainments. Over and above this, every Thursday evening she went to the subscription library to change the week’s supply of books, and there again she met friends and acquaintances. It is hard to overestimate the value of church or chapel—but particularly chapel—as a social institution, in places like Woodhouse. The Congregational Chapel provided Alvina with a whole outer life, lacking which she would have been poor indeed. She was not particularly religious by inclination. Perhaps her father’s beautiful prayers put her off. So she neither questioned nor accepted, but just let be.

She grew up a slim girl, rather distinguished in appearance, with a slender face, a fine, slightly arched nose, and beautiful grey-blue eyes over which the lids tilted with a very odd, sardonic tilt. The sardonic quality was, however, quite in abeyance. She was ladylike, not vehement at all. In the street her walk had a delicate, lingering motion, her face looked still. In conversation she had rather a quick, hurried manner, with intervals of well-bred repose and attention. Her voice was like her father’s, flexible and curiously attractive.

Sometimes, however, she would have fits of boisterous hilarity, not quite natural, with a strange note half pathetic, half jeering. Her father tended to a supercilious, sneering tone. In Vina it came out in mad bursts of hilarious jeering. This made Miss Frost uneasy. She would watch the girl’s strange face, that could take on a gargoyle look. She would see the eyes rolling strangely under sardonic eyelids, and then Miss Frost would feel that never, never had she known anything so utterly alien and incomprehensible and unsympathetic as her own beloved Vina. For twenty years the strong, protective governess reared and tended her lamb, her dove, only to see the lamb open a wolf’s mouth, to hear the dove utter the wild cackle of a daw or a magpie, a strange sound of derision. At such times Miss Frost’s heart went cold within her. She dared not realize. And she chid and checked her ward, restored her to the usual impulsive, affectionate demureness. Then she dismissed the whole matter. It was just an accidental aberration on the girl’s part from her own true nature. Miss Frost taught Alvina thoroughly the qualities of her own true nature, and Alvina believed what she was taught. She remained for twenty years the demure, refined creature of her governess’ desire. But there was an odd, derisive look at the back of her eyes, a look of old knowledge and deliberate derision. She herself was unconscious of it. But it was there. And this it was, perhaps, that scared away the young men.

Alvina reached the age of twenty-three, and it looked as if she were destined to join the ranks of the old maids, so many of whom found cold comfort in the Chapel. For she had no suitors. True there were extraordinarily few young men of her class—for whatever her condition, she had certain breeding and inherent culture—in Woodhouse. The young men of the same social standing as herself were in some curious way outsiders to her. Knowing nothing, yet her ancient sapience went deep, deeper than Woodhouse could fathom. The young men did not like her for it. They did not like the tilt of her eyelids.

Miss Frost, with anxious foreseeing, persuaded the girl to take over some pupils, to teach them the piano. The work was distasteful to Alvina. She was not a good teacher. She persevered in an off-hand way, somewhat indifferent, albeit dutiful.

When she was twenty-three years old, Alvina met a man called Graham. He was an Australian, who had been in Edinburgh taking his medical degree. Before going back to Australia, he came to spend some months practising with old Dr. Fordham in Woodhouse—Dr. Fordham being in some way connected with his mother.

Alexander Graham called to see Mrs. Houghton. Mrs. Houghton did not like him. She said he was creepy. He was a man of medium height, dark in colouring, with very dark eyes, and a body which seemed to move inside his clothing. He was amiable and polite, laughed often, showing his teeth. It was his teeth which Miss Frost could not stand. She seemed to see a strong mouthful of cruel, compact teeth. She declared he had dark blood in his veins, that he was not a man to be trusted, and that never, never would he make any woman’s life happy.

Yet in spite of all, Alvina was attracted by him. The two would stay together in the parlour, laughing and talking by the hour. What they could find to talk about was a mystery. Yet there they were, laughing and chatting, with a running insinuating sound through it all which made Miss Frost pace up and down unable to bear herself.

The man was always running in when Miss Frost was out. He contrived to meet Alvina in the evening, to take a walk with her. He went a long walk with her one night, and wanted to make love to her. But her upbringing was too strong for her.

“Oh no,” she said. “We are only friends.”

He knew her upbringing was too strong for him also.

“We’re more than friends,” he said. “We’re more than friends.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Yes we are,” he insisted, trying to put his arm round her waist.

“Oh, don’t!” she cried. “Let us go home.”

And then he burst out with wild and thick protestations of love, which thrilled her and repelled her slightly.

“Anyhow I must tell Miss Frost,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” he answered. “Yes, yes. Let us be engaged at once.”

As they passed under the lamps he saw her face lifted, the eyes shining, the delicate nostrils dilated, as of one who scents battle and laughs to herself. She seemed to laugh with a certain proud, sinister recklessness. His hands trembled with desire.

So they were engaged. He bought her a ring, an emerald set in tiny diamonds. Miss Frost looked grave and silent, but would not openly deny her approval.

“You like him, don’t you? You don’t dislike him?” Alvina insisted.

“I don’t dislike him,” replied Miss Frost. “How can I? He is a perfect stranger to me.”

And with this Alvina subtly contented herself. Her father treated the young man with suave attention, punctuated by fits of jerky hostility and jealousy. Her mother merely sighed, and took sal volatile.

To tell the truth, Alvina herself was a little repelled by the man’s love-making. She found him fascinating, but a trifle repulsive. And she was not sure whether she hated the repulsive element, or whether she rather gloried in it. She kept her look of arch, half-derisive recklessness, which was so unbearably painful to Miss Frost, and so exciting to the dark little man. It was a strange look in a refined, really virgin girl—oddly sinister. And her voice had a curious bronze-like resonance that acted straight on the nerves of her hearers: unpleasantly on most English nerves, but like fire on the different susceptibilities of the young man—the darkie, as people called him.

But after all, he had only six weeks in England, before sailing to Sydney. He suggested that he and Alvina should marry before he sailed. Miss Frost would not hear of it. He must see his people first, she said.

So the time passed, and he sailed. Alvina missed him, missed the extreme excitement of him rather than the human being he was. Miss Frost set to work to regain her influence over her ward, to remove that arch, reckless, almost lewd look from the girl’s face. It was a question of heart against sensuality. Miss Frost tried and tried to wake again the girl’s loving heart—which loving heart was certainly not occupied by that man. It was a hard task, an anxious, bitter task Miss Frost had set herself.

But at last she succeeded. Alvina seemed to thaw. The hard shining of her eyes softened again to a sort of demureness and tenderness. The influence of the man was revoked, the girl was left uninhabited, empty and uneasy.

She was due to follow her Alexander in three months’ time, to Sydney. Came letters from him, en route—and then a cablegram from Australia. He had arrived. Alvina should have been preparing her trousseau, to follow. But owing to her change of heart, she lingered indecisive.

“Do you love him, dear?” said Miss Frost with emphasis, knitting her thick, passionate, earnest eyebrows. “Do you love him sufficiently? That’s the point.”

The way Miss Frost put the question implied that Alvina did not and could not love him—because Miss Frost could not. Alvina lifted her large, blue eyes, confused, half-tender towards her governess, half shining with unconscious derision.

“I don’t really know,” she said, laughing hurriedly. “I don’t really.”

Miss Frost scrutinized her, and replied with a meaningful:

“Well—!”

To Miss Frost it was clear as daylight. To Alvina not so. In her periods of lucidity, when she saw as clear as daylight also, she certainly did not love the little man. She felt him a terrible outsider, an inferior, to tell the truth. She wondered how he could have the slightest attraction for her. In fact she could not understand it at all. She was as free of him as if he had never existed. The square green emerald on her finger was almost non-sensical. She was quite, quite sure of herself.

And then, most irritating, a complete volte face in her feelings. The clear-as-daylight mood disappeared as daylight is bound to disappear. She found herself in a night where the little man loomed large, terribly large, potent and magical, while Miss Frost had dwindled to nothingness. At such times she wished with all her force that she could travel like a cablegram to Australia. She felt it was the only way. She felt the dark, passionate receptivity of Alexander overwhelmed her, enveloped her even from the Antipodes. She felt herself going distracted—she felt she was going out of her mind. For she could not act.

Her mother and Miss Frost were fixed in one line. Her father said:

“Well, of course, you’ll do as you think best. There’s a great risk in going so far—a great risk. You would be entirely unprotected.”

“I don’t mind being unprotected,” said Alvina perversely.

“Because you don’t understand what it means,” said her father.

He looked at her quickly. Perhaps he understood her better than the others.

“Personally,” said Miss Pinnegar, speaking of Alexander, “I don’t care for him. But every one has their own taste.”

Alvina felt she was being overborne, and that she was letting herself be overborne. She was half relieved. She seemed to nestle into the well-known surety of Woodhouse. The other unknown had frightened her.

Miss Frost now took a definite line.

“I feel you don’t love him, dear. I’m almost sure you don’t. So now you have to choose. Your mother dreads your going—she dreads it. I am certain you would never see her again. She says she can’t bear it—she can’t bear the thought of you out there with Alexander. It makes her shudder. She suffers dreadfully, you know. So you will have to choose, dear. You will have to choose for the best.”

Alvina was made stubborn by pressure. She herself had come fully to believe that she did not love him. She was quite sure she did not love him. But out of a certain perversity, she wanted to go.

Came his letter from Sydney, and one from his parents to her and one to her parents. All seemed straightforward—not very cordial, but sufficiently. Over Alexander’s letter Miss Frost shed bitter tears. To her it seemed so shallow and heartless, with terms of endearment stuck in like exclamation marks. He semed to have no thought, no feeling for the girl herself. All he wanted was to hurry her out there. He did not even mention the grief of her parting from her English parents and friends: not a word. Just a rush to get her out there, winding up with “And now, dear, I shall not be myself till I see you here in Sydney—Your ever-loving Alexander.” A selfish, sensual creature, who would forget the dear little Vina in three months, if she did not turn up, and who would neglect her in six months, if she did. Probably Miss Frost was right.

Alvina knew the tears she was costing all round. She went upstairs and looked at his photograph—his dark and impertinent muzzle. Who was he, after all? She did not know him. With cold eyes she looked at him, and found him repugnant.

She went across to her governess’s room, and found Miss Frost in a strange mood of trepidation.

“Don’t trust me, dear, don’t trust what I say,” poor Miss Frost ejaculated hurriedly, even wildly. “Don’t notice what I have said. Act for yourself, dear. Act for yourself entirely. I am sure I am wrong in trying to influence you. I know I am wrong. It is wrong and foolish of me. Act just for yourself, dear—the rest doesn’t matter. The rest doesn’t matter. Don’t take any notice of what I have said. I know I am wrong.”

For the first time in her life Alvina saw her beloved governess flustered, the beautiful white hair looking a little draggled, the grey, near-sighted eyes, so deep and kind behind the gold-rimmed glasses, now distracted and scared. Alvina immediately burst into tears and flung herself into the arms of Miss Frost. Miss Frost also cried as if her heart would break, catching her indrawn breath with a strange sound of anguish, forlornness, the terrible crying of a woman with a loving heart, whose heart has never been able to relax. Alvina was hushed. In a second, she became the elder of the two. The terrible poignancy of the woman of fifty-two, who now at last had broken down, silenced the girl of twenty-three, and roused all her passionate tenderness. The terrible sound of “Never now, never now—it is too late,” which seemed to ring in the curious, indrawn cries of the elder woman, filled the girl with a deep wisdom. She knew the same would ring in her mother’s dying cry. Married or unmarried, it was the same—the same anguish, realized in all its pain after the age of fifty—the loss in never having been able to relax, to submit.

Alvina felt very strong and rich in the fact of her youth. For her it was not too late. For Miss Frost it was for ever too late.

“I don’t want to go, dear,” said Alvina to the elder woman. “I know I don’t care for him. He is nothing to me.”

Miss Frost became gradually silent, and turned aside her face. After this there was a hush in the house. Alvina announced her intention of breaking off her engagement. Her mother kissed her, and cried, and said, with the selfishness of an invalid:

“I couldn’t have parted with you, I couldn’t.” Whilst the father said:

“I think you are wise, Vina. I have thought a lot about it.”

So Alvina packed up his ring and his letters and little presents, and posted them over the seas. She was relieved, really: as if she had escaped some very trying ordeal. For some days she went about happily, in pure relief. She loved everybody. She was charming and sunny and gentle with everybody, particularly with Miss Frost, whom she loved with a deep, tender, rather sore love. Poor Miss Frost seemed to have lost a part of her confidence, to have taken on a new wistfulness, a new silence and remoteness. It was as if she found her busy contact with life a strain now. Perhaps she was getting old. Perhaps her proud heart had given way.

Alvina had kept a little photograph of the man. She would often go and look at it. Love?—no, it was not love! It was something more primitive still. It was curiosity, deep, radical, burning curiosity. How she looked and looked at his dark, impertinent-seeming face. A flicker of derision came into her eyes. Yet still she looked.

In the same manner she would look into the faces of the young men of Woodhouse. But she never found there what she found in her photograph. They all seemed like blank sheets of paper in comparison. There was a curious pale surface-look in the faces of the young men of Woodhouse: or, if there was some underneath suggestive power, it was a little abject or humiliating, inferior, common. They were all either blank or common.

Of course Alvina made everybody pay for her mood of submission and sweetness. In a month’s time she was quite intolerable.

“I can’t stay here all my life,” she declared, stretching her eyes in a way that irritated the other inmates of Manchester House extremely. “I know I can’t. I can’t bear it. I simply can’t bear it, and there’s an end of it. I can’t, I tell you. I can’t bear it. I’m buried alive—simply buried alive. And it’s more than I can stand. It is, really.”

There was an odd clang, like a taunt, in her voice. She was trying them all.

“But what do you want, dear?” asked Miss Frost, knitting her dark brows in agitation.

“I want to go away,” said Alvina bluntly.

Miss Frost gave a slight gesture with her right hand, of helpless impatience. It was so characteristic, that Alvina almost laughed.

“But where do you want to go?” asked Miss Frost.

“I don’t know. I don’t care,” said Alvina. “Anywhere, if I can get out of Woodhouse.”

“Do you wish you had gone to Australia?” put in Miss Pinnegar.

“No, I don’t wish I had gone to Australia,” retorted Alvina with a rude laugh. “Australia isn’t the only other place besides Woodhouse.”

Miss Pinnegar was naturally offended. But the curious insolence which sometimes came out in the girl was inherited direct from her father.

“You see, dear,” said Miss Frost, agitated: “if you knew what you wanted, it would be easier to see the way.”

“I want to be a nurse,” rapped out Alvina.

Miss Frost stood still, with the stillness of a middle-aged disapproving woman, and looked at her charge. She believed that Alvina was just speaking at random. Yet she dared not check her, in her present mood.

Alvina was indeed speaking at random. She had never thought of being a nurse—the idea had never entered her head. If it had she would certainly never have entertained it. But she had heard Alexander speak of Nurse This and Sister That. And so she had rapped out her declaration. And having rapped it out, she prepared herself to stick to it. Nothing like leaping before you look.

“A nurse!” repeated Miss Frost. “But do you feel yourself fitted to be a nurse? Do you think you could bear it?”

“Yes, I’m sure I could,” retorted Alvina. “I want to be a maternity nurse—” She looked strangely, even outrageously, at her governess. “I want to be a maternity nurse. Then I shouldn’t have to attend operations.” And she laughed quickly.

Miss Frost’s right hand beat like a wounded bird. It was reminiscent of the way she beat time, insistently, when she was giving music lessons, sitting close beside her pupils at the piano. Now it beat without time or reason. Alvina smiled brightly and cruelly.

“Whatever put such an idea into your head, Vina?” asked poor Miss Frost.

“I don’t know,” said Alvina, still more archly and brightly.

“Of course you don’t mean it, dear,” said Miss Frost, quailing.

“Yes, I do. Why should I say it if I don’t.”

Miss Frost would have done anything to escape the arch, bright, cruel eyes of her charge.

“Then we must think about it,” she said, numbly. And she went away.

Alvina floated off to her room, and sat by the window looking down on the street. The bright, arch look was still on her face. But her heart was sore. She wanted to cry, and fling herself on the breast of her darling. But she couldn’t. No, for her life she couldn’t. Some little devil sat in her breast and kept her smiling archly.

Somewhat to her amazement, he sat steadily on for days and days. Every minute she expected him to go. Every minute she expected to break down, to burst into tears and tenderness and reconciliation. But no—she did not break down. She persisted. They all waited for the old loving Vina to be herself again. But the new and recalcitrant Vina still shone hard. She found a copy of The Lancet, and saw an advertisement of a home in Islington where maternity nurses would be fully trained and equipped in six months’ time. The fee was sixty guineas. Alvina declared her intention of departing to this training home. She had two hundred pounds of her own, bequeathed by her grandfather.

In Manchester House they were all horrified—not moved with grief, this time, but shocked. It seemed such a repulsive and indelicate step to take. Which it was. And which, in her curious perverseness, Alvina must have intended it to be. Mrs. Houghton assumed a remote air of silence, as if she did not hear any more, did not belong. She lapsed far away. She was really very weak. Miss Pinnegar said: “Well really, if she wants to do it, why, she might as well try.” And, as often with Miss Pinnegar, this speech seemed to contain a veiled threat.

“A maternity nurse!” said James Houghton. “A maternity nurse! What exactly do you mean by a maternity nurse?”

“A trained mid-wife,” said Miss Pinnegar curtly. “That’s it, isn’t it? It is as far as I can see. A trained mid-wife.”

“Yes, of course,” said Alvina brightly.

“But—!” stammered James Houghton, pushing his spectacles up on to his forehead, and making his long fleece of painfully thin hair uncover his baldness. “I can’t understand that any young girl of any—any upbringing, any upbringing whatever, should want to choose such a—such an—occupation. I can’t understand it.”

“Can’t you?” said Alvina brightly.

“Oh well, if she does—” said Miss Pinnegar cryptically.

Miss Frost said very little. But she had serious confidential talks with Dr. Fordham. Dr. Fordham didn’t approve, certainly he didn’t—but neither did he see any great harm in it. At that time it was rather the thing for young ladies to enter the nursing profession, if their hopes had been blighted or checked in another direction! And so, enquiries were made. Enquiries were made.

The upshot was, that Alvina was to go to Islington for her six months’ training. There was a great bustle, preparing her nursing outfit. Instead of a trousseau, nurse’s uniforms in fine blue-and-white stripe, with great white aprons. Instead of a wreath of orange blossom, a rather chic nurse’s bonnet of blue silk, and for a trailing veil, a blue silk fall.

Well and good! Alvina expected to become frightened, as the time drew near. But no, she wasn’t a bit frightened. Miss Frost watched her narrowly. Would there not be a return of the old, tender, sensitive, shrinking Vina—the exquisitely sensitive and nervous, loving girl? No, astounding as it may seem, there was no return of such a creature. Alvina remained bright and ready, the half-hilarious clang remained in her voice, taunting. She kissed them all good-bye, brightly and sprightlily, and off she set. She wasn’t nervous.

She came to St. Pancras, she got her cab, she drove off to her destination—and as she drove, she looked out of the window. Horrid, vast, stony, dilapidated, crumbly-stuccoed streets and squares of Islington, grey, grey, greyer by far than Woodhouse, and interminable. How exceedingly sordid and disgusting! But instead of being repelled and heartbroken, Alvina enjoyed it. She felt her trunk rumble on the top of the cab, and still she looked out on the ghastly dilapidated flat facades of Islington, and still she smiled brightly, as if there were some charm in it all. Perhaps for her there was a charm in it all. Perhaps it acted like a tonic on the little devil in her breast. Perhaps if she had seen tufts of snowdrops—it was February—and yew-hedges and cottage windows, she would have broken down. As it was, she just enjoyed it. She enjoyed glimpsing in through uncurtained windows, into sordid rooms where human beings moved as if sordidly unaware. She enjoyed the smell of a toasted bloater, rather burnt. So common! so indescribably common! And she detested bloaters, because of the hairy feel of the spines in her mouth. But to smell them like this, to know that she was in the region of “penny beef-steaks,” gave her a perverse pleasure.

The cab stopped at a yellow house at the corner of a square where some shabby bare trees were flecked with bits of blown paper, bits of paper and refuse cluttered inside the round railings of each tree. She went up some dirty-yellowish steps, and rang the “Patients’” bell, because she knew she ought not to ring the “Tradesmen’s.” A servant, not exactly dirty, but unattractive, let her into a hall painted a dull drab, and floored with cocoa-matting, otherwise bare. Then up bare stairs to a room where a stout, pale, common woman with two warts on her face, was drinking tea. It was three o’clock. This was the matron. The matron soon deposited her in a bedroom, not very small, but bare and hard and dusty-seeming, and there left her. Alvina sat down on her chair, looked at her box opposite her, looked round the uninviting room, and smiled to herself. Then she rose and went to the window: a very dirty window, looking down into a sort of well of an area, with other wells ranging along, and straight opposite like a reflection another solid range of back-premises, with iron stair-ways and horrid little doors and washing and little W. C.’s and people creeping up and down like vermin. Alvina shivered a little, but still smiled. Then slowly she began to take off her hat. She put it down on the drab-painted chest of drawers.

Presently the servant came in with a tray, set it down, lit a naked gas-jet, which roared faintly, and drew down a crackly dark-green blind, which showed a tendency to fly back again alertly to the ceiling.

“Thank you,” said Alvina, and the girl departed.

Then Miss Houghton drank her black tea and ate her bread and margarine.

Surely enough books have been written about heroines in similar circumstances. There is no need to go into the details of Alvina’s six months in Islington.

The food was objectionable—yet Alvina got fat on it. The air was filthy—and yet never had her colour been so warm and fresh, her skin so soft. Her companions were almost without exception vulgar and coarse—yet never had she got on so well with women of her own age—or older than herself. She was ready with a laugh and a word, and though she was unable to venture on indecencies herself, yet she had an amazing faculty for looking knowing and indecent beyond words, rolling her eyes and pitching her eyebrows in a certain way—oh, it was quite sufficient for her companions! And yet, if they had ever actually demanded a dirty story or a really open indecency from her, she would have been floored.

But she enjoyed it. Amazing how she enjoyed it. She did not care how revolting and indecent these nurses were—she put on a look as if she were in with it all, and it all passed off as easy as winking. She swung her haunches and arched her eyes with the best of them. And they behaved as if she were exactly one of themselves. And yet, with the curious cold tact of women, they left her alone, one and all, in private: just ignored her.

It is truly incredible how Alvina became blooming and bouncing at this time. Nothing shocked her, nothing upset her. She was always ready with her hard, nurse’s laugh and her nurse’s quips. No one was better than she at double-entendres. No one could better give the nurse’s leer. She had it all in a fortnight. And never once did she feel anything but exhilarated and in full swing. It seemed to her she had not a moment’s time to brood or reflect about things—she was too much in the swing. Every moment, in the swing, living, or active in full swing. When she got into bed she went to sleep. When she awoke, it was morning, and she got up. As soon as she was up and dressed she had somebody to answer, something to say, something to do. Time passed like an express train—and she seemed to have known no other life than this.

Not far away was a lying-in hospital. A dreadful place it was. There she had to go, right off, and help with cases. There she had to attend lectures and demonstrations. There she met the doctors and students. Well, a pretty lot they were, one way and another. When she had put on flesh and become pink and bouncing she was just their sort: just their very ticket. Her voice had the right twang, her eyes the right roll, her haunches the right swing. She seemed altogether just the ticket. And yet she wasn’t.

It would be useless to say she was not shocked. She was profoundly and awfully shocked. Her whole state was perhaps largely the result of shock: a sort of play-acting based on hysteria. But the dreadful things she saw in the lying-in hospital, and afterwards, went deep, and finished her youth and her tutelage for ever. How many infernos deeper than Miss Frost could ever know, did she not travel? the inferno of the human animal, the human organism in its convulsions, the human social beast in its abjection and its degradation.

For in her latter half she had to visit the slum cases. And such cases! A woman lying on a bare, filthy floor, a few old coats thrown over her, and vermin crawling everywhere, in spite of sanitary inspectors. But what did the woman, the sufferer, herself care! She ground her teeth and screamed and yelled with pains. In her calm periods she lay stupid and indifferent—or she cursed a little. But abject, stupid indifference was the bottom of it all: abject, brutal indifference to everything—yes, everything. Just a piece of female functioning, no more.

Alvina was supposed to receive a certain fee for these cases she attended in their homes. A small proportion of her fee she kept for herself, the rest she handed over to the Home. That was the agreement. She received her grudged fee callously, threatened and exacted it when it was not forthcoming. Ha!—if they didn’t have to pay you at all, these slum-people, they would treat you with more contempt than if you were one of themselves. It was one of the hardest lessons Alvina had to learn—to bully these people, in their own hovels, into some sort of obedience to her commands, and some sort of respect for her presence. She had to fight tooth and nail for this end. And in a week she was as hard and callous to them as they to her. And so her work was well done. She did not hate them. There they were. They had a certain life, and you had to take them at their own worth in their own way. What else! If one should be gentle, one was gentle. The difficulty did not lie there. The difficulty lay in being sufficiently rough and hard: that was the trouble. It cost a great struggle to be hard and callous enough. Glad she would have been to be allowed to treat them quietly and gently, with consideration. But pah—it was not their line. They wanted to be callous, and if you were not callous to match, they made a fool of you and prevented your doing your work.

Was Alvina her own real self all this time? The mighty question arises upon us, what is one’s own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be. Alvina had been bred to think of herself as a delicate, tender, chaste creature with unselfish inclinations and a pure, “high” mind. Well, so she was, in the more-or-less exhausted part of herself. But high-mindedness had really come to an end with James Houghton, had really reached the point, not only of pathetic, but of dry and anti-human, repulsive quixotry. In Alvina high-mindedness was already stretched beyond the breaking point. Being a woman of some flexibility of temper, wrought through generations to a fine, pliant hardness, she flew back. She went right back on high-mindedness. Did she thereby betray it?

We think not. If we turn over the head of the penny and look at the tail, we don’t thereby deny or betray the head. We do but adjust it to its own complement. And so with high-mindedness. It is but one side of the medal—the crowned reverse. On the obverse the three legs still go kicking the soft-footed spin of the universe, the dolphin flirts and the crab leers.

So Alvina spun her medal, and her medal came down tails. Heads or tails? Heads for generations. Then tails. See the poetic justice.

Now Alvina decided to accept the decision of her fate. Or rather, being sufficiently a woman, she didn’t decide anything. She was her own fate. She went through her training experiences like another being. She was not herself, said Everybody. When she came home to Woodhouse at Easter, in her bonnet and cloak, everybody was simply knocked out. Imagine that this frail, pallid, diffident girl, so ladylike, was now a rather fat, warm-coloured young woman, strapping and strong-looking, and with a certain bounce. Imagine her mother’s startled, almost expiring:

“Why, Vina dear!”

Vina laughed. She knew how they were all feeling.

“At least it agrees with your health,” said her father, sarcastically, to which Miss Pinnegar answered:

“Well, that’s a good deal.”

But Miss Frost said nothing the first day. Only the second day, at breakfast, as Alvina ate rather rapidly and rather well, the white-haired woman said quietly, with a tinge of cold contempt:

“How changed you are, dear!”

“Am I?” laughed Alvina. “Oh, not really.” And she gave the arch look with her eyes, which made Miss Frost shudder.

Inwardly, Miss Frost shuddered, and abstained from questioning. Alvina was always speaking of the doctors: Doctor Young and Doctor Headley and Doctor James. She spoke of theatres and music-halls with these young men, and the jolly good time she had with them. And her blue-grey eyes seemed to have become harder and greyer, lighter somehow. In her wistfulness and her tender pathos, Alvina’s eyes would deepen their blue, so beautiful. And now, in her floridity, they were bright and arch and light-grey. The deep, tender, flowery blue was gone for ever. They were luminous and crystalline, like the eyes of a changeling.

Miss Frost shuddered, and abstained from question. She wanted, she needed to ask of her charge: “Alvina, have you betrayed yourself with any of these young men?” But coldly her heart abstained from asking—or even from seriously thinking. She left the matter untouched for the moment. She was already too much shocked.

Certainly Alvina represented the young doctors as very nice, but rather fast young fellows. “My word, you have to have your wits about you with them!” Imagine such a speech from a girl tenderly nurtured: a speech uttered in her own home, and accompanied by a florid laugh, which would lead a chaste, generous woman like Miss Frost to imagine—well, she merely abstained from imagining anything. She had that strength of mind. She never for one moment attempted to answer the question to herself, as to whether Alvina had betrayed herself with any of these young doctors, or not. The question remained stated, but completely unanswered—coldly awaiting its answer. Only when Miss Frost kissed Alvina good-bye at the station, tears came to her eyes, and she said hurriedly, in a low voice:

“Remember we are all praying for you, dear!”

“No, don’t do that!” cried Alvina involuntarily, without knowing what she said.

And then the train moved out, and she saw her darling standing there on the station, the pale, well-modelled face looking out from behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, wistfully, the strong, rather stout figure standing very still and unchangeable, under its coat and skirt of dark purple, the white hair glistening under the folded dark hat. Alvina threw herself down on the seat of her carriage. She loved her darling. She would love her through eternity. She knew she was right—amply and beautifully right, her darling, her beloved Miss Frost. Eternally and gloriously right.

And yet—and yet—it was a right which was fulfilled. There were other rights. There was another side to the medal. Purity and high-mindedness—the beautiful, but unbearable tyranny. The beautiful, unbearable tyranny of Miss Frost! It was time now for Miss Frost to die. It was time for that perfected flower to be gathered to immortality. A lovely immortel. But an obstruction to other, purple and carmine blossoms which were in bud on the stem. A lovely edelweiss—but time it was gathered into eternity. Black-purple and red anemones were due, real Adonis blood, and strange individual orchids, spotted and fantastic. Time for Miss Frost to die. She, Alvina, who loved her as no one else would ever love her, with that love which goes to the core of the universe, knew that it was time for her darling to be folded, oh, so gently and softly, into immortality. Mortality was busy with the day after her day. It was time for Miss Frost to die. As Alvina sat motionless in the train, running from Woodhouse to Tibshelf, it decided itself in her.

She was glad to be back in Islington, among all the horrors of her confinement cases. The doctors she knew hailed her. On the whole, these young men had not any too deep respect for the nurses as a whole. Why drag in respect? Human functions were too obviously established to make any great fuss about. And so the doctors put their arms round Alvina’s waist, because she was plump, and they kissed her face, because the skin was soft. And she laughed and squirmed a little, so that they felt all the more her warmth and softness under their arm’s pressure.

“It’s no use, you know,” she said, laughing rather breathless, but looking into their eyes with a curious definite look of unchangeable resistance. This only piqued them.

“What’s no use?” they asked.

She shook her head slightly.

“It isn’t any use your behaving like that with me,” she said, with the same challenging definiteness, finality: a flat negative.

“Who’re you telling?” they said.

For she did not at all forbid them to “behave like that.” Not in the least. She almost encouraged them. She laughed and arched her eyes and flirted. But her backbone became only the stronger and firmer. Soft and supple as she was, her backbone never yielded for an instant. It could not. She had to confess that she liked the young doctors. They were alert, their faces were clean and bright-looking. She liked the sort of intimacy with them, when they kissed her and wrestled with her in the empty laboratories or corridors—often in the intervals of most critical and appalling cases. She liked their arm round her waist, the kisses as she reached back her face, straining away, the sometimes desperate struggles. They took unpardonable liberties. They pinched her haunches and attacked her in unheard-of ways. Sometimes her blood really came up in the fight, and she felt as if, with her hands, she could tear any man, any male creature, limb from limb. A super-human, voltaic force filled her. For a moment she surged in massive, inhuman, female strength. The men always wilted. And invariably, when they wilted, she touched them with a sudden gentle touch, pitying. So that she always remained friends with them. When her curious Amazonic power left her again, and she was just a mere woman, she made shy eyes at them once more, and treated them with the inevitable female-to-male homage.

The men liked her. They cocked their eyes at her, when she was not looking, and wondered at her. They wondered over her. They had been beaten by her, every one of them. But they did not openly know it. They looked at her, as if she were Woman itself, some creature not quite personal. What they noticed, all of them, was the way her brown hair looped over her ears. There was something chaste, and noble, and war-like about it. The remote quality which hung about her in the midst of her intimacies and her frequencies, nothing high or lofty, but something given to the struggle and as yet invincible in the struggle, made them seek her out.

They felt safe with her. They knew she would not let them down. She would not intrigue into marriage, or try and make use of them in any way. She didn’t care about them. And so, because of her isolate self-sufficiency in the fray, her wild, overweening backbone, they were ready to attend on her and serve her. Headley in particular hoped he might overcome her. He was a well-built fellow with sandy hair and a pugnacious face. The battle-spirit was really roused in him, and he heartily liked the woman. If he could have overcome her he would have been mad to marry her.

With him, she summoned up all her mettle. She had never to be off her guard for a single minute. The treacherous suddenness of his attack—for he was treachery itself—had to be met by the voltaic suddenness of her resistance and counter-attack. It was nothing less than magical the way the soft, slumbering body of the woman could leap in one jet into terrible, overwhelming voltaic force, something strange and massive, at the first treacherous touch of the man’s determined hand. His strength was so different from hers—quick, muscular, lambent. But hers was deep and heaving, like the strange heaving of an earthquake, or the heave of a bull as it rises from earth. And by sheer non-human power, electric and paralysing, she could overcome the brawny red-headed fellow.

He was nearly a match for her. But she did not like him. The two were enemies—and good acquaintances. They were more or less matched. But as he found himself continually foiled, he became sulky, like a bear with a sore head. And then she avoided him.

She really liked Young and James much better. James was a quick, slender, dark-haired fellow, a gentleman, who was always trying to catch her out with his quickness. She liked his fine, slim limbs, and his exaggerated generosity. He would ask her out to ridiculously expensive suppers, and send her sweets and flowers, fabulously recherché. He was always immaculately well-dressed.

“Of course, as a lady and a nurse,” he said to her, “you are two sorts of women in one.”

But she was not impressed by his wisdom.

She was most strongly inclined to Young. He was a plump young man of middle height, with those blue eyes of a little boy which are so knowing: particularly of a woman’s secrets. It is a strange thing that these childish men have such a deep, half-perverse knowledge of the other sex. Young was certainly innocent as far as acts went. Yet his hair was going thin at the crown already.

He also played with her—being a doctor, and she a nurse who encouraged it. He too touched her and kissed her: and did not rouse her to contest. For his touch and his kiss had that nearness of a little boy’s, which nearly melted her. She could almost have succumbed to him. If it had not been that with him there was no question of succumbing. She would have had to take him between her hands and caress and cajole him like a cherub, into a fall. And though she would have like to do so, yet that inflexible stiffness of her backbone prevented her. She could not do as she liked. There was an inflexible fate within her, which shaped her ends.

Sometimes she wondered to herself, over her own virginity. Was it worth much, after all, behaving as she did? Did she care about it, anyhow? Didn’t she rather despise it? To sin in thought was as bad as to sin in act. If the thought was the same as the act, how much more was her behaviour equivalent to a whole committal? She wished she were wholly committed. She wished she had gone the whole length.

But sophistry and wishing did her no good. There she was, still isolate. And still there was that in her which would preserve her intact, sophistry and deliberate intention notwithstanding. Her time was up. She was returning to Woodhouse virgin as she had left it. In a measure she felt herself beaten. Why? Who knows. But so it was, she felt herself beaten, condemned to go back to what she was before. Fate had been too strong for her and her desires: fate which was not an external association of forces, but which was integral in her own nature. Her own inscrutable nature was her fate: sore against her will.

It was August when she came home, in her nurse’s uniform. She was beaten by fate, as far as chastity and virginity went. But she came home with high material hopes. Here was James Houghton’s own daughter. She had an affluent future ahead of her. A fully-qualified maternity nurse, she was going to bring all the babies of the district easily and triumphantly into the world. She was going to charge the regulation fee of two guineas a case: and even on a modest estimate of ten babies a month, she would have twenty guineas. For well-to-do mothers she would charge from three to five guineas. At this calculation she would make an easy three hundred a year, without slaving either. She would be independent, she could laugh every one in the face.

She bounced back into Woodhouse to make her fortune.

It goes without saying that Alvina Houghton did not make her fortune as a maternity nurse. Being her father’s daughter, we might almost expect that she did not make a penny. But she did—just a few pence. She had exactly four cases—and then no more.

The reason is obvious. Who in Woodhouse was going to afford a two-guinea nurse, for a confinement? And who who was going to engage Alvina Houghton, even if they were ready to stretch their purse-strings? After all, they all knew her as Miss Houghton, with a stress on the Miss, and they could not conceive of her as Nurse Houghton. Besides, there seemed something positively indecent in technically engaging one who was so much part of themselves. They all preferred either a simple mid-wife, or a nurse procured out of the unknown by the doctor.

If Alvina wanted to make her fortune—or even her living—she should have gone to a strange town. She was so advised by every one she knew. But she never for one moment reflected on the advice. She had become a maternity nurse in order to practise in Woodhouse, just as James Houghton had purchased his elegancies to sell in Woodhouse. And father and daughter alike calmly expected Woodhouse demand to rise to their supply. So both alike were defeated in their expectations.

For a little while Alvina flaunted about in her nurse’s uniform. Then she left it off. And as she left it off she lost her bounce, her colour, and her flesh. Gradually she shrank back to the old, slim, reticent pallor, with eyes a little too large for her face. And now it seemed her face was a little too long, a little gaunt. And in her civilian clothes she seemed a little dowdy, shabby. And altogether, she looked older: she looked more than her age, which was only twenty-four years. Here was the old Alvina come back, rather battered and deteriorated, apparently. There was even a tiny touch of the trollops in her dowdiness—so the shrewd-eyed collier-wives decided. But she was a lady still, and unbeaten. Undeniably she was a lady. And that was rather irritating to the well-to-do and florid daughter of W.H. Johnson, next door but one. Undeniably a lady, and undeniably unmastered. This last was irritating to the good-natured but easy-coming young men in the Chapel Choir, where she resumed her seat. These young men had the good nature of dogs that wag their tails and expect to be patted. And Alvina did not pat them. To be sure, a pat from such a shabbily-black-kid-gloved hand would not have been so flattering—she need not imagine it! The way she hung back and looked at them, the young men, as knowing as if she were a prostitute, and yet with the well-bred indifference of a lady—well, it was almost offensive.

As a matter of fact, Alvina was detached for the time being from her interest in young men. Manchester House had settled down on her like a doom. There was the quartered shop, through which one had to worm one’s encumbered way in the gloom—unless one liked to go miles round a back street, to the yard entry. There was James Houghton, faintly powdered with coal-dust, flitting back and forth in a fever of nervous frenzy, to Throttle-Ha’penny—so carried away that he never saw his daughter at all the first time he came in, after her return. And when she reminded him of her presence, with her—“Hello, father!”—he merely glancied hurriedly at her, as if vexed with her interruption, and said:

“Well, Alvina, you’re back. You’re back to find us busy.” And he went off into his ecstasy again.

Mrs. Houghton was now very weak, and so nervous in her weakness that she could not bear the slightest sound. Her greatest horror was lest her husband should come into the room. On his entry she became blue at the lips immediately, so he had to hurry out again. At last he stayed away, only hurriedly asking, each time he came into the house, “How is Mrs. Houghton? Ha!” Then off into uninterrupted Throttle-Ha’penny ecstasy once more.

When Alvina went up to her mother’s room, on her return, all the poor invalid could do was to tremble into tears, and cry faintly:

“Child, you look dreadful. It isn’t you.”

This from the pathetic little figure in the bed had struck Alvina like a blow.

“Why not, mother?” she asked.

But for her mother she had to remove her nurse’s uniform. And at the same time, she had to constitute herself nurse. Miss Frost, and a woman who came in, and the servant had been nursing the invalid between them. Miss Frost was worn and rather heavy: her old buoyancy and brightness was gone. She had become irritable also. She was very glad that Alvina had returned to take this responsibility of nursing off her shoulders. For her wonderful energy had ebbed and oozed away.

Alvina said nothing, but settled down to her task. She was quiet and technical with her mother. The two loved one another, with a curious impersonal love which had not a single word to exchange: an almost after-death love. In these days Mrs. Houghton never talked—unless to fret a little. So Alvina sat for many hours in the lofty, sombre bedroom, looking out silently on the street, or hurriedly rising to attend the sick woman. For continually came the fretful murmur:

“Vina!”

To sit still—who knows the long discipline of it, nowadays, as our mothers and grandmothers knew. To sit still, for days, months, and years—perforce to sit still, with some dignity of tranquil bearing. Alvina was old-fashioned. She had the old, womanly faculty for sitting quiet and collected—not indeed for a life-time, but for long spells together. And so it was during these months nursing her mother. She attended constantly on the invalid: she did a good deal of work about the house: she took her walks and occupied her place in the choir on Sunday mornings. And yet, from August to January, she seemed to be seated in her chair in the bedroom, sometimes reading, but mostly quite still, her hands quietly in her lap, her mind subdued by musing. She did not even think, not even remember. Even such activity would have made her presence too disturbing in the room. She sat quite still, with all her activities in abeyance—except that strange will-to-passivity which was by no means a relaxation, but a severe, deep, soul-discipline.

For the moment there was a sense of prosperity—or probable prosperity, in the house. And there was an abundance of Throttle-Ha’penny coal. It was dirty ashy stuff. The lower bars of the grate were constantly blanked in with white powdery ash, which it was fatal to try to poke away. For if you poked and poked, you raised white cumulus clouds of ash, and you were left at last with a few darkening and sulphurous embers. But even so, by continuous application, you could keep the room moderately warm, without feeling you were consuming the house’s meat and drink in the grate. Which was one blessing.

The days, the months darkened past, and Alvina returned to her old thinness and pallor. Her fore-arms were thin, they rested very still in her lap, there was a ladylike stillness about them as she took her walk, in her lingering, yet watchful fashion. She saw everything. Yet she passed without attracting any attention.

Early in the year her mother died. Her father came and wept self-conscious tears, Miss Frost cried a little, painfully. And Alvina cried also: she did not quite know why or wherefore. Her poor mother! Alvina had the old-fashioned wisdom to let be, and not to think. After all, it was not for her to reconstruct her parents’ lives. She came after them. Her day was not their day, their life was not hers. Returning up-channel to re-discover their course was quite another matter from flowing down-stream into the unknown, as they had done thirty years before. This supercilious and impertinent exploration of the generation gone by, by the present generation, is nothing to our credit. As a matter of fact, no generation repeats the mistakes of the generation ahead, any more than any river repeats its course. So the young need not be so proud of their superiority over the old. The young generation glibly makes its own mistakes: and how detestable these new mistakes are, why, only the future will be able to tell us. But be sure they are quite as detestable, quite as full of lies and hypocrisy, as any of the mistakes of our parents. There is no such thing as absolute wisdom.

Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains for ever an infinite field for mistakes. You can’t know beforehand.

So Alvina refrained from pondering on her mother’s life and fate. Whatever the fate of the mother, the fate of the daughter will be otherwise. That is organically inevitable. The business of the daughter is with her own fate, not with her mother’s.

Miss Frost however meditated bitterly on the fate of the poor dead woman. Bitterly she brooded on the lot of woman. Here was Clariss Houghton, married, and a mother—and dead. What a life! Who was responsible? James Houghton. What ought James Houghton to have done differently? Everything. In short, he should have been somebody else, and not himself. Which is the reductio ad absurdum of idealism. The universe should be something else, and not what it is: so the nonsense of idealistic conclusion. The cat should not catch the mouse, the mouse should not nibble holes in the table-cloth, and so on and so on, in the House that Jack Built.

But Miss Frost sat by the dead in grief and despair. This was the end of another woman’s life: such an end! Poor Clariss: guilty James.

Yet why? Why was James more guilty than Clariss? Is the only aim and end of a man’s life, to make some woman, or parcel of women, happy? Why? Why should anybody expect to be made happy, and develop heart-disease if she isn’t? Surely Clariss’ heart-disease was a more emphatic sign of obstinate self-importance than ever James’ shop-windows were. She expected to be made happy. Every woman in Europe and America expects it. On her own head then if she is made unhappy: for her expectation is arrogant and impertinent. The be-all and end-all of life doesn’t lie in feminine happiness—or in any happiness. Happiness is a sort of soap-tablet—he won’t be happy till he gets it, and when he’s got it, the precious baby, it’ll cost him his eyes and his stomach. Could anything be more puerile than a mankind howling because it isn’t happy: like a baby in the bath!

Poor Clariss, however, was dead—and if she had developed heart-disease because she wasn’t happy, well, she had died of her own heart-disease, poor thing. Wherein lies every moral that mankind can wish to draw.

Miss Frost wept in anguish, and saw nothing but another woman betrayed to sorrow and a slow death. Sorrow and a slow death, because a man had married her. Miss Frost wept also for herself, for her own sorrow and slow death. Sorrow and slow death, because a man had not married her. Wretched man, what is he to do with these exigeant and never-to-be-satisfied women? Our mothers pined because our fathers drank and were rakes. Our wives pine because we are virtuous but inadequate. Who is this sphinx, this woman? Where is the Oedipus that will solve her riddle of happiness, and then strangle her?—only to marry his own mother!

In the months that followed her mother’s death, Alvina went on the same, in abeyance. She took over the housekeeping, and received one or two overflow pupils from Miss Frost, young girls to whom she gave lessons in the dark drawing-room of Manchester House. She was busy—chiefly with housekeeping. There seemed a great deal to put in order after her mother’s death.

She sorted all her mother’s clothes—expensive, old-fashioned clothes, hardly worn. What was to be done with them? She gave them away, without consulting anybody. She kept a few private things, she inherited a few pieces of jewellery. Remarkable how little trace her mother left—hardly a trace.

She decided to move into the big, monumental bedroom in front of the house. She liked space, she liked the windows. She was strictly mistress, too. So she took her place. Her mother’s little sitting-room was cold and disused.

Then Alvina went through all the linen. There was still abundance, and it was all sound. James had had such large ideas of setting up house, in the beginning. And now he begrudged the household expenses, begrudged the very soap and candles, and even would have liked to introduce margarine instead of butter. This last degradation the women refused. But James was above food.

The old Alvina seemed completely herself again. She was quiet, dutiful, affectionate. She appealed in her old, childish way to Miss Frost, and Miss Frost called her “Dear!” with all the old protective gentleness. But there was a difference. Underneath her appearance of appeal, Alvina was almost coldly independent. She did what she thought she would. The old manner of intimacy persisted between her and her darling. And perhaps neither of them knew that the intimacy itself had gone. But it had. There was no spontaneous interchange between them. It was a kind of deadlock. Each knew the great love she felt for the other. But now it was a love static, inoperative. The warm flow did not run any more. Yet each would have died for the other, would have done anything to spare the other hurt.

Miss Frost was becoming tired, dragged looking. She would sink into a chair as if she wished never to rise again—never to make the effort. And Alvina quickly would attend on her, bring her tea and take away her music, try to make everything smooth. And continually the young woman exhorted the elder to work less, to give up her pupils. But Miss Frost answered quickly, nervously:

“When I don’t work I shan’t live.”

“But why—?” came the long query from Alvina. And in her expostulation there was a touch of mockery for such a creed.

Miss Frost did not answer. Her face took on a greyish tinge.

In these days Alvina struck up an odd friendship with Miss Pinnegar, after so many years of opposition. She felt herself more in sympathy with Miss Pinnegar—it was so easy to get on with her, she left so much unsaid. What was left unsaid mattered more to Alvina now than anything that was expressed. She began to hate outspokenness and direct speaking-forth of the whole mind. It nauseated her. She wanted tacit admission of difference, not open, wholehearted communication. And Miss Pinnegar made this admission all along. She never made you feel for an instant that she was one with you. She was never even near. She kept quietly on her own ground, and left you on yours. And across the space came her quiet commonplaces—but fraught with space.

With Miss Frost all was openness, explicit and downright. Not that Miss Frost trespassed. She was far more well-bred than Miss Pinnegar. But her very breeding had that Protestant, northern quality which assumes that we have all the same high standards, really, and all the same divine nature, intrinsically. It is a fine assumption. But willy-nilly, it sickened Alvina at this time.

She preferred Miss Pinnegar, and admired Miss Pinnegar’s humble wisdom with a new admiration. The two were talking of Dr. Headley, who, they read in the newspaper, had disgraced himself finally.

“I suppose,” said Miss Pinnegar, “it takes his sort to make all sorts.”

Such bits of homely wisdom were like relief from cramp and pain, to Alvina. “It takes his sort to make all sorts.” It took her sort too. And it took her father’s sort—as well as her mother’s and Miss Frost’s. It took every sort to make all sorts. Why have standards and a regulation pattern? Why have a human criterion? There’s the point! Why, in the name of all the free heavens, have human criteria? Why? Simply for bullying and narrowness.

Alvina felt at her ease with Miss Pinnegar. The two women talked away to one another, in their quiet moments: and slipped apart like conspirators when Miss Frost came in: as if there was something to be ashamed of. If there was, heaven knows what it might have been, for their talk was ordinary enough. But Alvina liked to be with Miss Pinnegar in the kitchen. Miss Pinnegar wasn’t competent and masterful like Miss Frost: she was ordinary and uninspired, with quiet, unobserved movements. But she was deep, and there was some secret satisfaction in her very quality of secrecy.

So the days and weeks and months slipped by, and Alvina was hidden like a mole in the dark chambers of Manchester House, busy with cooking and cleaning and arranging, getting the house in her own order, and attending to her pupils. She took her walk in the afternoon. Once and only once she went to Throttle-Ha’penny, and, seized with sudden curiosity, insisted on being wound down in the iron bucket to the little workings underneath. Everything was quite tidy in the short gang-ways down below, timbered and in sound order. The miners were competent enough. But water dripped dismally in places, and there was a stale feeling in the air.

Her father accompanied her, pointed her to the seam of yellow-flecked coal, the shale and the bind, the direction of the trend. He had already an airy-fairy kind of knowledge of the whole affair, and seemed like some not quite trustworthy conjuror who had conjured it all up by sleight of hand. In the background the miners stood grey and ghostly, in the candle-light, and seemed to listen sardonically. One of them, facile in his subordinate way as James in his authoritative, kept chiming in:

“Ay, that’s the road it goes, Miss Huffen—yis, yo’ll see th’ roof theer bellies down a bit—s’ loose. No, you dunna get th’ puddin’ stones i’ this pit—s’ not deep enough. Eh, they come down on you plumb, as if th’ roof had laid its egg on you. Ay, it runs a bit thin down here—six inches. You see th’ bed’s soft, it’s a sort o’ clay-bind, it’s not clunch such as you get deeper. Oh, it’s easy workin’—you don’t have to knock your guts out. There’s no need for shots, Miss Huffen—we bring it down—you see here—” And he stooped, pointing to a shallow, shelving excavation which he was making under the coal. The working was low, you must stoop all the time. The roof and the timbered sides of the way seemed to press on you. It was as if she were in her tomb for ever, like the dead and everlasting Egyptians. She was frightened, but fascinated. The collier kept on talking to her, stretching his bare, grey-black hairy arm across her vision, and pointing with his knotted hand. The thick-wicked tallow candles guttered and smelled. There was a thickness in the air, a sense of dark, fluid presence in the thick atmosphere, the dark, fluid, viscous voice of the collier making a broad-vowelled, clapping sound in her ear. He seemed to linger near her as if he knew—as if he knew—what? Something for ever unknowable and inadmissible, something that belonged purely to the underground: to the slaves who work underground: knowledge humiliated, subjected, but ponderous and inevitable. And still his voice went on clapping in her ear, and still his presence edged near her, and seemed to impinge on her—a smallish, semi-grotesque, grey-obscure figure with a naked brandished forearm: not human: a creature of the subterranean world, melted out like a bat, fluid. She felt herself melting out also, to become a mere vocal ghost, a presence in the thick atmosphere. Her lungs felt thick and slow, her mind dissolved, she felt she could cling like a bat in the long swoon of the crannied, underworld darkness. Cling like a bat and sway for ever swooning in the draughts of the darkness—

When she was up on the earth again she blinked and peered at the world in amazement. What a pretty, luminous place it was, carved in substantial luminosity. What a strange and lovely place, bubbling iridescent-golden on the surface of the underworld. Iridescent golden—could anything be more fascinating! Like lovely glancing surface on fluid pitch. But a velvet surface. A velvet surface of golden light, velvet-pile of gold and pale luminosity, and strange beautiful elevations of houses and trees, and depressions of fields and roads, all golden and floating like atmospheric majolica. Never had the common ugliness of Woodhouse seemed so entrancing. She thought she had never seen such beauty—a lovely luminous majolica, living and palpitating, the glossy, svelte world-surface, the exquisite face of all the darkness. It was like a vision. Perhaps gnomes and subterranean workers, enslaved in the era of light, see with such eyes. Perhaps that is why they are absolutely blind to conventional ugliness. For truly nothing could be more hideous than Woodhouse, as the miners had built it and disposed it. And yet, the very cabbage-stumps and rotten fences of the gardens, the very back-yards were instinct with magic, molten as they seemed with the bubbling-up of the under-darkness, bubbling up of majolica weight and luminosity, quite ignorant of the sky, heavy and satisfying.

Slaves of the underworld! She watched the swing of the grey colliers along the pavement with a new fascination, hypnotized by a new vision. Slaves—the underground trolls and iron-workers, magic, mischievous, and enslaved, of the ancient stories. But tall—the miners seemed to her to loom tall and grey, in their enslaved magic. Slaves who would cause the superimposed day-order to fall. Not because, individually, they wanted to. But because, collectively, something bubbled up in them, the force of darkness which had no master and no control. It would bubble and stir in them as earthquakes stir the earth. It would be simply disastrous, because it had no master. There was no dark master in the world. The puerile world went on crying out for a new Jesus, another Saviour from the sky, another heavenly superman. When what was wanted was a Dark Master from the underworld.

So they streamed past her, home from work—grey from head to foot, distorted in shape, cramped, with curious faces that came out pallid from under their dirt. Their walk was heavy-footed and slurring, their bearing stiff and grotesque. A stream they were—yet they seemed to her to loom like strange, valid figures of fairy-lore, unrealized and as yet unexperienced. The miners, the iron-workers, those who fashion the stuff of the underworld.

As it always comes to its children, the nostalgia of the repulsive, heavy-footed Midlands came over her again, even whilst she was there in the midst. The curious, dark, inexplicable and yet insatiable craving—as if for an earthquake. To feel the earth heave and shudder and shatter the world from beneath. To go down in the débâcle.

And so, in spite of everything, poverty, dowdiness, obscurity, and nothingness, she was content to stay in abeyance at home for the time. True, she was filled with the same old, slow, dreadful craving of the Midlands: a craving insatiable and inexplicable. But the very craving kept her still. For at this time she did not translate it into a desire, or need, for love. At the back of her mind somewhere was the fixed idea, the fixed intention of finding love, a man. But as yet, at this period, the idea was in abeyance, it did not act. The craving that possessed her as it possesses everybody, in a greater or less degree, in those parts, sustained her darkly and unconsciously.

A hot summer waned into autumn, the long, bewildering days drew in, the transient nights, only a few breaths of shadow between noon and noon, deepened and strengthened. A restlessness came over everybody. There was another short strike among the miners. James Houghton, like an excited beetle, scurried to and fro, feeling he was making his fortune. Never had Woodhouse been so thronged on Fridays with purchasers and money-spenders. The place seemed surcharged with life.

Autumn lasted beautiful till end of October. And then suddenly, cold rain, endless cold rain, and darkness heavy, wet, ponderous. Through the wind and rain it was a toil to move. Poor Miss Frost, who had seemed almost to blossom again in the long hot days, regaining a free cheerfulness that amounted almost to liveliness, and who even caused a sort of scandal by her intimacy with a rather handsome but common stranger, an insurance agent who had come into the place with a good, unused tenor voice—now she wilted again. She had given the rather florid young man tea in her room, and had laboured away at his fine, metallic voice, correcting him and teaching him and laughing with him and spending really a remarkable number of hours alone with him in her room in Woodhouse—for she had given up tramping the country, and had hired a music-room in a quiet street, where she gave her lessons. And the young man had hung round, and had never wanted to go away. They would prolong their tête-à-tête and their singing on till ten o’clock at night, and Miss Frost would return to Manchester House flushed and handsome and a little shy, while the young man, who was common, took on a new boldness in the streets. He had auburn hair, high colouring, and a rather challenging bearing. He took on a new boldness, his own estimate of himself rose considerably, with Miss Frost and his trained voice to justify him. He was a little insolent and condescending to the natives, who disliked him. For their lives they could not imagine what Miss Frost could find in him. They began even to dislike her, and a pretty scandal was started about the pair, in the pleasant room where Miss Frost had her piano, her books, and her flowers. The scandal was as unjust as most scandals are. Yet truly, all that summer and autumn Miss Frost had a new and slightly aggressive cheerfulness and humour. And Manchester House saw little of her, comparatively.

And then, at the end of September, the young man was removed by his Insurance Company to another district. And at the end of October set in the most abominable and unbearable weather, deluges of rain and north winds, cutting the tender, summer-unfolded people to pieces. Miss Frost wilted at once. A silence came over her. She shuddered when she had to leave the fire. She went in the morning to her room, and stayed there all the day, in a hot, close atmosphere, shuddering when her pupils brought the outside weather with them to her.

She was always subject to bronchitis. In November she had a bad bronchitis cold. Then suddenly one morning she could not get up. Alvina went in and found her semi-conscious.

The girl was almost mad. She flew to the rescue. She despatched her father instantly for the doctor, she heaped the sticks in the bedroom grate and made a bright fire, she brough hot milk and brandy.

“Thank you, dear, thank you. It’s a bronchial cold,” whispered Miss Frost hurriedly, trying to sip the milk. She could not. She didn’t want it.

“I’ve sent for the doctor,” said Alvina, in her cool voice, wherein none the less there rang the old hesitancy of sheer love.

Miss Frost lifted her eyes:

“There’s no need,” she said, and she smiled winsomely at Alvina.

It was pneumonia. Useless to talk of the distracted anguish of Alvina during the next two days. She was so swift and sensitive in her nursing, she seemed to have second sight. She talked to nobody. In her silence her soul was alone with the soul of her darling. The long semi-consciousness and the tearing pain of pneumonia, the anguished sickness.

But sometimes the grey eyes would open and smile with delicate winsomeness at Alvina, and Alvina smiled back, with a cheery, answering winsomeness. But that costs something.

On the evening of the second day, Miss Frost got her hand from under the bedclothes, and laid it on Alvina’s hand. Alvina leaned down to her.

“Everything is for you, my love,” whispered Miss Frost, looking with strange eyes on Alvina’s face.

“Don’t talk, Miss Frost,” moaned Alvina.

“Everything is for you,” murmured the sick woman—“except—” and she enumerated some tiny legacies which showed her generous, thoughtful nature.

“Yes, I shall remember,” said Alvina, beyond tears now.

Miss Frost smiled with her old bright, wonderful look, that had a touch of queenliness in it.

“Kiss me, dear,” she whispered.

Alvina kissed her, and could not suppress the whimpering of her too-much grief.

The night passed slowly. Sometimes the grey eyes of the sick woman rested dark, dilated, haggard on Alvina’s face, with a heavy, almost accusing look, sinister. Then they closed again. And sometimes they looked pathetic, with a mute, stricken appeal. Then again they closed—only to open again tense with pain. Alvina wiped her blood-phlegmed lips.

In the morning she died—lay there haggard, death-smeared, with her lovely white hair smeared also, and disorderly: she who had been so beautiful and clean always.

Alvina knew death—which is untellable. She knew that her darling carried away a portion of her own soul into death.

But she was alone. And the agony of being alone, the agony of grief, passionate, passionate grief for her darling who was torn into death—the agony of self-reproach, regret; the agony of remembrance; the agony of the looks of the dying woman, winsome, and sinisterly accusing, and pathetically, despairingly appealing—probe after probe of mortal agony, which throughout eternity would never lose its power to pierce to the quick!

Alvina seemed to keep strangely calm and aloof all the days after the death. Only when she was alone she suffered till she felt her heart really broke.

“I shall never feel anything any more,” she said in her abrupt way to Miss Frost’s friend, another woman of over fifty.

“Nonsense, child!” expostulated Mrs. Lawson gently.

“I shan’t! I shall never have a heart to feel anything any more,” said Alvina, with a strange, distraught roll of the eyes.

“Not like this, child. But you’ll feel other things—”

“I haven’t the heart,” persisted Alvina.

“Not yet,” said Mrs. Lawson gently. “You can’t expect—But time—time brings back—”

“Oh well—but I don’t believe it,” said Alvina.

People thought her rather hard. To one of her gossips Miss Pinnegar confessed:

“I thought she’d have felt it more. She cared more for her than she did for her own mother—and her mother knew it. Mrs. Houghton complained bitterly, sometimes, that she had no love. They were everything to one another, Miss Frost and Alvina. I should have thought she’d have felt it more. But you never know. A good thing if she doesn’t, really.”

Miss Pinnegar herself did not care one little bit that Miss Frost was dead. She did not feel herself implicated.

The nearest relatives came down, and everything was settled. The will was found, just a brief line on a piece of notepaper expressing a wish that Alvina should have everything. Alvina herself told the verbal requests. All was quietly fulfilled.

As it might well be. For there was nothing to leave. Just sixty-three pounds in the bank—no more: then the clothes, piano, books and music. Miss Frost’s brother had these latter, at his own request: the books and music, and the piano. Alvina inherited the few simple trinkets, and about forty-five pounds in money.

“Poor Miss Frost,” cried Mrs. Lawson, weeping rather bitterly—“she saved nothing for herself. You can see why she never wanted to grow old, so that she couldn’t work. You can see. It’s a shame, it’s a shame, one of the best women that ever trod earth.”

Manchester House settled down to its deeper silence, its darker gloom. Miss Frost was irreparably gone. With her, the reality went out of the house. It seemed to be silently waiting to disappear. And Alvina and Miss Pinnegar might move about and talk in vain. They could never remove the sense of waiting to finish: it was all just waiting to finish. And the three, James and Alvina and Miss Pinnegar, waited lingering through the months, for the house to come to an end. With Miss Frost its spirit passed away: it was no more. Dark, empty-feeling, it seemed all the time like a house just before a sale.

Throttle-Ha’penny worked fitfully through the winter, and in the spring broke down. By this time James Houghton had a pathetic, childish look which touched the hearts of Alvina and Miss Pinnegar. They began to treat him with a certain feminine indulgence, as he fluttered round, agitated and bewildered. He was like a bird that has flown into a room and is exhausted, enfeebled by its attempts to fly through the false freedom of the window-glass. Sometimes he would sit moping in a corner, with his head under his wing. But Miss Pinnegar chased him forth, like the stealthy cat she was, chased him up to the work-room to consider some detail of work, chased him into the shop to turn over the old débris of the stock. At one time he showed the alarming symptom of brooding over his wife’s death. Miss Pinnegar was thoroughly scared. But she was not inventive. It was left to Alvina to suggest: “Why doesn’t father let the shop, and some of the house?”

Let the shop! Let the last inch of frontage on the street! James thought of it. Let the shop! Permit the name of Houghton to disappear from the list of tradesmen? Withdraw? Disappear? Become a nameless nobody, occupying obscure premises?

He thought about it. And thinking about it, became so indignant at the thought that he pulled his scattered energies together within his frail frame. And then he came out with the most original of all his schemes. Manchester House was to be fitted up as a boarding-house for the better classes, and was to make a fortune catering for the needs of these gentry, who had now nowhere to go. Yes, Manchester House should be fitted up as a sort of quiet family hotel for the better classes. The shop should be turned into an elegant hall-entrance, carpeted, with a hall-porter and a wide plate-glass door, round-arched, in the round arch of which the words: “Manchester House” should appear large and distinguished, making an arch also, whilst underneath, more refined and smaller, should show the words: “Private Hotel.” James was to be proprietor and secretary, keeping the books and attending to correspondence: Miss Pinnegar was to be manageress, superintending the servants and directing the house, whilst Alvina was to occupy the equivocal position of “hostess.” She was to shake hands with the guests: she was to play the piano, and she was to nurse the sick. For in the prospectus James would include: “Trained nurse always on the premises.”

“Why!” cried Miss Pinnegar, for once brutally and angrily hostile to him: “You’ll make it sound like a private lunatic asylum.”

“Will you explain why?” answered James tartly.

For himself, he was enraptured with the scheme. He began to tot up ideas and expenses. There would be the handsome entrance and hall: there would be an extension of the kitchen and scullery: there would be an installing of new hot-water and sanitary arrangements: there would be a light lift-arrangment from the kitchen: there would be a handsome glazed balcony or loggia or terrace on the first floor at the back, over the whole length of the back-yard. This loggia would give a wonderful outlook to the south-west and the west. In the immediate foreground, to be sure, would be the yard of the livery-stables and the rather slummy dwellings of the colliers, sloping downhill. But these could be easily overlooked, for the eye would instinctively wander across the green and shallow valley, to the long upslope opposite, showing the Manor set in its clump of trees, and farms and haystacks pleasantly dotted, and moderately far off coal-mines with twinkling headstocks and narrow railwaylines crossing the arable fields, and heaps of burning slag. The balcony or covered terrace—James settled down at last to the word terrace—was to be one of the features of the house: the feature. It was to be fitted up as a sort of elegant lounging restaurant. Elegant teas, at two-and-six per head, and elegant suppers, at five shillings without wine, were to be served here.

As a teetotaller and a man of ascetic views, James, in his first shallow moments, before he thought about it, assumed that his house should be entirely non-alcoholic. A temperance house! Already he winced. We all know what a provincial Temperance Hotel is. Besides, there is magic in the sound of wine. Wines Served. The legend attracted him immensely—as a teetotaller, it had a mysterious, hypnotic influence. He must have wines. He knew nothing about them. But Alfred Swayn, from the Liquor Vaults, would put him in the running in five minutes.

It was most curious to see Miss Pinnegar turtle up at the mention of this scheme. When first it was disclosed to her, her colour came up like a turkey’s in a flush of indignant anger.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous!” she blurted, bridling and ducking her head and turning aside, like an indignant turkey.

“Ridiculous! Why? Will you explain why!” retorted James, turtling also.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous!” she repeated, unable to do more than splutter.

“Well, we’ll see,” said James, rising to superiority.

And again he began to dart absorbedly about, like a bird building a nest. Miss Pinnegar watched him with a sort of sullen fury. She went to the shop door to peep out after him. She saw him slip into the Liquor Vaults, and she came back to announce to Alvina:

“He’s taken to drink!”

“Drink?” said Alvina.

“That’s what it is,” said Miss Pinnegar vindictively. “Drink!”

Alvina sank down and laughed till she was weak. It all seemed really too funny to her—too funny.

“I can’t see what it is to laugh at,” said Miss Pinnegar. “Disgraceful—it’s disgraceful! But I’m not going to stop to be made a fool of. I shall be no manageress, I tell you. It’s absolutely ridiculous. Who does he think will come to the place? He’s out of his mind—and it’s drink; that’s what it is! Going into the Liquor Vaults at ten o’clock in the morning! That’s where he gets his ideas—out of whiskey—or brandy! But he’s not going to make a fool of me—”

“Oh dear!” sighed Alvina, laughing herself into composure and a little weariness. “I know it’s perfectly ridiculous. We shall have to stop him.”

“I’ve said all I can say,” blurted Miss Pinnegar.

As soon as James came in to a meal, the two women attacked him.

“But father,” said Alvina, “there’ll be nobody to come.”

“Plenty of people—plenty of people,” said her father. “Look at The Shakespeare’s Head, in Knarborough.”

“Knarborough! Is this Knarborough!” blurted Miss Pinnegar. “Where are the business men here? Where are the foreigners coming here for business, where’s our lace-trade and our stocking-trade?”

“There are business men,” said James. “And there are ladies.”

“Who,” retorted Miss Pinnegar, “is going to give half-a-crown for a tea? They expect tea and bread-and-butter for fourpence, and cake for sixpence, and apricots or pineapple for ninepence, and ham-and-tongue for a shilling, and fried ham and eggs and jam and cake as much as they can eat for one-and-two. If they expect a knife-and-fork tea for a shilling, what are you going to give them for half-a-crown?”

“I know what I shall offer,” said James. “And we may make it two shillings.” Through his mind flitted the idea of 1/11-1/2—but he rejected it. “You don’t realize that I’m catering for a higher class of custom—”

“But there isn’t any higher class in Woodhouse, father,” said Alvina, unable to restrain a laugh.

“If you create a supply you create a demand,” he retorted.

“But how can you create a supply of better class people?” asked Alvina mockingly.

James took on his refined, abstracted look, as if he were preoccupied on higher planes. It was the look of an obstinate little boy who poses on the side of the angels—or so the women saw it.

Miss Pinnegar was prepared to combat him now by sheer weight of opposition. She would pitch her dead negative will obstinately against him. She would not speak to him, she would not observe his presence, she was stone deaf and stone blind: there was no James. This nettled him. And she miscalculated him. He merely took another circuit, and rose another flight higher on the spiral of his spiritual egotism. He believed himself finely and sacredly in the right, that he was frustrated by lower beings, above whom it was his duty to rise, to soar. So he soared to serene heights, and his Private Hotel seemed a celestial injunction, an erection on a higher plane.

He saw the architect: and then, with his plans and schemes, he saw the builder and contractor. The builder gave an estimate of six or seven hundred—but James had better see the plumber and fitter who was going to instal the new hot water and sanitary system. James was a little dashed. He had calculated much less. Having only a few hundred pounds in possession after Throttle-Ha’penny, he was prepared to mortgage Manchester House if he could keep in hand a sufficent sum of money for the running of his establishment for a year. He knew he would have to sacrifice Miss Pinnegar’s work-room. He knew, and he feared Miss Pinnegar’s violent and unmitigated hostility. Still—his obstinate spirit rose—he was quite prepared to risk everything on this last throw.

Miss Allsop, daughter of the builder, called to see Alvina. The Allsops were great Chapel people, and Cassie Allsop was one of the old maids. She was thin and nipped and wistful looking, about forty-two years old. In private, she was tyrannously exacting with the servants, and spiteful, rather mean with her motherless nieces. But in public she had this nipped, wistful look.

Alvina was surprised by this visit. When she found Miss Allsop at the back door, all her inherent hostility awoke.

“Oh, is it you, Miss Allsop! Will you come in.”

They sat in the middle room, the common living room of the house.

“I called,” said Miss Allsop, coming to the point at once, and speaking in her Sunday-school-teacher voice, “to ask you if you know about this Private Hotel scheme of your father’s?”

“Yes,” said Alvina.

“Oh, you do! Well, we wondered. Mr. Houghton came to father about the building alterations yesterday. They’ll be awfully expensive.”

“Will they?” said Alvina, making big, mocking eyes.

“Yes, very. What do you think of the scheme?”

“I?—well—!” Alvina hesitated, then broke into a laugh. “To tell the truth I haven’t thought much about it at all.”

“Well I think you should,” said Miss Allsop severely. “Father’s sure it won’t pay—and it will cost I don’t know how much. It is bound to be a dead loss. And your father’s getting on. You’ll be left stranded in the world without a penny to bless yourself with. I think it’s an awful outlook for you.”

“Do you?” said Alvina.

Here she was, with a bang, planked upon the shelf among the old maids.

“Oh, I do. Sincerely! I should do all I could to prevent him, if I were you.”

Miss Allsop took her departure. Alvina felt herself jolted in her mood. An old maid along with Cassie Allsop!—and James Houghton fooling about with the last bit of money, mortgaging Manchester House up to the hilt. Alvina sank in a kind of weary mortification, in which her peculiar obstinacy persisted devilishly and spitefully. “Oh well, so be it,” said her spirit vindictively. “Let the meagre, mean, despicable fate fulfil itself.” Her old anger against her father arose again.

Arthur Witham, the plumber, came in with James Houghton to examine the house. Arthur Witham was also one of the Chapel men—as had been his common, interfering, uneducated father before him. The father had left each of his sons a fair little sum of money, which Arthur, the eldest, had already increased ten-fold. He was sly and slow and uneducated also, and spoke with a broad accent. But he was not bad-looking, a tight fellow with big blue eyes, who aspired to keep his “h’s” in the right place, and would have been a gentleman if he could.

Against her usual habit, Alvina joined the plumber and her father in the scullery. Arthur Witham saluted her with some respect. She liked his blue eyes and tight figure. He was keen and sly in business, very watchful, and slow to commit himself. Now he poked and peered and crept under the sink. Alvina watched him half disappear—she handed him a candle—and she laughed to herself seeing his tight, well-shaped hind-quarters protruding from under the sink like the wrong end of a dog from a kennel. He was keen after money, was Arthur—and bossy, creeping slyly after his own self-importance and power. He wanted power—and he would creep quietly after it till he got it: as much as he was capable of. His “h’s” were a barbed-wire fence and entanglement, preventing his unlimited progress.

He emerged from under the sink, and they went to the kitchen and afterwards upstairs. Alvina followed them persistently, but a little aloof, and silent. When the tour of inspection was almost over, she said innocently:

“Won’t it cost a great deal?”

Arthur Witham slowly shook his head. Then he looked at her. She smiled rather archly into his eyes.

“It won’t be done for nothing,” he said, looking at her again.

“We can go into that later,” said James, leading off the plumber.

“Good morning, Miss Houghton,” said Arthur Witham.

“Good morning, Mr. Witham,” replied Alvina brightly.

But she lingered in the background, and as Arthur Witham was going she heard him say: “Well, I’ll work it out, Mr. Houghton. I’ll work it out, and let you know tonight. I’ll get the figures by tonight.”

The younger man’s tone was a little off-hand, just a little supercilious with her father, she thought. James’s star was setting.

In the afternoon, directly after dinner, Alvina went out. She entered the shop, where sheets of lead and tins of paint and putty stood about, varied by sheets of glass and fancy paper. Lottie Witham, Arthur’s wife, appeared. She was a woman of thirty-five, a bit of a shrew, with social ambitions and no children.

“Is Mr. Witham in?” said Alvina.

Mrs. Witham eyed her.

“I’ll see,” she answered, and she left the shop.

Presently Arthur entered, in his shirt-sleeves: rather attractive-looking.

“I don’t know what you’ll think of me, and what I’ve come for,” said Alvina, with hurried amiability. Arthur lifted his blue eyes to her, and Mrs. Witham appeared in the background, in the inner doorway.

“Why, what is it?” said Arthur stolidly.

“Make it as dear as you can, for father,” said Alvina, laughing nervously.

Arthur’s blue eyes rested on her face. Mrs. Witham advanced into the shop.

“Why? What’s that for?” asked Lottie Witham shrewdly.

Alvina turned to the woman.

“Don’t say anything,” she said. “But we don’t want father to go on with this scheme. It’s bound to fail. And Miss Pinnegar and I can’t have anything to do with it anyway. I shall go away.”

“It’s bound to fail,” said Arthur Witham stolidly.

“And father has no money, I’m sure,” said Alvina.

Lottie Witham eyed the thin, nervous face of Alvina. For some reason, she liked her. And of course, Alvina was considered a lady in Woodhouse. That was what it had come to, with James’s declining fortunes: she was merely considered a lady. The consideration was no longer indisputable.

“Shall you come in a minute?” said Lottie Witham, lifting the flap of the counter. It was a rare and bold stroke on Mrs. Witham’s part. Alvina’s immediate instinct was to refuse. But she liked Arthur Witham, in his shirt sleeves.

“Well—I must be back in a minute,” she said, as she entered the embrasure of the counter. She felt as if she were really venturing on new ground. She was led into the new drawing-room, done in new peacock-and-bronze brocade furniture, with gilt and brass and white walls. This was the Withams’ new house, and Lottie was proud of it. The two women had a short confidential chat. Arthur lingered in the doorway a while, then went away.

Alvina did not really like Lottie Witham. Yet the other woman was sharp and shrewd in the uptake, and for some reason she fancied Alvina. So she was invited to tea at Manchester House.

After this, so many difficulties rose up in James Houghton’s way that he was worried almost out of his life. His two women left him alone. Outside difficulties multiplied on him till he abandoned his scheme—he was simply driven out of it by untoward circumstances.

Lottie Witham came to tea, and was shown over Manchester House. She had no opinion at all of Manchester House—wouldn’t hang a cat in such a gloomy hole. Still, she was rather impressed by the sense of superiority.

“Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed as she stood in Alvina’s bedroom, and looked at the enormous furniture, the lofty tableland of the bed.

“Oh my goodness! I wouldn’t sleep in that for a trifle, by myself! Aren’t you frightened out of your life? Even if I had Arthur at one side of me, I should be that frightened on the other side I shouldn’t know what to do. Do you sleep here by yourself?”

“Yes,” said Alvina laughing. “I haven’t got an Arthur, even for one side.”

“Oh, my word, you’d want a husband on both sides, in that bed,” said Lottie Witham.

Alvina was asked back to tea—on Wednesday afternoon, closing day. Arthur was there to tea—very ill at ease and feeling as if his hands were swollen. Alvina got on better with his wife, who watched closely to learn from her guest the secret of repose. The indefinable repose and inevitability of a lady—even of a lady who is nervous and agitated—this was the problem which occupied Lottie’s shrewd and active, but lower-class mind. She even did not resent Alvina’s laughing attempts to draw out the clumsy Arthur: because Alvina was a lady, and her tactics must be studied.

Alvina really liked Arthur, and thought a good deal about him—heaven knows why. He and Lottie were quite happy together, and he was absorbed in his petty ambitions. In his limited way, he was invincibly ambitious. He would end by making a sufficient fortune, and by being a town councillor and a J.P. But beyond Woodhouse he did not exist. Why then should Alvina be attracted by him? Perhaps because of his “closeness,” and his secret determinedness.

When she met him in the street she would stop him—though he was always busy—and make him exchange a few words with her. And when she had tea at his house, she would try to rouse his attention. But though he looked at her, steadily, with his blue eyes, from under his long lashes, still, she knew, he looked at her objectively. He never conceived any connection with her whatsoever.

It was Lottie who had a scheming mind. In the family of three brothers there was one—not black sheep, but white. There was one who was climbing out, to be a gentleman. This was Albert, the second brother. He had been a school-teacher in Woodhouse: had gone out to South Africa and occupied a post in a sort of Grammar School in one of the cities of Cape Colony. He had accumulated some money, to add to his patrimony. Now he was in England, at Oxford, where he would take his belated degree. When he had got his degree, he would return to South Africa to become head of his school, at seven hundred a year.

Albert was thirty-two years old, and unmarried. Lottie was determined he should take back to the Cape a suitable wife: presumably Alvina. He spent his vacations in Woodhouse—and he was only in his first year at Oxford. Well now, what could be more suitable—a young man at Oxford, a young lady in Woodhouse. Lottie told Alvina all about him, and Alvina was quite excited to meet him. She imagined him a taller, more fascinating, educated Arthur.

For the fear of being an old maid, the fear of her own virginity was really gaining on Alvina. There was a terrible sombre futility, nothingness, in Manchester House. She was twenty-six years old. Her life was utterly barren now Miss Frost had gone. She was shabby and penniless, a mere household drudge: for James begrudged even a girl to help in the kitchen. She was looking faded and worn. Panic, the terrible and deadly panic which overcomes so many unmarried women at about the age of thirty, was beginning to overcome her. She would not care about marriage, if even she had a lover. But some sort of terror hunted her to the search of a lover. She would become loose, she would become a prostitute, she said to herself, rather than die off like Cassie Allsop and the rest, wither slowly and ignominiously and hideously on the tree. She would rather kill herself.

But it needs a certain natural gift to become a loose woman or a prostitute. If you haven’t got the qualities which attract loose men, what are you to do? Supposing it isn’t in your nature to attract loose and promiscuous men! Why, then you can’t be a prostitute, if you try your head off: nor even a loose woman. Since willing won’t do it. It requires a second party to come to an agreement.

Therefore all Alvina’s desperate and profligate schemes and ideas fell to nought before the inexorable in her nature. And the inexorable in her nature was highly exclusive and selective, an inevitable negation of looseness or prostitution. Hence men were afraid of her—of her power, once they had committed themselves. She would involve and lead a man on, she would destroy him rather than not get of him what she wanted. And what she wanted was something serious and risky. Not mere marriage—oh dear no! But a profound and dangerous inter-relationship. As well ask the paddlers in the small surf of passion to plunge themselves into the heaving gulf of mid-ocean. Bah, with their trousers turned up to their knees it was enough for them to wet their toes in the dangerous sea. They were having nothing to do with such desperate nereids as Alvina.

She had cast her mind on Arthur. Truly ridiculous. But there was something compact and energetic and wilful about him that she magnified ten-fold and so obtained, imaginatively, an attractive lover. She brooded her days shabbily away in Manchester House, busy with housework drudgery. Since the collapse of Throttle-Ha’penny, James Houghton had become so stingy that it was like an inflammation in him. A silver sixpence had a pale and celestial radiance which he could not forego, a nebulous whiteness which made him feel he had heaven in his hold. How then could he let it go. Even a brown penny seemed alive and pulsing with mysterious blood, potent, magical. He loved the flock of his busy pennies, in the shop, as if they had been divine bees bringing him sustenance from the infinite. But the pennies he saw dribbling away in household expenses troubled him acutely, as if they were live things leaving his fold. It was a constant struggle to get from him enough money for necessities.

And so the household diet became meagre in the extreme, the coal was eked out inch by inch, and when Alvina must have her boots mended she must draw on her own little stock of money. For James Houghton had the impudence to make her an allowance of two shillings a week. She was very angry. Yet her anger was of that dangerous, half-ironical sort which wears away its subject and has no outward effect. A feeling of half-bitter mockery kept her going. In the ponderous, rather sordid nullity of Manchester House she became shadowy and absorbed, absorbed in nothing in particular, yet absorbed. She was always more or less busy: and certainly there was always something to be done, whether she did it or not.

The shop was opened once a week, on Friday evenings. James Houghton prowled round the warehouses in Knarborough and picked up job lots of stuff, with which he replenished his shabby window. But his heart was not in the business. Mere tenacity made him hover on with it.

In midsummer Albert Witham came to Woodhouse, and Alvina was invited to tea. She was very much excited. All the time imagining Albert a taller, finer Arthur, she had abstained from actually fixing her mind upon this latter little man. Picture her disappointment when she found Albert quite unattractive. He was tall and thin and brittle, with a pale, rather dry, flattish face, and with curious pale eyes. His impression was one of uncanny flatness, something like a lemon sole. Curiously flat and fish-like he was, one might have imagined his backbone to be spread like the backbone of a sole or a plaice. His teeth were sound, but rather large and yellowish and flat. A most curious person.

He spoke in a slightly mouthing way, not well bred in spite of Oxford. There was a distinct Woodhouse twang. He would never be a gentleman if he lived for ever. Yet he was not ordinary. Really an odd fish: quite interesting, if one could get over the feeling that one was looking at him through the glass wall of an aquarium: that most horrifying of all boundaries between two worlds. In an aquarium fish seem to come smiling broadly to the doorway, and there to stand talking to one, in a mouthing fashion, awful to behold. For one hears no sound from all their mouthing and staring conversation. Now although Albert Witham had a good strong voice, which rang like water among rocks in her ear, still she seemed never to hear a word he was saying. He smiled down at her and fixed her and swayed his head, and said quite original things, really. For he was a genuine odd fish. And yet she seemed to hear no sound, no word from him: nothing came to her. Perhaps as a matter of fact fish do actually pronounce streams of watery words, to which we, with our aerial-resonant ears, are deaf for ever.

The odd thing was that this odd fish seemed from the very first to imagine she had accepted him as a follower. And he was quite prepared to follow. Nay, from the very first moment he was smiling on her with a sort of complacent delight—compassionate, one might almost say—as if there was a full understanding between them. If only she could have got into the right state of mind, she would really rather have liked him. He smiled at her, and said really interesting things between his big teeth. There was something rather nice about him. But, we must repeat, it was as if the glass wall of an aquarium divided them.

Alvina looked at Arthur. Arthur was short and dark-haired and nicely coloured. But, now his brother was there, he too seemed to have a dumb, aqueous silence, fish-like and aloof, about him. He seemed to swim like a fish in his own little element. Strange it all was, like Alice in Wonderland. Alvina understood now Lottie’s strained sort of thinness, a haggard, sinewy, sea-weedy look. The poor thing was all the time swimming for her life.

For Alvina it was a most curious tea-party. She listened and smiled and made vague answers to Albert, who leaned his broad, thin, brittle shoulders towards her. Lottie seemed rather shadowily to preside. But it was Arthur who came out into communication. And now, uttering his rather broad-mouthed speeches, she seemed to hear in him a quieter, subtler edition of his father. His father had been a little, terrifically loud-voiced, hard-skinned man, amazingly uneducated and amazingly bullying, who had tyrannized for many years over the Sunday School children during morning service. He had been an odd-looking creature with round grey whiskers: to Alvina, always a creature, never a man: an atrocious leprechaun from under the Chapel floor. And how he used to dig the children in the back with his horrible iron thumb, if the poor things happened to whisper or nod in chapel!

These were his children—most curious chips of the old block. Who ever would have believed she would have been taking tea with them.

“Why don’t you have a bicycle, and go out on it?” Arthur was saying.

“But I can’t ride,” said Alvina.

“You’d learn in a couple of lessons. There’s nothing in riding a bicycle.”

“I don’t believe I ever should,” laughed Alvina.

“You don’t mean to say you’re nervous?” said Arthur rudely and sneeringly.

“I am,” she persisted.

“You needn’t be nervous with me,” smiled Albert broadly, with his odd, genuine gallantry. “I’ll hold you on.”

“But I haven’t got a bicycle,” said Alvina, feeling she was slowly colouring to a deep, uneasy blush.

“You can have mine to learn on,” said Lottie. “Albert will look after it.”

“There’s your chance,” said Arthur rudely. “Take it while you’ve got it.”

Now Alvina did not want to learn to ride a bicycle. The two Miss Carlins, two more old maids, had made themselves ridiculous for ever by becoming twin cycle fiends. And the horrible energetic strain of peddling a bicycle over miles and miles of high-way did not attract Alvina at all. She was completely indifferent to sight-seeing and scouring about. She liked taking a walk, in her lingering indifferent fashion. But rushing about in any way was hateful to her. And then, to be taught to ride a bicycle by Albert Witham! Her very soul stood still.

“Yes,” said Albert, beaming down at her from his strange pale eyes. “Come on. When will you have your first lesson?”

“Oh,” cried Alvina in confusion. “I can’t promise. I haven’t time, really.”

“Time!” exclaimed Arthur rudely. “But what do you do wi’ yourself all day?”

“I have to keep house,” she said, looking at him archly.

“House! You can put a chain round its neck, and tie it up,” he retorted.

Albert laughed, showing all his teeth.

“I’m sure you find plenty to do, with everything on your hands,” said Lottie to Alvina.

“I do!” said Alvina. “By evening I’m quite tired—though you mayn’t believe it, since you say I do nothing,” she added, laughing confusedly to Arthur.

But he, hard-headed little fortune-maker, replied:

“You have a girl to help you, don’t you!”

Albert, however, was beaming at her sympathetically.

“You have too much to do indoors,” he said. “It would do you good to get a bit of exercise out of doors. Come down to the Coach Road tomorrow afternoon, and let me give you a lesson. Go on—”

Now the coach-road was a level drive between beautiful park-like grass-stretches, down in the valley. It was a delightful place for learning to ride a bicycle, but open in full view of all the world. Alvina would have died of shame. She began to laugh nervously and hurriedly at the very thought.

“No, I can’t. I really can’t. Thanks, awfully,” she said.

“Can’t you really!” said Albert. “Oh well, we’ll say another day, shall we?”

“When I feel I can,” she said.

“Yes, when you feel like it,” replied Albert.

“That’s more it,” said Arthur. “It’s not the time. It’s the nervousness.” Again Albert beamed at her sympathetically, and said:

“Oh, I’ll hold you. You needn’t be afraid.”

“But I’m not afraid,” she said.

“You won’t say you are,” interposed Arthur. “Women’s faults mustn’t be owned up to.”

Alvina was beginning to feel quite dazed. Their mechanical, overbearing way was something she was unaccustomed to. It was like the jaws of a pair of insentient iron pincers. She rose, saying she must go.

Albert rose also, and reached for his straw hat, with its coloured band.

“I’ll stroll up with you, if you don’t mind,” he said. And he took his place at her side along the Knarborough Road, where everybody turned to look. For, of course, he had a sort of fame in Woodhouse. She went with him laughing and chatting. But she did not feel at all comfortable. He seemed so pleased. Only he was not pleased with her. He was pleased with himself on her account: inordinately pleased with himself. In his world, as in a fish’s, there was but his own swimming self: and if he chanced to have something swimming alongside and doing him credit, why, so much the more complacently he smiled.

He walked stiff and erect, with his head pressed rather back, so that he always seemed to be advancing from the head and shoulders, in a flat kind of advance, horizontal. He did not seem to be walking with his whole body. His manner was oddly gallant, with a gallantry that completely missed the individual in the woman, circled round her and flew home gratified to his own hive. The way he raised his hat, the way he inclined and smiled flatly, even rather excitedly, as he talked, was all a little discomforting and comical.

He left her at the shop door, saying:

“I shall see you again, I hope.”

“Oh, yes,” she replied, rattling the door anxiously, for it was locked. She heard her father’s step at last tripping down the shop.

“Good-evening, Mr. Houghton,” said Albert suavely and with a certain confidence, as James peered out.

“Oh, good-evening!” said James, letting Alvina pass, and shutting the door in Albert’s face.

“Who was that?” he asked her sharply.

“Albert Witham,” she replied.

“What has he got to do with you?” said James shrewishly.

“Nothing, I hope.”

She fled into the obscurity of Manchester House, out of the grey summer evening. The Withams threw her off her pivot, and made her feel she was not herself. She felt she didn’t know, she couldn’t feel, she was just scattered and decentralized. And she was rather afraid of the Witham brothers. She might be their victim. She intended to avoid them.

The following days she saw Albert, in his Norfolk jacket and flannel trousers and his straw hat, strolling past several times and looking in through the shop door and up at the upper windows. But she hid herself thoroughly. When she went out, it was by the back way. So she avoided him.

But on Sunday evening, there he sat, rather stiff and brittle in the old Withams’ pew, his head pressed a little back, so that his face and neck seemed slightly flattened. He wore very low, turn-down starched collars that showed all his neck. And he kept looking up at her during the service—she sat in the choir-loft—gazing up at her with apparently love-lorn eyes and a faint, intimate smile—the sort of je-sais-tout look of a private swain. Arthur also occasionally cast a judicious eye on her, as if she were a chimney that needed repairing, and he must estimate the cost, and whether it was worth it.

Sure enough, as she came out through the narrow choir gate into Knarborough Road, there was Albert stepping forward like a policeman, and saluting her and smiling down on her.

“I don’t know if I’m presuming—” he said, in a mock deferential way that showed he didn’t imagine he could presume.

“Oh, not at all,” said Alvina airily. He smiled with assurance.

“You haven’t got any engagement, then, for this evening?” he said.

“No,” she replied simply.

“We might take a walk. What do you think?” he said, glancing down the road in either direction.

What, after all, was she to think? All the girls were pairing off with the boys for the after-chapel stroll and spoon.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “But I can’t go far. I’ve got to be in at nine.”

“Which way shall we go?” he said.

He steered off, turned downhill through the common gardens, and proposed to take her the not-very-original walk up Flint’s Lane, and along the railway line—the colliery railway, that is—then back up the Marlpool Road: a sort of circle. She agreed.

They did not find a great deal to talk about. She questioned him about his plans, and about the Cape. But save for bare outlines, which he gave readily enough, he was rather close.

“What do you do on Sunday nights as a rule?” he asked her.

“Oh, I have a walk with Lucy Grainger—or I go down to Hallam’s—or go home,” she answered.

“You don’t go walks with the fellows, then?”

“Father would never have it,” she replied.

“What will he say now?” he asked, with self-satisfaction.

“Goodness knows!” she laughed.

“Goodness usually does,” he answered archly.

When they came to the rather stumbly railway, he said:

“Won’t you take my arm?”—offering her the said member.

“Oh, I’m all right,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Go on,” he said, pressing a little nearer to her, and offering his arm. “There’s nothing against it, is there?”

“Oh, it’s not that,” she said.

And feeling in a false position, she took his arm, rather unwillingly. He drew a little nearer to her, and walked with a slight prance.

“We get on better, don’t we?” he said, giving her hand the tiniest squeeze with his arm against his side.

“Much!” she replied, with a laugh.

Then he lowered his voice oddly.

“It’s many a day since I was on this railroad,” he said.

“Is this one of your old walks?” she asked, malicious.

“Yes, I’ve been it once or twice—with girls that are all married now.”

“Didn’t you want to marry?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. I may have done. But it never came off, somehow. I’ve sometimes thought it never would come off.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, exactly. It didn’t seem to, you know. Perhaps neither of us was properly inclined.”

“I should think so,” she said.

“And yet,” he admitted slyly, “I should like to marry—” To this she did not answer.

“Shouldn’t you?” he continued.

“When I meet the right man,” she laughed.

“That’s it,” he said. “There, that’s just it! And you haven’t met him?” His voice seemed smiling with a sort of triumph, as if he had caught her out.

“Well—once I thought I had—when I was engaged to Alexander.”

“But you found you were mistaken?” he insisted.

“No. Mother was so ill at the time—”

“There’s always something to consider,” he said.

She kept on wondering what she should do if he wanted to kiss her. The mere incongruity of such a desire on his part formed a problem. Luckily, for this evening he formulated no desire, but left her in the shop-door soon after nine, with the request:

“I shall see you in the week, shan’t I?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t promise now,” she said hurriedly. “Good-night.”

What she felt chiefly about him was a decentralized perplexity, very much akin to no feeling at all.

“Who do you think took me for a walk, Miss Pinnegar?” she said, laughing, to her confidante.

“I can’t imagine,” replied Miss Pinnegar, eyeing her.

“You never would imagine,” said Alvina. “Albert Witham.”

“Albert Witham!” exclaimed Miss Pinnegar, standing quite motionless.

“It may well take your breath away,” said Alvina.

“No, it’s not that!” hurriedly expostulated Miss Pinnegar. “Well—! Well, I declare!—” and then, on a new note: “Well, he’s very eligible, I think.”

“Most eligible!” replied Alvina.

“Yes, he is,” insisted Miss Pinnegar. “I think it’s very good.”

“What’s very good?” asked Alvina.

Miss Pinnegar hesitated. She looked at Alvina. She reconsidered.

“Of course he’s not the man I should have imagined for you, but—”

“You think he’ll do?” said Alvina.

“Why not?” said Miss Pinnegar. “Why shouldn’t he do—if you like him.”

“Ah—!” cried Alvina, sinking on the sofa with a laugh. “That’s it.”

“Of course you couldn’t have anything to do with him if you don’t care for him,” pronounced Miss Pinnegar.

Albert continued to hang around. He did not make any direct attack for a few days. Suddenly one evening he appeared at the back door with a bunch of white stocks in his hand. His face lit up with a sudden, odd smile when she opened the door—a broad, pale-gleaming, remarkable smile.

“Lottie wanted to know if you’d come to tea tomorrow,” he said straight out, looking at her with the pale light in his eyes, that smiled palely right into her eyes, but did not see her at all. He was waiting on the doorstep to come in.

“Will you come in?” said Alvina. “Father is in.”

“Yes, I don’t mind,” he said, pleased. He mounted the steps, still holding his bunch of white stocks.

James Houghton screwed round in his chair and peered over his spectacles to see who was coming.

“Father,” said Alvina, “you know Mr. Witham, don’t you?”

James Houghton half rose. He still peered over his glasses at the intruder.

“Well—I do by sight. How do you do?”

He held out his frail hand.

Albert held back, with the flowers in his own hand, and giving his broad, pleased, pale-gleaming smile from father to daughter, he said:

“What am I to do with these? Will you accept them, Miss Houghton?” He stared at her with shining, pallid smiling eyes.

“Are they for me?” she said, with false brightness. “Thank you.”

James Houghton looked over the top of his spectacles, searchingly, at the flowers, as if they had been a bunch of white and sharp-toothed ferrets. Then he looked as suspiciously at the hand which Albert at last extended to him. He shook it slightly, and said:

“Take a seat.”

“I’m afraid I’m disturbing you in your reading,” said Albert, still having the drawn, excited smile on his face.

“Well—” said James Houghton. “The light is fading.”

Alvina came in with the flowers in a jar. She set them on the table.

“Haven’t they a lovely scent?” she said.

“Do you think so?” he replied, again with the excited smile. There was a pause. Albert, rather embarrassed, reached forward, saying:

“May I see what you’re reading!” And he turned over the book. “‘Tommy and Grizel!’ Oh yes! What do you think of it?”

“Well,” said James, “I am only in the beginning.”

“I think it’s interesting, myself,” said Albert, “as a study of a man who can’t get away from himself. You meet a lot of people like that. What I wonder is why they find it such a drawback.”

“Find what a drawback?” asked James.

“Not being able to get away from themselves. That self-consciousness. It hampers them, and interferes with their power of action. Now I wonder why self-consciousness should hinder a man in his action? Why does it cause misgiving? I think I’m self-conscious, but I don’t think I have so many misgivings. I don’t see that they’re necessary.”

“Certainly I think Tommy is a weak character. I believe he’s a despicable character,” said James.

“No, I don’t know so much about that,” said Albert. “I shouldn’t say weak, exactly. He’s only weak in one direction. No, what I wonder is why he feels guilty. If you feel self-conscious, there’s no need to feel guilty about it, is there?”

He stared with his strange, smiling stare at James.

“I shouldn’t say so,” replied James. “But if a man never knows his own mind, he certainly can’t be much of a man.”

“I don’t see it,” replied Albert. “What’s the matter is that he feels guilty for not knowing his own mind. That’s the unnecessary part. The guilty feeling—”

Albert seemed insistent on this point, which had no particular interest for James.

“Where we’ve got to make a change,” said Albert, “is in the feeling that other people have a right to tell us what we ought to feel and do. Nobody knows what another man ought to feel. Every man has his own special feelings, and his own right to them. That’s where it is with education. You ought not to want all your children to feel alike. Their natures are all different, and so they should all feel different, about practically everything.”

“There would be no end to the confusion,” said James.

“There needn’t be any confusion to speak of. You agree to a number of rules and conventions and laws, for social purposes. But in private you feel just as you do feel, without occasion for trying to feel something else.”

“I don’t know,” said James. “There are certain feelings common to humanity, such as love, and honour, and truth.”

“Would you call them feelings?” said Albert. “I should say what is common is the idea. The idea is common to humanity, once you’ve put it into words. But the feeling varies with every man. The same idea represents a different kind of feeling in every different individual. It seems to me that’s what we’ve got to recognize if we’re going to do anything with education. We don’t want to produce mass feelings. Don’t you agree?”

Poor James was too bewildered to know whether to agree or not to agree.

“Shall we have a light, Alvina?” he said to his daughter.

Alvina lit the incandescent gas-jet that hung in the middle of the room. The hard white light showed her somewhat haggard-looking as she reached up to it. But Albert watched her, smiling abstractedly. It seemed as if his words came off him without affecting him at all. He did not think about what he was feeling, and he did not feel what he was thinking about. And therefore she hardly heard what he said. Yet she believed he was clever.

It was evident Albert was quite blissfully happy, in his own way, sitting there at the end of the sofa not far from the fire, and talking animatedly. The uncomfortable thing was that though he talked in the direction of his interlocutor, he did not speak to him: merely said his words towards him. James, however, was such an airy feather himself he did not remark this, but only felt a little self-important at sustaining such a subtle conversation with a man from Oxford. Alvina, who never expected to be interested in clever conversations, after a long experience of her father, found her expectation justified again. She was not interested.

The man was quite nicely dressed, in the regulation tweed jacket and flannel trousers and brown shoes. He was even rather smart, judging from his yellow socks and yellow-and-brown tie. Miss Pinnegar eyed him with approval when she came in.

“Good-evening!” she said, just a trifle condescendingly, as she shook hands. “How do you find Woodhouse, after being away so long?” Her way of speaking was so quiet, as if she hardly spoke aloud.

“Well,” he answered. “I find it the same in many ways.”

“You wouldn’t like to settle here again?”

“I don’t think I should. It feels a little cramped, you know, after a new country. But it has its attractions.” Here he smiled meaningful.

“Yes,” said Miss Pinnegar. “I suppose the old connections count for something.”

“They do. Oh decidedly they do. There’s no associations like the old ones.” He smiled flatly as he looked towards Alvina.

“You find it so, do you!” returned Miss Pinnegar. “You don’t find that the new connections make up for the old?”

“Not altogether, they don’t. There’s something missing—” Again he looked towards Alvina. But she did not answer his look.

“Well,” said Miss Pinnegar. “I’m glad we still count for something, in spite of the greater attractions. How long have you in England?”

“Another year. Just a year. This time next year I expect I shall be sailing back to the Cape.” He smiled as if in anticipation. Yet it was hard to believe that it mattered to him—or that anything mattered.

“And is Oxford agreeable to you?” she asked.

“Oh, yes. I keep myself busy.”

“What are your subjects?” asked James.

“English and History. But I do mental science for my own interest.”

Alvina had taken up a piece of sewing. She sat under the light, brooding a little. What had all this to do with her. The man talked on, and beamed in her direction. And she felt a little important. But moved or touched?—not the least in the world.

She wondered if any one would ask him to supper—bread and cheese and currant-loaf, and water, was all that offered. No one asked him, and at last he rose.

“Show Mr. Witham out through the shop, Alvina,” said Miss Pinnegar.

Alvina piloted the man through the long, dark, encumbered way of the shop. At the door he said:

“You’ve never said whether you’re coming to tea on Thursday.”

“I don’t think I can,” said Alvina.

He seemed rather taken aback.

“Why?” he said. “What stops you?”

“I’ve so much to do.”

He smiled slowly and satirically.

“Won’t it keep?” he said.

“No, really. I can’t come on Thursday—thank you so much. Good-night!” She gave him her hand and turned quickly into the shop, closing the door. He remained standing in the porch, staring at the closed door. Then, lifting his lip, he turned away.

“Well,” said Miss Pinnegar decidedly, as Alvina re-entered. “You can say what you like—but I think he’s very pleasant, very pleasant.”

“Extremely intelligent,” said James Houghton, shifting in his chair.

“I was awfully bored,” said Alvina.

They both looked at her, irritated.

After this she really did what she could to avoid him. When she saw him sauntering down the street in all his leisure, a sort of anger possessed her. On Sunday, she slipped down from the choir into the Chapel, and out through the main entrance, whilst he awaited her at the small exit. And by good luck, when he called one evening in the week, she was out. She returned down the yard. And there, through the uncurtained window, she saw him sitting awaiting her. Without a thought, she turned on her heel and fled away. She did not come in till he had gone.

“How late you are!” said Miss Pinnegar. “Mr. Witham was here till ten minutes ago.”

“Yes,” laughed Alvina. “I came down the yard and saw him. So I went back till he’d gone.”

Miss Pinnegar looked at her in displeasure:

“I suppose you know your own mind,” she said.

“How do you explain such behaviour?” said her father pettishly.

“I didn’t want to meet him,” she said.

The next evening was Saturday. Alvina had inherited Miss Frost’s task of attending to the Chapel flowers once a quarter. She had been round the gardens of her friends, and gathered the scarlet and hot yellow and purple flowers of August, asters, red stocks, tall Japanese sunflowers, coreopsis, geraniums. With these in her basket she slipped out towards evening, to the Chapel. She knew Mr. Calladine, the caretaker would not lock up till she had been.

The moment she got inside the Chapel—it was a big, airy, pleasant building—she heard hammering from the organ-loft, and saw the flicker of a candle. Some workman busy before Sunday. She shut the baize door behind her, and hurried across to the vestry, for vases, then out to the tap, for water. All was warm and still.

It was full early evening. The yellow light streamed through the side windows, the big stained-glass window at the end was deep and full of glowing colour, in which the yellows and reds were richest. Above in the organ-loft the hammering continued. She arranged her flowers in many vases, till the communion table was like the window, a tangle of strong yellow, and crimson, and purple, and bronze-green. She tried to keep the effect light and kaleidoscopic, an interplay of tossed pieces of strong, hot colour, vibrating and lightly intermingled. It was very gorgeous, for a communion table. But the day of white lilies was over.

Suddenly there was a terrific crash and bang and tumble, up in the organ-loft, followed by a cursing.

“Are you hurt?” called Alvina, looking up into space. The candle had disappeared.

But there was no reply. Feeling curious, she went out of the Chapel to the stairs in the side porch, and ran up to the organ. She went round the side—and there she saw a man in his shirt-sleeves sitting crouched in the obscurity on the floor between the organ and the wall of the back, while a collapsed pair of steps lay between her and him. It was too dark to see who it was.

“That rotten pair of steps came down with me,” said the infuriated voice of Arthur Witham, “and about broke my leg.”

Alvina advanced towards him, picking her way over the steps. He was sitting nursing his leg.

“Is it bad?” she asked, stooping towards him.

In the shadow he lifted up his face. It was pale, and his eyes were savage with anger. Her face was near his.

“It is bad,” he said furious because of the shock. The shock had thrown him off his balance.

“Let me see,” she said.

He removed his hands from clasping his shin, some distance above the ankle. She put her fingers over the bone, over his stocking, to feel if there was any fracture. Immediately her fingers were wet with blood. Then he did a curious thing. With both his hands he pressed her hand down over his wounded leg, pressed it with all his might, as if her hand were a plaster. For some moments he sat pressing her hand over his broken shin, completely oblivious, as some people are when they have had a shock and a hurt, intense on one point of consciousness only, and for the rest unconscious.

Then he began to come to himself. The pain modified itself. He could not bear the sudden acute hurt to his shin. That was one of his sensitive, unbearable parts.

“The bone isn’t broken,” she said professionally. “But you’d better get the stocking out of it.”

Without a thought, he pulled his trouser-leg higher and rolled down his stocking, extremely gingerly, and sick with pain.

“Can you show a light?” he said.

She found the candle. And she knew where matches always rested, on a little ledge of the organ. So she brought him a light, whilst he examined his broken shin. The blood was flowing, but not so much. It was a nasty cut bruise, swelling and looking very painful. He sat looking at it absorbedly, bent over it in the candle-light.

“It’s not so very bad, when the pain goes off,” she said, noticing the black hairs of his shin. “We’d better tie it up. Have you got a handkerchief?”

“It’s in my jacket,” he said.

She looked round for his jacket. He annoyed her a little, by being completely oblivious of her. She got his handkerchief and wiped her fingers on it. Then of her own kerchief she made a pad for the wound.

“Shall I tie it up, then?” she said.

But he did not answer. He sat still nursing his leg, looking at his hurt, while the blood slowly trickled down the wet hairs towards his ankle. There was nothing to do but wait for him.

“Shall I tie it up, then?” she repeated at length, a little impatient. So he put his leg a little forward.

She looked at the wound, and wiped it a little. Then she folded the pad of her own handkerchief, and laid it over the hurt. And again he did the same thing, he took her hand as if it were a plaster, and applied it to his wound, pressing it cautiously but firmly down. She was rather angry. He took no notice of her at all. And she, waiting, seemed to go into a dream, a sleep, her arm trembled a little, stretched out and fixed. She seemed to lose count, under the firm compression he imposed on her. It was as if the pressure on her hand pressed her into oblivion.

“Tie it up,” he said briskly.

And she, obedient, began to tie the bandage with numb fingers. He seemed to have taken the use out of her.

When she had finished, he scrambled to his feet, looked at the organ which he was repairing, and looked at the collapsed pair of steps.

“A rotten pair of things to have, to put a man’s life in danger,” he said, towards the steps. Then stubbornly, he rigged them up again, and stared again at his interrupted job.

“You won’t go on, will you?” she asked.

“It’s got to be done, Sunday tomorrow,” he said. “If you’d hold them steps a minute! There isn’t more than a minute’s fixing to do. It’s all done, but fixing.”

“Hadn’t you better leave it,” she said.

“Would you mind holding the steps, so that they don’t let me down again,” he said. Then he took the candle, and hobbled stubbornly and angrily up again, with spanner and hammer. For some minutes he worked, tapping and readjusting, whilst she held the ricketty steps and stared at him from below, the shapeless bulk of his trousers. Strange the difference—she could not help thinking it—between the vulnerable hairy, and somehow childish leg of the real man, and the shapeless form of these workmen’s trousers. The kernel, the man himself—seemed so tender—the covering so stiff and insentient.

And was he not going to speak to her—not one human word of recognition? Men are the most curious and unreal creatures. After all he had made use of her. Think how he had pressed her hand gently but firmly down, down over his bruise, how he had taken the virtue out of her, till she felt all weak and dim. And after that was he going to relapse into his tough and ugly workman’s hide, and treat her as if she were a pair of steps, which might let him down or hold him up, as might be.

As she stood clinging to the steps she felt weak and a little hysterical. She wanted to summon her strength, to have her own back from him. After all he had taken the virtue from her, he might have the grace to say thank you, and treat her as if she were a human being.

At last he left off tinkering, and looked round.

“Have you finished?” she said.

“Yes,” he answered crossly.

And taking the candle he began to clamber down. When he got to the bottom he crouched over his leg and felt the bandage.

“That gives you what for,” he said, as if it were her fault.

“Is the bandage holding?” she said.

“I think so,” he answered churlishly.

“Aren’t you going to make sure?” she said.

“Oh, it’s all right,” he said, turning aside and taking up his tools. “I’ll make my way home.”

“So will I,” she answered.

She took the candle and went a little in front. He hurried into his coat and gathered his tools, anxious to get away. She faced him, holding the candle.

“Look at my hand,” she said, holding it out. It was smeared with blood, as was the cuff of her dress—a black-and-white striped cotton dress.

“Is it hurt?” he said.

“No, but look at it. Look here!” She showed the bloodstains on her dress.

“It’ll wash out,” he said, frightened of her.

“Yes, so it will. But for the present it’s there. Don’t you think you ought to thank me?”

He recoiled a little.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m very much obliged.”

“You ought to be more than that,” she said.

He did not answer, but looked her up and down.

“We’ll be going down,” he said. “We s’ll have folks talking.”

Suddenly she began to laugh. It seemed so comical. What a position! The candle shook as she laughed. What a man, answering her like a little automaton! Seriously, quite seriously he said it to her—“We s’ll have folks talking!” She laughed in a breathless, hurried way, as they tramped downstairs.

At the bottom of the stairs Calladine, the caretaker, met them. He was a tall thin man with a black moustache—about fifty years old.

“Have you done for tonight, all of you?” he said, grinning in echo to Alvina’s still fluttering laughter.

“That’s a nice rotten pair of steps you’ve got up there for a death-trap,” said Arthur angrily. “Come down on top of me, and I’m lucky I haven’t got my leg broken. It is near enough.”

“Come down with you, did they?” said Calladine good-humouredly. “I never knowed ’em come down wi’ me.”

“You ought to, then. My leg’s as near broke as it can be.”

“What, have you hurt yourself?”

“I should think I have. Look here—” And he began to pull up his trouser leg. But Alvina had given the candle to Calladine, and fled. She had a last view of Arthur stooping over his precious leg, while Calladine stooped his length and held down the candle.

When she got home she took off her dress and washed herself hard and washed the stained sleeve, thoroughly, thoroughly, and threw away the wash water and rinsed the wash-bowls with fresh water, scrupulously. Then she dressed herself in her black dress once more, did her hair, and went downstairs.

But she could not sew—and she could not settle down. It was Saturday evening, and her father had opened the shop, Miss Pinnegar had gone to Knarborough. She would be back at nine o’clock. Alvina set about to make a mock woodcock, or a mock something or other, with cheese and an egg and bits of toast. Her eyes were dilated and as if amused, mocking, her face quivered a little with irony that was not all enjoyable.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” said Alvina, as Miss Pinnegar entered. “The supper’s just done. I’ll ask father if he’ll close the shop.”

Of course James would not close the shop, though he was merely wasting light. He nipped in to eat his supper, and started out again with a mouthful the moment he heard the ping of the bell. He kept his customers chatting as long as he could. His love for conversation had degenerated into a spasmodic passion for chatter.

Alvina looked across at Miss Pinnegar, as the two sat at the meagre supper-table. Her eyes were dilated and arched with a mocking, almost satanic look.

“I’ve made up my mind about Albert Witham,” said Alvina. Miss Pinnegar looked at her.

“Which way?” she asked, demurely, but a little sharp.

“It’s all off,” said Alvina, breaking into a nervous laugh.

“Why? What has happened?”

“Nothing has happened. I can’t stand him.”

“Why?—suddenly—” said Miss Pinnegar.

“It’s not sudden,” laughed Alvina. “Not at all. I can’t stand him. I never could. And I won’t try. There! Isn’t that plain?” And she went off into her hurried laugh, partly at herself, partly at Arthur, partly at Albert, partly at Miss Pinnegar.

“Oh, well, if you’re so sure—” said Miss Pinnegar rather bitingly.

“I am quite sure—” said Alvina. “I’m quite certain.”

“Cock-sure people are often most mistaken,” said Miss Pinnegar.

“I’d rather have my own mistakes than somebody else’s rights,” said Alvina.

“Then don’t expect anybody to pay for your mistakes,” said Miss Pinnegar.

“It would be all the same if I did,” said Alvina.

When she lay in bed, she stared at the light of the street-lamp on the wall. She was thinking busily: but heaven knows what she was thinking. She had sharpened the edge of her temper. She was waiting till tomorrow. She was waiting till she saw Albert Witham. She wanted to finish off with him. She was keen to cut clean through any correspondence with him. She stared for many hours at the light of the street-lamp, and there was a narrowed look in her eyes.

The next day she did not go to Morning Service, but stayed at home to cook the dinner. In the evening she sat in her place in the choir. In the Withams’ pew sat Lottie and Albert—no Arthur. Albert kept glancing up. Alvina could not bear the sight of him—she simply could not bear the sight of him. Yet in her low, sweet voice she sang the alto to the hymns, right to the vesper:

“Lord keep us safe this night
Secure from all our fears,
May angels guard us while we sleep
Till morning light appears—”

As she sang her alto, and as the soft and emotional harmony of the vesper swelled luxuriously through the chapel, she was peeping over her folded hands at Lottie’s hat. She could not bear Lottie’s hats. There was something aggressive and vulgar about them. And she simply detested the look of the back of Albert’s head, as he too stooped to the vesper prayer. It looked mean and rather common. She remembered Arthur had the same look, bending to prayer. There!—why had she not seen it before! That petty, vulgar little look! How could she have thought twice of Arthur. She had made a fool of herself, as usual. Him and his little leg. She grimaced round the chapel, waiting for people to bob up their heads and take their departure.

At the gate Albert was waiting for her. He came forward lifting his hat with a smiling and familiar “Good evening!”

“Good evening,” she murmured.

“It’s ages since I’ve seen you,” he said. “And I’ve looked out for you everywhere.”

It was raining a little. She put up her umbrella.

“You’ll take a little stroll. The rain isn’t much,” he said.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I must go home.”

“Why, what’s your hurry! Walk as far as Beeby Bridge. Go on.”

“No, thank you.”

“How’s that? What makes you refuse?”

“I don’t want to.”

He paused and looked down at her. The cold and supercilious look of anger, a little spiteful, came into his face.

“Do you mean because of the rain?” he said.

“No. I hope you don’t mind. But I don’t want to take any more walks. I don’t mean anything by them.”

“Oh, as for that,” he said, taking the words out of her mouth. “Why should you mean anything by them!” He smiled down on her.

She looked him straight in the face.

“But I’d rather not take any more walks, thank you—none at all,” she said, looking him full in the eyes.

“You wouldn’t!” he replied, stiffening.

“Yes. I’m quite sure,” she said.

“As sure as all that, are you!” he said, with a sneering grimace. He stood eyeing her insolently up and down.

“Good-night,” she said. His sneering made her furious. Putting her umbrella between him and her, she walked off.

“Good-night then,” he replied, unseen by her. But his voice was sneering and impotent.

She went home quivering. But her soul was burning with satisfaction. She had shaken them off.

Later she wondered if she had been unkind to him. But it was done—and done for ever. Vogue la galère.

The trouble with her ship was that it would not sail. It rode water-logged in the rotting port of home. All very well to have wild, reckless moods of irony and independence, if you have to pay for them by withering dustily on the shelf.

Alvina fell again into humility and fear: she began to show symptoms of her mother’s heart trouble. For day followed day, month followed month, season after season went by, and she grubbed away like a housemaid in Manchester House, she hurried round doing the shopping, she sang in the choir on Sundays, she attended the various chapel events, she went out to visit friends, and laughed and talked and played games. But all the time, what was there actually in her life? Not much. She was withering towards old-maiddom. Already in her twenty-eighth year, she spent her days grubbing in the house, whilst her father became an elderly, frail man still too lively in mind and spirit. Miss Pinnegar began to grow grey and elderly too, money became scarcer and scarcer, there was a black day ahead when her father would die and the home be broken up, and she would have to tackle life as a worker.

There lay the only alternative: in work. She might slave her days away teaching the piano, as Miss Frost had done: she might find a subordinate post as nurse: she might sit in the cash-desk of some shop. Some work of some sort would be found for her. And she would sink into the routine of her job, as did so many women, and grow old and die, chattering and fluttering. She would have what is called her independence. But, seriously faced with that treasure, and without the option of refusing it, strange how hideous she found it.

Work!—a job! More even than she rebelled against the Withams did she rebel against a job. Albert Witham was distasteful to her—or rather, he was not exactly distasteful, he was chiefly incongruous. She could never get over the feeling that he was mouthing and smiling at her through the glass wall of an aquarium, he being on the watery side. Whether she would ever be able to take to his strange and dishuman element, who knows? Anyway it would be some sort of an adventure: better than a job. She rebelled with all her backbone against the word job. Even the substitutes, employment or work, were detestable, unbearable. Emphatically, she did not want to work for a wage. It was too humiliating. Could anything be more infra dig than the performing of a set of special actions day in day out, for a life-time, in order to receive some shillings every seventh day. Shameful! A condition of shame. The most vulgar, sordid and humiliating of all forms of slavery: so mechanical. Far better be a slave outright, in contact with all the whims and impulses of a human being, than serve some mechanical routine of modern work.

She trembled with anger, impotence, and fear. For months, the thought of Albert was a torment to her. She might have married him. He would have been strange, a strange fish. But were it not better to take the strange leap, over into his element, than to condemn oneself to the routine of a job? He would have been curious and dishuman. But after all, it would have been an experience. In a way, she liked him. There was something odd and integral about him, which she liked. He was not a liar. In his own line, he was honest and direct. Then he would take her to South Africa: a whole new milieu. And perhaps she would have children. She shivered a little. No, not his children! He seemed so curiously cold-blooded. And yet, why not? Why not his curious, pale, half cold-blooded children, like little fishes of her own? Why not? Everything was possible: and even desirable, once one could see the strangeness of it. Once she could plunge through the wall of the aquarium! Once she could kiss him!

Therefore Miss Pinnegar’s quiet harping on the string was unbearable.

“I can’t understand that you disliked Mr. Witham so much?” said Miss Pinnegar.

“We never can understand those things,” said Alvina. “I can’t understand why I dislike tapioca and arrowroot—but I do.”

“That’s different,” said Miss Pinnegar shortly.

“It’s no more easy to understand,” said Alvina.

“Because there’s no need to understand it,” said Miss Pinnegar.

“And is there need to understand the other?”

“Certainly. I can see nothing wrong with him,” said Miss Pinnegar.

Alvina went away in silence. This was in the first months after she had given Albert his dismissal. He was at Oxford again—would not return to Woodhouse till Christmas. Between her and the Woodhouse Withams there was a decided coldness. They never looked at her now—nor she at them.

None the less, as Christmas drew near Alvina worked up her feelings. Perhaps she would be reconciled to him. She would slip across and smile to him. She would take the plunge, once and for all—and kiss him and marry him and bear the little half-fishes, his children. She worked herself into quite a fever of anticipation.

But when she saw him, the first evening, sitting stiff and staring flatly in front of him in Chapel, staring away from everything in the world, at heaven knows what—just as fishes stare—then his dishumanness came over her again like an arrest, and arrested all her flights of fancy. He stared flatly in front of him, and flatly set a wall of oblivion between him and her. She trembled and let be.

After Christmas, however, she had nothing at all to think forward to. And it was then she seemed to shrink: she seemed positively to shrink.

“You never spoke to Mr. Witham?” Miss Pinnegar asked.

“He never spoke to me,” replied Alvina.

“He raised his hat to me.”

“You ought to have married him, Miss Pinnegar,” said Alvina. “He would have been right for you.” And she laughed rather mockingly.

“There is no need to make provision for me,” said Miss Pinnegar.

And after this, she was a long time before she forgave Alvina, and was really friendly again. Perhaps she would never have forgiven her if she had not found her weeping rather bitterly in her mother’s abandoned sitting-room.

Now so far, the story of Alvina is commonplace enough. It is more or less the story of thousands of girls. They all find work. It is the ordinary solution of everything. And if we were dealing with an ordinary girl we should have to carry on mildly and dully down the long years of employment; or, at the best, marriage with some dull school-teacher or office-clerk.

But we protest that Alvina is not ordinary. Ordinary people, ordinary fates. But extraordinary people, extraordinary fates. Or else no fate at all. The all-to-one-pattern modern system is too much for most extraordinary individuals. It just kills them off or throws them disused aside.

There have been enough stories about ordinary people. I should think the Duke of Clarence must even have found malmsey nauseating, when he choked and went purple and was really asphyxiated in a butt of it. And ordinary people are no malmsey. Just ordinary tap-water. And we have been drenched and deluged and so nearly drowned in perpetual floods of ordinariness, that tap-water tends to become a really hateful fluid to us. We loathe its out-of-the-tap tastelessness. We detest ordinary people. We are in peril of our lives from them: and in peril of our souls too, for they would damn us one and all to the ordinary. Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary points. But nowadays you may look for them with a microscope, they are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and mechanical days.

There was no hope for Alvina in the ordinary. If help came, it would have to come from the extraordinary. Hence the extreme peril of her case. Hence the bitter fear and humiliation she felt as she drudged shabbily on in Manchester House, hiding herself as much as possible from public view. Men can suck the heady juice of exalted self-importance from the bitter weed of failure—failures are usually the most conceited of men: even as was James Houghton. But to a woman, failure is another matter. For her it means failure to live, failure to establish her own life on the face of the earth. And this is humiliating, the ultimate humiliation.

And so the slow years crept round, and the completed coil of each one was a further heavy, strangling noose. Alvina had passed her twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth and even her twenty-ninth year. She was in her thirtieth. It ought to be a laughing matter. But it isn’t.

          Ach, schon zwanzig
          Ach, schon zwanzig
Immer noch durch’s Leben tanz’ ich
Jeder, Jeder will mich küssen
Mir das Leben zu versüssen.

          Ach, schon dreissig
          Ach, schon dreissig
Immer Mädchen, Mädchen heiss’ ich.
In dem Zopf schon graue Härchen
Ach, wie schnell vergehn die Jährchen.

          Ach, schon vierzig
          Ach, schon vierzig
Und noch immer Keiner find ’sich.
Im gesicht schon graue Flecken
Ach, das muss im Spiegel stecken.

          Ach, schon fünfzig
          Ach, schon fünfzig
Und noch immer Keiner will ’mich;
Soll ich mich mit Bänden zieren
Soll ich einen Schleier führen?
          Dann heisst’s, die Alte putzt sich,
          Sie ist fu’fzig, sie ist fu’fzig.

True enough, in Alvina’s pig-tail of soft brown the grey hairs were already showing. True enough, she still preferred to be thought of as a girl. And the slow-footed years, so heavy in passing, were so imperceptibly numerous in their accumulation.

But we are not going to follow our song to its fatal and dreary conclusion. Presumably, the ordinary old-maid heroine nowadays is destined to die in her fifties, she is not allowed to be the long-liver of the by-gone novels. Let the song suffice her.

James Houghton had still another kick in him. He had one last scheme up his sleeve. Looking out on a changing world, it was the popular novelties which had the last fascination for him. The Skating Rink, like another Charybdis, had all but entangled him in its swirl as he pushed painfully off from the rocks of Throttle-Ha’penny. But he had escaped, and for almost three years had lain obscurely in port, like a frail and finished bark, selling the last of his bits and bobs, and making little splashes in warehouse-oddments. Miss Pinnegar thought he had really gone quiet.

But alas, at that degenerated and shabby, down-at-heel club he met another tempter: a plump man who had been in the music-hall line as a sort of agent. This man had catered for the little shows of little towns. He had been in America, out West, doing shows there. He had trailed his way back to England, where he had left his wife and daughter. But he did not resume his family life. Wherever he was, his wife was a hundred miles away. Now he found himself more or less stranded in Woodhouse. He had nearly fixed himself up with a music-hall in the Potteries—as manager: he had all-but got such another place at Ickley, in Derbyshire: he had forced his way through the industrial and mining townlets, prospecting for any sort of music-hall or show from which he could get a picking. And now, in very low water, he found himself at Woodhouse.

Woodhouse had a cinema already: a famous Empire run-up by Jordan, the sly builder and decorator who had got on so surprisingly. In James’s younger days, Jordan was an obscure and illiterate nobody. And now he had a motor car, and looked at the tottering James with sardonic contempt, from under his heavy, heavy-lidded dark eyes. He was rather stout, frail in health, but silent and insuperable, was A. W. Jordan.

“I missed a chance there,” said James, fluttering. “I missed a rare chance there. I ought to have been first with a cinema.”

He admitted as much to Mr. May, the stranger who was looking for some sort of “managing” job. Mr. May, who also was plump and who could hold his tongue, but whose pink, fat face and light-blue eyes had a loud look, for all that, put the speech in his pipe and smoked it. Not that he smoked a pipe: always cigarettes. But he seized on James’s admission, as something to be made the most of.

Now Mr. May’s mind, though quick, was pedestrian, not winged. He had come to Woodhouse not to look at Jordan’s “Empire,” but at the temporary wooden structure that stood in the old Cattle Market—“Wright’s Cinematograph and Variety Theatre.” Wright’s was not a superior show, like the Woodhouse Empire. Yet it was always packed with colliers and work-lasses. But unfortunately there was no chance of Mr. May’s getting a finger in the Cattle Market pie. Wright’s was a family affair. Mr. and Mrs. Wright and a son and two daughters with their husbands: a tight old lock-up family concern. Yet it was the kind of show that appealed to Mr. May: pictures between the turns. The cinematograph was but an item in the program, amidst the more thrilling incidents—to Mr. May—of conjurors, popular songs, five-minute farces, performing birds, and comics. Mr. May was too human to believe that a show should consist entirely of the dithering eye-ache of a film.

He was becoming really depressed by his failure to find any opening. He had his family to keep—and though his honesty was of the variety sort, he had a heavy conscience in the direction of his wife and daughter. Having been so long in America, he had acquired American qualities, one of which was this heavy sort of private innocence, coupled with complacent and natural unscrupulousness in “matters of business.” A man of some odd sensitiveness in material things, he liked to have his clothes neat and spick, his linen immaculate, his face clean-shaved like a cherub. But alas, his clothes were now old-fashioned, so that their rather expensive smartness was detrimental to his chances, in spite of their scrupulous look of having come almost new out of the bandbox that morning. His rather small felt hats still curved jauntily over his full pink face. But his eyes looked lugubrious, as if he felt he had not deserved so much bad luck, and there were bilious lines beneath them.

So Mr. May, in his room in the Moon and Stars, which was the best inn in Woodhouse—he must have a good hötel—lugubriously considered his position. Woodhouse offered little or nothing. He must go to Alfreton. And would he find anything there? Ah, where, where in this hateful world was there refuge for a man saddled with responsibilities, who wanted to do his best and was given no opportunity? Mr. May had travelled in his Pullman car and gone straight to the best hotel in the town, like any other American with money—in America. He had done it smart, too. And now, in this grubby penny-picking England, he saw his boots being worn-down at the heel, and was afraid of being stranded without cash even for a railway ticket. If he had to clear out without paying his hotel bill—well, that was the world’s fault. He had to live. But he must perforce keep enough in hand for a ticket to Birmingham. He always said his wife was in London. And he always walked down to Lumley to post his letters. He was full of evasions.

So again he walked down to Lumley to post his letters. And he looked at Lumley. And he found it a damn god-forsaken hell of a hole. It was a long straggle of a dusty road down in the valley, with a pale-grey dust and spatter from the pottery, and big chimneys bellying forth black smoke right by the road. Then there was a short cross-way, up which one saw the iron foundry, a black and rusty place. A little further on was the railway junction, and beyond that, more houses stretching to Hathersedge, where the stocking factories were busy. Compared with Lumley, Woodhouse, whose church could be seen sticking up proudly and vulgarly on an eminence, above trees and meadow-slopes, was an idyllic heaven.

Mr. May turned in to the Derby Hotel to have a small whiskey. And of course he entered into conversation.

“You seem somewhat quiet at Lumley,” he said, in his odd, refined-showman’s voice. “Have you nothing at all in the way of amusement?”

“They all go up to Woodhouse, else to Hathersedge.”

“But couldn’t you support some place of your own—some rival to Wright’s Variety?”

“Ay—’appen—if somebody started it.”

And so it was that James was inoculated with the idea of starting a cinema on the virgin soil of Lumley. To the women he said not a word. But on the very first morning that Mr. May broached the subject, he became a new man. He fluttered like a boy, he fluttered as if he had just grown wings.

“Let us go down,” said Mr. May, “and look at a site. You pledge yourself to nothing—you don’t compromise yourself. You merely have a site in your mind.”

And so it came to pass that, next morning, this oddly assorted couple went down to Lumley together. James was very shabby, in his black coat and dark grey trousers, and his cheap grey cap. He bent forward as he walked, and still nipped along hurriedly, as if pursued by fate. His face was thin and still handsome. Odd that his cheap cap, by incongruity, made him look more a gentleman. But it did. As he walked he glanced alertly hither and thither, and saluted everybody.

By his side, somewhat tight and tubby, with his chest out and his head back, went the prim figure of Mr. May, reminding one of a consequential bird of the smaller species. His plumbago-grey suit fitted exactly—save that it was perhaps a little tight. The jacket and waistcoat were bound with silk braid of exactly the same shade as the cloth. His soft collar, immaculately fresh, had a dark stripe like his shirt. His boots were black, with grey suède uppers: but a little down at heel. His dark-grey hat was jaunty. Altogether he looked very spruce, though a little behind the fashions: very pink faced, though his blue eyes were bilious beneath: very much on the spot, although the spot was the wrong one.

They discoursed amiably as they went, James bending forward, Mr. May bending back. Mr. May took the refined man-of-the-world tone.

“Of course,” he said—he used the two words very often, and pronounced the second, rather mincingly, to rhyme with sauce: “Of course,” said Mr. May, “it’s a disgusting place—disgusting! I never was in a worse, in all the cauce of my travels. But then—that isn’t the point—”

He spread his plump hands from his immaculate shirt-cuffs.

“No, it isn’t. Decidedly it isn’t. That’s beside the point altogether. What we want—” began James.

“Is an audience—of cauce—! And we have it—! Virgin soil—!

“Yes, decidedly. Untouched! An unspoiled market.”

“An unspoiled market!” reiterated Mr. May, in full confirmation, though with a faint flicker of a smile. “How very fortunate for us.”

“Properly handled,” said James. “Properly handled.”

“Why yes—of cauce! Why shouldn’t we handle it properly!”

“Oh, we shall manage that, we shall manage that,” came the quick, slightly husky voice of James.

“Of cauce we shall! Why bless my life, if we can’t manage an audience in Lumley, what can we do.”

“We have a guide in the matter of their taste,” said James. “We can see what Wright’s are doing—and Jordan’s—and we can go to Hathersedge and Knarborough and Alfreton—beforehand, that is—”

“Why certainly—if you think it’s necessary. I’ll do all that for you. And I’ll interview the managers and the performers themselves—as if I were a journalist, don’t you see. I’ve done a fair amount of journalism, and nothing easier than to get cards from various newspapers.”

“Yes, that’s a good suggestion,” said James. “As if you were going to write an account in the newspapers—excellent.”

“And so simple! You pick up just all the information you require.”

“Decidedly—decidedly!” said James.

And so behold our two heroes sniffing round the sordid backs and wasted meadows and marshy places of Lumley. They found one barren patch where two caravans were standing. A woman was peeling potatoes, sitting on the bottom step of her caravan. A half-caste girl came up with a large pale-blue enamelled jug of water. In the background were two booths covered up with coloured canvas. Hammering was heard inside.

“Good-morning!” said Mr. May, stopping before the woman. “’Tisn’t fair time, is it?”

“No, it’s no fair,” said the woman.

“I see. You’re just on your own. Getting on all right?”

“Fair,” said the woman.

“Only fair! Sorry. Good-morning.”

Mr. May’s quick eye, roving round, had seen a negro stoop from under the canvas that covered one booth. The negro was thin, and looked young but rather frail, and limped. His face was very like that of the young negro in Watteau’s drawing—pathetic, wistful, north-bitten. In an instant Mr. May had taken all in: the man was the woman’s husband—they were acclimatized in these regions: the booth where he had been hammering was a Hoop-La. The other would be a cocoanut-shy. Feeling the instant American dislike for the presence of a negro, Mr. May moved off with James.

They found out that the woman was a Lumley woman, that she had two children, that the negro was a most quiet and respectable chap, but that the family kept to itself, and didn’t mix up with Lumley.

“I should think so,” said Mr. May, a little disgusted even at the suggestion.

Then he proceeded to find out how long they had stood on this ground—three months—how long they would remain—only another week, then they were moving off to Alfreton fair—who was the owner of the pitch—Mr. Bows, the butcher. Ah! And what was the ground used for? Oh, it was building land. But the foundation wasn’t very good.

“The very thing! Aren’t we fortunate!” cried Mr. May, perking up the moment they were in the street. But this cheerfulness and brisk perkiness was a great strain on him. He missed his eleven o’clock whiskey terribly—terribly—his pick-me-up! And he daren’t confess it to James, who, he knew, was T-T. So he dragged his weary and hollow way up to Woodhouse, and sank with a long “Oh!” of nervous exhaustion in the private bar of the Moon and Stars. He wrinkled his short nose. The smell of the place was distasteful to him. The disgusting beer that the colliers drank. Oh!—he was so tired. He sank back with his whiskey and stared blankly, dismally in front of him. Beneath his eyes he looked more bilious still. He felt thoroughly out of luck, and petulant.

None the less he sallied out with all his old bright perkiness, the next time he had to meet James. He hadn’t yet broached the question of costs. When would he be able to get an advance from James? He must hurry the matter forward. He brushed his crisp, curly brown hair carefully before the mirror. How grey he was at the temples! No wonder, dear me, with such a life! He was in his shirt-sleeves. His waistcoat, with its grey satin back, fitted him tightly. He had filled out—but he hadn’t developed a corporation. Not at all. He looked at himself sideways, and feared dismally he was thinner. He was one of those men who carry themselves in a birdie fashion, so that their tail sticks out a little behind, jauntily. How wonderfully the satin of his waistcoat had worn! He looked at his shirt-cuffs. They were going. Luckily, when he had had the shirts made he had secured enough material for the renewing of cuffs and neckbands. He put on his coat, from which he had flicked the faintest suspicion of dust, and again settled himself to go out and meet James on the question of an advance. He simply must have an advance.

He didn’t get it that day, none the less. The next morning he was ringing for his tea at six o’clock. And before ten he had already flitted to Lumley and back, he had already had a word with Mr. Bows, about that pitch, and, overcoming all his repugnance, a word with the quiet, frail, sad negro, about Alfreton fair, and the chance of buying some sort of collapsible building, for his cinematograph.

With all this news he met James—not at the shabby club, but in the deserted reading-room of the so-called Artizans Hall—where never an artizan entered, but only men of James’s class. Here they took the chessboard and pretended to start a game. But their conversation was rapid and secretive.

Mr. May disclosed all his discoveries. And then he said, tentatively:

“Hadn’t we better think about the financial part now? If we’re going to look round for an erection”—curious that he always called it an erection—“we shall have to know what we are going to spend.”

“Yes—yes. Well—” said James vaguely, nervously, giving a glance at Mr. May. Whilst Mr. May abstractedly fingered his black knight.

“You see at the moment,” said Mr. May, “I have no funds that I can represent in cash. I have no doubt a little later—if we need it—I can find a few hundreds. Many things are due—numbers of things. But it is so difficult to collect one’s dues, particularly from America.” He lifted his blue eyes to James Houghton. “Of course we can delay for some time, until I get my supplies. Or I can act just as your manager—you can employ me—”

He watched James’s face. James looked down at the chessboard. He was fluttering with excitement. He did not want a partner. He wanted to be in this all by himself. He hated partners.

“You will agree to be manager, at a fixed salary?” said James hurriedly and huskily, his fine fingers slowly rubbing each other, along the sides.

“Why yes, willingly, if you’ll give me the option of becoming your partner upon terms of mutual agreement, later on.”

James did not quite like this.

“What terms are you thinking of?” he asked.

“Well, it doesn’t matter for the moment. Suppose for the moment I enter an engagement as your manager, at a salary, let us say, of—of what, do you think?”

“So much a week?” said James pointedly.

“Hadn’t we better make it monthly?”

The two men looked at one another.

“With a month’s notice on either hand?” continued Mr. May.

“How much?” said James, avaricious.

Mr. May studied his own nicely kept hands.

“Well, I don’t see how I can do it under twenty pounds a month. Of course it’s ridiculously low. In America I never accepted less than three hundred dollars a month, and that was my poorest and lowest. But of cauce, England’s not America—more’s the pity.”

But James was shaking his head in a vibrating movement.

“Impossible!” he replied shrewdly. “Impossible! Twenty pounds a month? Impossible. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of it.”

“Then name a figure. Say what you can think of,” retorted Mr. May, rather annoyed by this shrewd, shaking head of a doddering provincial, and by his own sudden collapse into mean subordination.

“I can’t make it more than ten pounds a month,” said James sharply.

“What!” screamed Mr. May. “What am I to live on? What is my wife to live on?”

“I’ve got to make it pay,” said James. “If I’ve got to make it pay, I must keep down expenses at the beginning.”

“No,—on the contrary. You must be prepared to spend something at the beginning. If you go in a pinch-and-scrape fashion in the beginning, you will get nowhere at all. Ten pounds a month! Why it’s impossible! Ten pounds a month! But how am I to live?”

James’s head still vibrated in a negative fashion. And the two men came to no agreement that morning. Mr. May went home more sick and weary than ever, and took his whiskey more biliously. But James was lit with the light of battle.

Poor Mr. May had to gather together his wits and his sprightliness for his next meeting. He had decided he must make a percentage in other ways. He schemed in all known ways. He would accept the ten pounds—but really, did ever you hear of anything so ridiculous in your life, ten pounds!—dirty old screw, dirty, screwing old woman! He would accept the ten pounds; but he would get his own back.

He flitted down once more to the negro, to ask him of a certain wooden show-house, with section sides and roof, an old travelling theatre which stood closed on Selverhay Common, and might probably be sold. He pressed across once more to Mr. Bows. He wrote various letters and drew up certain notes. And the next morning, by eight o’clock, he was on his way to Selverhay: walking, poor man, the long and uninteresting seven miles on his small and rather tight-shod feet, through country that had been once beautiful but was now scrubbled all over with mining villages, on and on up heavy hills and down others, asking his way from uncouth clowns, till at last he came to the Common, which wasn’t a Common at all, but a sort of village more depressing than usual: naked, high, exposed to heaven and to full barren view.

There he saw the theatre-booth. It was old and sordid-looking, painted dark-red and dishevelled with narrow, tattered announcements. The grass was growing high up the wooden sides. If only it wasn’t rotten? He crouched and probed and pierced with his pen-knife, till a country-policeman in a high helmet like a jug saw him, got off his bicycle and came stealthily across the grass wheeling the same bicycle, and startled poor Mr. May almost into apoplexy by demanding behind him, in a loud voice:

“What’re you after?”

Mr. May rose up with flushed face and swollen neck-veins, holding his pen-knife in his hand.

“Oh,” he said, “good-morning.” He settled his waistcoat and glanced over the tall, lanky constable and the glittering bicycle. “I was taking a look at this old erection, with a view to buying it. I’m afraid it’s going rotten from the bottom.”

“Shouldn’t wonder,” said the policeman suspiciously, watching Mr. May shut the pocket knife.

“I’m afraid that makes it useless for my purpose,” said Mr. May.

The policeman did not deign to answer.

“Could you tell me where I can find out about it, anyway?” Mr. May used his most affable, man of the world manner. But the policeman continued to stare him up and down, as if he were some marvellous specimen unknown on the normal, honest earth.

“What, find out?” said the constable.

“About being able to buy it,” said Mr. May, a little testily. It was with great difficulty he preserved his man-to-man openness and brightness.

“They aren’t here,” said the constable.

“Oh indeed! Where are they? And who are they?”

The policeman eyed him more suspiciously than ever.

“Cowlard’s their name. An’ they live in Offerton when they aren’t travelling.”

“Cowlard—thank you.” Mr. May took out his pocket-book. “C-o-w-l-a-r-d—is that right? And the address, please?”

“I dunno th’ street. But you can find out from the Three Bells. That’s Missis’ sister.”

“The Three Bells—thank you. Offerton did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Offerton!—where’s that?”

“About eight mile.”

“Really—and how do you get there?”

“You can walk—or go by train.”

“Oh, there is a station?”

“Station!” The policeman looked at him as if he were either a criminal or a fool.

“Yes. There is a station there?”

“Ay—biggest next to Chesterfield—”

Suddenly it dawned on Mr. May.

“Oh-h!” he said. “You mean Alfreton—”

“Alfreton, yes.” The policeman was now convinced the man was a wrong-’un. But fortunately he was not a pushing constable, he did not want to rise in the police-scale: thought himself safest at the bottom.

“And which is the way to the station here?” asked Mr. May.

“Do yer want Pinxon or Bull’ill?”

“Pinxon or Bull’ill?”

“There’s two,” said the policeman.

“For Selverhay?” asked Mr. May.

“Yes, them’s the two.”

“And which is the best?”

“Depends what trains is runnin’. Sometimes yer have to wait an hour or two—”

“You don’t know the trains, do you—?”

“There’s one in th’ afternoon—but I don’t know if it’d be gone by the time you get down.”

“To where?”

“Bull’ill.”

“Oh Bull’ill! Well, perhaps I’ll try. Could you tell me the way?”

When, after an hour’s painful walk, Mr. May came to Bullwell Station and found there was no train till six in the evening, he felt he was earning every penny he would ever get from Mr. Houghton.

The first intelligence which Miss Pinnegar and Alvina gathered of the coming adventure was given them when James announced that he had let the shop to Marsden, the grocer next door. Marsden had agreed to take over James’s premises at the same rent as that of the premises he already occupied, and moreover to do all alterations and put in all fixtures himself. This was a grand scoop for James: not a penny was it going to cost him, and the rent was clear profit.

“But when?” cried Miss Pinnegar.

“He takes possession on the first of October.”

“Well—it’s a good idea. The shop isn’t worth while,” said Miss Pinnegar.

“Certainly it isn’t,” said James, rubbing his hands: a sign that he was rarely excited and pleased.

“And you’ll just retire, and live quietly,” said Miss Pinnegar.

“I shall see,” said James. And with those fatal words he wafted away to find Mr. May.

James was now nearly seventy years old. Yet he nipped about like a leaf in the wind. Only, it was a frail leaf.

“Father’s got something going,” said Alvina, in a warning voice.

“I believe he has,” said Miss Pinnegar pensively. “I wonder what it is, now.”

“I can’t imagine,” laughed Alvina. “But I’ll bet it’s something awful—else he’d have told us.”

“Yes,” said Miss Pinnegar slowly. “Most likely he would. I wonder what it can be.”

“I haven’t an idea,” said Alvina.

Both women were so retired, they had heard nothing of James’s little trips down to Lumley. So they watched like cats for their man’s return, at dinner-time.

Miss Pinnegar saw him coming along talking excitedly to Mr. May, who, all in grey, with his chest perkily stuck out like a robin, was looking rather pinker than usual. Having come to an agreement, he had ventured on whiskey and soda in honour, and James had actually taken a glass of port.

“Alvina!” Miss Pinnegar called discreetly down the shop. “Alvina! Quick!”

Alvina flew down to peep round the corner of the shop window. There stood the two men, Mr. May like a perky, pink-faced grey bird standing cocking his head in attention to James Houghton, and occasionally catching James by the lapel of his coat, in a vain desire to get a word in, whilst James’s head nodded and his face simply wagged with excited speech, as he skipped from foot to foot, and shifted round his listener.

“Who ever can that common-looking man be?” said Miss Pinnegar, her heart going down to her boots.

“I can’t imagine,” said Alvina, laughing at the comic sight.

“Don’t you think he’s dreadful?” said the poor elderly woman.

“Perfectly impossible. Did ever you see such a pink face?”

“And the braid binding!” said Miss Pinnegar in indignation.

“Father might almost have sold him the suit,” said Alvina.

“Let us hope he hasn’t sold your father, that’s all,” said Miss Pinnegar.

The two men had moved a few steps further towards home, and the women prepared to flee indoors. Of course it was frightfully wrong to be standing peeping in the high street at all. But who could consider the proprieties now?

“They’ve stopped again,” said Miss Pinnegar, recalling Alvina.

The two men were having a few more excited words, their voices just audible.

“I do wonder who he can be,” murmured Miss Pinnegar miserably.

“In the theatrical line, I’m sure,” declared Alvina.

“Do you think so?” said Miss Pinnegar. “Can’t be! Can’t be!”

“He couldn’t be anything else, don’t you think?”

“Oh I can’t believe it, I can’t.”

But now Mr. May had laid his detaining hand on James’s arm. And now he was shaking his employer by the hand. And now James, in his cheap little cap, was smiling a formal farewell. And Mr. May, with a graceful wave of his grey-suède-gloved hand, was turning back to the Moon and Stars, strutting, whilst James was running home on tip-toe, in his natural hurry.

Alvina hastily retreated, but Miss Pinnegar stood it out. James started as he nipped into the shop entrance, and found her confronting him.

“Oh—Miss Pinnegar!” he said, and made to slip by her.

“Who was that man?” she asked sharply, as if James were a child whom she could endure no more.

“Eh? I beg your pardon?” said James, starting back.

“Who was that man?”

“Eh? Which man?”

James was a little deaf, and a little husky.

“The man—” Miss Pinnegar turned to the door. “There! That man!”

James also came to the door, and peered out as if he expected to see a sight. The sight of Mr. May’s tight and perky back, the jaunty little hat and the grey suède hands retreating quite surprised him. He was angry at being introduced to the sight.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s my manager.” And he turned hastily down the shop, asking for his dinner.

Miss Pinnegar stood for some moments in pure oblivion in the shop entrance. Her consciousness left her. When she recovered, she felt she was on the brink of hysteria and collapse. But she hardened herself once more, though the effort cost her a year of her life. She had never collapsed, she had never fallen into hysteria.

She gathered herself together, though bent a little as from a blow, and, closing the shop door, followed James to the living room, like the inevitable. He was eating his dinner, and seemed oblivious of her entry. There was a smell of Irish stew.

“What manager?” said Miss Pinnegar, short, silent, and inevitable in the doorway.

But James was in one of his abstractions, his trances.

“What manager?” persisted Miss Pinnegar.

But he still bent unknowing over his plate and gobbled his Irish stew.

“Mr. Houghton!” said Miss Pinnegar, in a sudden changed voice. She had gone a livid yellow colour. And she gave a queer, sharp little rap on the table with her hand.

James started. He looked up bewildered, as one startled out of sleep.

“Eh?” he said, gaping. “Eh?”

“Answer me,” said Miss Pinnegar. “What manager?”

“Manager? Eh? Manager? What manager?”

She advanced a little nearer, menacing in her black dress. James shrank.

“What manager?” he re-echoed. “My manager. The manager of my cinema.”

Miss Pinnegar looked at him, and looked at him, and did not speak. In that moment all the anger which was due to him from all womanhood was silently discharged at him, like a black bolt of silent electricity. But Miss Pinnegar, the engine of wrath, felt she would burst.

“Cinema! Cinema! Do you mean to tell me—” but she was really suffocated, the vessels of her heart and breast were bursting. She had to lean her hand on the table.

It was a terrible moment. She looked ghastly and terrible, with her mask-like face and her stony eyes and her bluish lips. Some fearful thunderbolt seemed to fall. James withered, and was still. There was silence for minutes, a suspension.

And in those minutes, she finished with him. She finished with him for ever. When she had sufficiently recovered, she went to her chair, and sat down before her plate. And in a while she began to eat, as if she were alone.

Poor Alvina, for whom this had been a dreadful and uncalled-for moment, had looked from one to another, and had also dropped her head to her plate. James too, with bent head, had forgotten to eat. Miss Pinnegar ate very slowly, alone.

“Don’t you want your dinner, Alvina?” she said at length.

“Not as much as I did,” said Alvina.

“Why not?” said Miss Pinnegar. She sounded short, almost like Miss Frost. Oddly like Miss Frost.

Alvina took up her fork and began to eat automatically.

“I always think,” said Miss Pinnegar, “Irish stew is more tasty with a bit of Swede in it.”

“So do I, really,” said Alvina. “But Swedes aren’t come yet.”

“Oh! Didn’t we have some on Tuesday?”

“No, they were yellow turnips—but they weren’t Swedes.”

“Well then, yellow turnip. I like a little yellow turnip,” said Miss Pinnegar.

“I might have put some in, if I’d known,” said Alvina.

“Yes. We will another time,” said Miss Pinnegar.

Not another word about the cinema: not another breath. As soon as James had eaten his plum tart, he ran away.

“What can he have been doing?” said Alvina when he had gone.

“Buying a cinema show—and that man we saw is his manager. It’s quite simple.”

“But what are we going to do with a cinema show?” said Alvina.

“It’s what is he going to do. It doesn’t concern me. It’s no concern of mine. I shall not lend him anything, I shall not think about it, it will be the same to me as if there were no cinema. Which is all I have to say,” announced Miss Pinnegar.

“But he’s gone and done it,” said Alvina.

“Then let him go through with it. It’s no affair of mine. After all, your father’s affairs don’t concern me. It would be impertinent of me to introduce myself into them.”

“They don’t concern me very much,” said Alvina.

“You’re different. You’re his daughter. He’s no connection of mine, I’m glad to say. I pity your mother.”

“Oh, but he was always alike,” said Alvina.

“That’s where it is,” said Miss Pinnegar.

There was something fatal about her feelings. Once they had gone cold, they would never warm up again. As well try to warm up a frozen mouse. It only putrifies.

But poor Miss Pinnegar after this looked older, and seemed to get a little round-backed. And the things she said reminded Alvina so often of Miss Frost.

James fluttered into conversation with his daughter the next evening, after Miss Pinnegar had retired.

“I told you I had bought a cinematograph building,” said James. “We are negotiating for the machinery now: the dynamo and so on.”

“But where is it to be?” asked Alvina.

“Down at Lumley. I’ll take you and show you the site tomorrow. The building—it is a frame-section travelling theatre—will arrive on Thursday—next Thursday.”

“But who is in with you, father?”

“I am quite alone—quite alone,” said James Houghton. “I have found an excellent manager, who knows the whole business thoroughly—a Mr. May. Very nice man. Very nice man.”

“Rather short and dressed in grey?”

“Yes. And I have been thinking—if Miss Pinnegar will take the cash and issue tickets: if she will take over the ticket-office: and you will play the piano: and if Mr. May learns the control of the machine—he is having lessons now—: and if I am the indoors attendant, we shan’t need any more staff.”

“Miss Pinnegar won’t take the cash, father.”

“Why not? Why not?”

“I can’t say why not. But she won’t do anything—and if I were you I wouldn’t ask her.”

There was a pause.

“Oh, well,” said James, huffy. “She isn’t indispensable.”

And Alvina was to play the piano! Here was a blow for her! She hurried off to her bedroom to laugh and cry at once. She just saw herself at that piano, banging off the Merry Widow Waltz, and, in tender moments, The Rosary. Time after time, The Rosary. While the pictures flickered and the audience gave shouts and some grubby boy called “Chot-let, penny a bar! Chot-let, penny a bar! Chot-let, penny a bar!” away she banged at another tune.

What a sight for the gods! She burst out laughing. And at the same time, she thought of her mother and Miss Frost, and she cried as if her heart would break. And then all kinds of comic and incongruous tunes came into her head. She imagined herself dressing up with most priceless variations. Linger Longer Lucy, for example. She began to spin imaginary harmonies and variations in her head, upon the theme of Linger Longer Lucy.

“Linger longer Lucy, linger longer Loo.
How I love to linger longer linger long o’ you.
Listen while I sing, love, promise you’ll be true,
And linger longer longer linger linger longer Loo.”

All the tunes that used to make Miss Frost so angry. All the Dream Waltzes and Maiden’s Prayers, and the awful songs.

“For in Spooney-ooney Island
Is there any one cares for me?
In Spooney-ooney Island
Why surely there ought to be—”

Poor Miss Frost! Alvina imagined herself leading a chorus of collier louts, in a bad atmosphere of “Woodbines” and oranges, during the intervals when the pictures had collapsed.

“How’d you like to spoon with me?
How’d you like to spoon with me?
                    (Why ra-ther!)

Underneath the oak-tree nice and shady
Calling me your tootsey-wootsey lady?
How’d you like to hug and squeeze,
                    (Just try me!)

Dandle me upon your knee,
Calling me your little lovey-dovey—
How’d you like to spoon with me?
                    (Oh-h—Go on!)”

Alvina worked herself into quite a fever, with her imaginings.

In the morning she told Miss Pinnegar.

“Yes,” said Miss Pinnegar, “you see me issuing tickets, don’t you? Yes—well. I’m afraid he will have to do that part himself. And you’re going to play the piano. It’s a disgrace! It’s a disgrace! It’s a disgrace! It’s a mercy Miss Frost and your mother are dead. He’s lost every bit of shame—every bit—if he ever had any—which I doubt very much. Well, all I can say, I’m glad I am not concerned. And I’m sorry for you, for being his daughter. I’m heart sorry for you, I am. Well, well—no sense of shame—no sense of shame—”

And Miss Pinnegar padded out of the room.

Alvina walked down to Lumley and was shown the site and was introduced to Mr. May. He bowed to her in his best American fashion, and treated her with admirable American deference.

“Don’t you think,” he said to her, “it’s an admirable scheme?”

“Wonderful,” she replied.

“Of cauce,” he said, “the erection will be a merely temporary one. Of cauce it won’t be anything to look at: just an old wooden travelling theatre. But then—all we need is to make a start.”

“And you are going to work the film?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said with pride, “I spend every evening with the operator at Marsh’s in Knarborough. Very interesting I find it—very interesting indeed. And you are going to play the piano?” he said, perking his head on one side and looking at her archly.

“So father says,” she answered.

“But what do you say?” queried Mr. May.

“I suppose I don’t have any say.”

“Oh but surely. Surely you won’t do it if you don’t wish to. That would never do. Can’t we hire some young fellow—?” And he turned to Mr. Houghton with a note of query.

“Alvina can play as well as anybody in Woodhouse,” said James. “We mustn’t add to our expenses. And wages in particular—”

“But surely Miss Houghton will have her wage. The labourer is worthy of his hire. Surely! Even of her hire, to put it in the feminine. And for the same wage you could get some unimportant fellow with strong wrists. I’m afraid it will tire Miss Houghton to death—”

“I don’t think so,” said James. “I don’t think so. Many of the turns she will not need to accompany—”

“Well, if it comes to that,” said Mr. May, “I can accompany some of them myself, when I’m not operating the film. I’m not an expert pianist—but I can play a little, you know—” And he trilled his fingers up and down an imaginary keyboard in front of Alvina, cocking his eye at her smiling a little archly.

“I’m sure,” he continued, “I can accompany anything except a man juggling dinner-plates—and then I’d be afraid of making him drop the plates. But songs—oh, songs! Con molto espressione!”

And again he trilled the imaginary keyboard, and smiled his rather fat cheeks at Alvina.

She began to like him. There was something a little dainty about him, when you knew him better—really rather fastidious. A showman, true enough! Blatant too. But fastidiously so.

He came fairly frequently to Manchester House after this. Miss Pinnegar was rather stiff with him and he did not like her. But he was very happy sitting chatting tête-à-tête with Alvina.

“Where is your wife?” said Alvina to him.

“My wife! Oh, don’t speak of her,” he said comically. “She’s in London.”

“Why not speak of her?” asked Alvina.

“Oh, every reason for not speaking of her. We don’t get on at all well, she and I.”

“What a pity,” said Alvina.

“Dreadful pity! But what are you to do?” He laughed comically. Then he became grave. “No,” he said. “She’s an impossible person.”

“I see,” said Alvina.

“I’m sure you don’t see,” said Mr. May. “Don’t—” and here he laid his hand on Alvina’s arm—“don’t run away with the idea that she’s immoral! You’d never make a greater mistake. Oh dear me, no. Morality’s her strongest point. Live on three lettuce leaves, and give the rest to the char. That’s her. Oh, dreadful times we had in those first years. We only lived together for three years. But dear me! how awful it was!”

“Why?”

“There was no pleasing the woman. She wouldn’t eat. If I said to her ‘What shall we have for supper, Grace?’ as sure as anything she’d answer ‘Oh, I shall take a bath when I go to bed—that will be my supper.’ She was one of these advanced vegetarian women, don’t you know.”

“How extraordinary!” said Alvina.

“Extraordinary! I should think so. Extraordinary hard lines on me. And she wouldn’t let me eat either. She followed me to the kitchen in a fury while I cooked for myself. Why imagine! I prepared a dish of champignons: oh, most beautiful champignons, beautiful—and I put them on the stove to fry in butter: beautiful young champignons. I’m hanged if she didn’t go into the kitchen while my back was turned, and pour a pint of old carrot-water into the pan. I was furious. Imagine!—beautiful fresh young champignons—”

“Fresh mushrooms,” said Alvina.

“Mushrooms—most beautiful things in the world. Oh! don’t you think so?” And he rolled his eyes oddly to heaven.

“They are good,” said Alvina.

“I should say so. And swamped—swamped with her dirty old carrot water. Oh I was so angry. And all she could say was, ‘Well, I didn’t want to waste it!’ Didn’t want to waste her old carrot water, and so ruined my champignons. Can you imagine such a person?”

“It must have been trying.”

“I should think it was. I lost weight. I lost I don’t know how many pounds, the first year I was married to that woman. She hated me to eat. Why, one of her great accusations against me, at the last, was when she said: ‘I’ve looked round the larder,’ she said to me, ‘and seen it was quite empty, and I thought to myself: Now he can’t cook a supper! And then you did!’ There! What do you think of that? The spite of it! ‘And then you did!’”

“What did she expect you to live on?” asked Alvina.

“Nibble a lettuce leaf with her, and drink water from the tap—and then elevate myself with a Bernard Shaw pamphlet. That was the sort of woman she was. All it gave me was gas in the stomach.”

“So overbearing!” said Alvina.

“Oh!” he turned his eyes to heaven, and spread his hands. “I didn’t believe my senses. I didn’t know such people existed. And her friends! Oh the dreadful friends she had—these Fabians! Oh, their eugenics. They wanted to examine my private morals, for eugenic reasons. Oh, you can’t imagine such a state. Worse than the Spanish Inquisition. And I stood it for three years. How I stood it, I don’t know—”

“Now don’t you see her?”

“Never! I never let her know where I am! But I support her, of cauce.”

“And your daughter?”

“Oh, she’s the dearest child in the world. I saw her at a friend’s when I came back from America. Dearest little thing in the world. But of cauce suspicious of me. Treats me as if she didn’t know me—”

“What a pity!”

“Oh—unbearable!” He spread his plump, manicured hands, on one finger of which was a green intaglio ring.

“How old is your daughter?”

“Fourteen.”

“What is her name?”

“Gemma. She was born in Rome, where I was managing for Miss Maud Callum, the danseuse.”

Curious the intimacy Mr. May established with Alvina at once. But it was all purely verbal, descriptive. He made no physical advances. On the contrary, he was like a dove-grey, disconsolate bird pecking the crumbs of Alvina’s sympathy, and cocking his eye all the time to watch that she did not advance one step towards him. If he had seen the least sign of coming-on-ness in her, he would have fluttered off in a great dither. Nothing horrified him more than a woman who was coming-on towards him. It horrified him, it exasperated him, it made him hate the whole tribe of women: horrific two-legged cats without whiskers. If he had been a bird, his innate horror of a cat would have been such. He liked the angel, and particularly the angel-mother in woman. Oh!—that he worshipped. But coming-on-ness!

So he never wanted to be seen out-of-doors with Alvina; if he met her in the street he bowed and passed on: bowed very deep and reverential, indeed, but passed on, with his little back a little more strutty and assertive than ever. Decidedly he turned his back on her in public.

But Miss Pinnegar, a regular old, grey, dangerous she-puss, eyed him from the corner of her pale eye, as he turned tail.

“So unmanly!” she murmured. “In his dress, in his way, in everything—so unmanly.”

“If I was you, Alvina,” she said, “I shouldn’t see so much of Mr. May, in the drawing-room. People will talk.”

“I should almost feel flattered,” laughed Alvina.

“What do you mean?” snapped Miss Pinnegar.

None the less, Mr. May was dependable in matters of business. He was up at half-past five in the morning, and by seven was well on his way. He sailed like a stiff little ship before a steady breeze, hither and thither, out of Woodhouse and back again, and across from side to side. Sharp and snappy, he was, on the spot. He trussed himself up, when he was angry or displeased, and sharp, snip-snap came his words, rather like scissors.

“But how is it—” he attacked Arthur Witham—“that the gas isn’t connected with the main yet? It was to be ready yesterday.”

“We’ve had to wait for the fixings for them brackets,” said Arthur.

“Had to wait for fixings! But didn’t you know a fortnight ago that you’d want the fixings?”

“I thought we should have some as would do.”

“Oh! you thought so! Really! Kind of you to think so. And have you just thought about those that are coming, or have you made sure?”

Arthur looked at him sullenly. He hated him. But Mr. May’s sharp touch was not to be foiled.

“I hope you’ll go further than thinking,” said Mr. May. “Thinking seems such a slow process. And when do you expect the fittings—?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What! Another day! Another day still! But you’re strangely indifferent to time, in your line of business. Oh! Tomorrow! Imagine it! Two days late already, and then tomorrow! Well I hope by tomorrow you mean Wednesday, and not tomorrow’s tomorrow, or some other absurd and fanciful date that you’ve just thought about. But now, do have the thing finished by tomorrow—” here he laid his hand cajoling on Arthur’s arm. “You promise me it will all be ready by tomorrow, don’t you?”

“Yes, I’ll do it if anybody could do it.”

“Don’t say ‘if anybody could do it.’ Say it shall be done.”

“It shall if I can possibly manage it—”

“Oh—very well then. Mind you manage it—and thank you very much. I shall be most obliged, if it is done.”

Arthur was annoyed, but he was kept to the scratch. And so, early in October the place was ready, and Woodhouse was plastered with placards announcing “Houghton’s Pleasure Palace.” Poor Mr. May could not but see an irony in the Palace part of the phrase. “We can guarantee the pleasure,” he said. “But personally, I feel I can’t take the responsibility for the palace.”

But James, to use the vulgar expression, was in his eye-holes.

“Oh, father’s in his eye-holes,” said Alvina to Mr. May.

“Oh!” said Mr. May, puzzled and concerned.

But it merely meant that James was having the time of his life. He was drawing out announcements. First was a batch of vermilion strips, with the mystic script, in big black letters: Houghton’s Picture Palace, underneath which, quite small: Opens at Lumley on October 7th, at 6:30 P.M. Everywhere you went, these vermilion and black bars sprang from the wall at you. Then there were other notices, in delicate pale-blue and pale red, like a genuine theatre notice, giving full programs. And beneath these a broad-letter notice announced, in green letters on a yellow ground: “Final and Ultimate Clearance Sale at Houghton’s, Knarborough Road, on Friday, September 30th. Come and Buy Without Price.”

James was in his eye-holes. He collected all his odds and ends from every corner of Manchester House. He sorted them in heaps, and marked the heaps in his own mind. And then he let go. He pasted up notices all over the window and all over the shop: “Take what you want and Pay what you Like.”

He and Miss Pinnegar kept shop. The women flocked in. They turned things over. It nearly killed James to take the prices they offered. But take them he did. But he exacted that they should buy one article at a time. “One piece at a time, if you don’t mind,” he said, when they came up with their three-a-penny handfuls. It was not till later in the evening that he relaxed this rule.

Well, by eleven o’clock he had cleared out a good deal—really, a very great deal—and many women had bought what they didn’t want, at their own figure. Feverish but content, James shut the shop for the last time. Next day, by eleven, he had removed all his belongings, the door that connected the house with the shop was screwed up fast, the grocer strolled in and looked round his bare extension, took the key from James, and immediately set his boy to paste a new notice in the window, tearing down all James’s announcements. Poor James had to run round, down Knarborough Road, and down Wellington Street as far as the Livery Stable, then down long narrow passages, before he could get into his own house, from his own shop.

But he did not mind. Every hour brought the first performance of his Pleasure Palace nearer. He was satisfied with Mr. May: he had to admit that he was satisfied with Mr. May. The Palace stood firm at last—oh, it was so ricketty when it arrived!—and it glowed with a new coat, all over, of dark-red paint, like ox-blood. It was tittivated up with a touch of lavender and yellow round the door and round the decorated wooden eaving. It had a new wooden slope up to the doors—and inside, a new wooden floor, with red-velvet seats in front, before the curtain, and old chapel-pews behind. The collier youths recognized the pews.

“Hey! These ’ere’s the pews out of the old Primitive Chapel.”

“Sorry ah! We’n come ter hear t’ parson.”

Theme for endless jokes. And the Pleasure Palace was christened, in some lucky stroke, Houghton’s Endeavour, a reference to that particular Chapel effort called the Christian Endeavour, where Alvina and Miss Pinnegar both figured.

“Wheer art off, Sorry?”

“Lumley.”

“Houghton’s Endeavour?”

“Ah.”

“Rotten.”

So, when one laconic young collier accosted another. But we anticipate.

Mr. May had worked hard to get a program for the first week. His pictures were: “The Human Bird,” which turned out to be a ski-ing film from Norway, purely descriptive; “The Pancake,” a humorous film: and then his grand serial: “The Silent Grip.” And then, for Turns, his first item was Miss Poppy Traherne, a lady in innumerable petticoats, who could whirl herself into anything you like, from an arum lily in green stockings to a rainbow and a Catherine wheel and a cup-and-saucer: marvellous, was Miss Poppy Traherne. The next turn was The Baxter Brothers, who ran up and down each other’s backs and up and down each other’s front, and stood on each other’s heads and on their own heads, and perched for a moment on each other’s shoulders, as if each of them was a flight of stairs with a landing, and the three of them were three flights, three storeys up, the top flight continually running down and becoming the bottom flight, while the middle flight collapsed and became a horizontal corridor.

Alvina had to open the performance by playing an overture called “Welcome All”: a ridiculous piece. She was excited and unhappy. On the Monday morning there was a rehearsal, Mr. May conducting. She played “Welcome All,” and then took the thumbed sheets which Miss Poppy Traherne carried with her. Miss Poppy was rather exacting. As she whirled her skirts she kept saying: “A little faster, please”—“A little slower”—in a rather haughty, official voice that was somewhat muffled by the swim of her drapery. “Can you give it expression?” she cried, as she got the arum lily in full blow, and there was a sound of real ecstasy in her tones. But why she should have called “Stronger! Stronger!” as she came into being as a cup and saucer, Alvina could not imagine: unless Miss Poppy was fancying herself a strong cup of tea.

However, she subsided into her mere self, panted frantically, and then, in a hoarse voice, demanded if she was in the bare front of the show. She scorned to count “Welcome All.” Mr. May said Yes. She was the first item. Whereupon she began to raise a dust. Mr. Houghton said, hurriedly interposing, that he meant to make a little opening speech. Miss Poppy eyed him as if he were a cuckoo-clock, and she had to wait till he’d finished cuckooing. Then she said:

“That’s not every night. There’s six nights to a week.” James was properly snubbed. It ended by Mr. May metamorphizing himself into a pug dog: he said he had got the “costoom” in his bag: and doing a lump-of-sugar scene with one of the Baxter Brothers, as a brief first item. Miss Poppy’s professional virginity was thus saved from outrage.

At the back of the stage there was half-a-yard of curtain screening the two dressing-rooms, ladies and gents. In her spare time Alvina sat in the ladies’ dressing room, or in its lower doorway, for there was not room right inside. She watched the ladies making up—she gave some slight assistance. She saw the men’s feet, in their shabby pumps, on the other side of the curtain, and she heard the men’s gruff voices. Often a slangy conversation was carried on through the curtain—for most of the turns were acquainted with each other: very affable before each other’s faces, very sniffy behind each other’s backs.

Poor Alvina was in a state of bewilderment. She was extremely nice—oh, much too nice with the female turns. They treated her with a sort of off-hand friendliness, and they snubbed and patronized her and were a little spiteful with her because Mr. May treated her with attention and deference. She felt bewildered, a little excited, and as if she was not herself.

The first evening actually came. Her father had produced a pink crêpe de Chine blouse and a back-comb massed with brilliants—both of which she refused to wear. She stuck to her black blouse and black shirt, and her simple hair-dressing. Mr. May said “Of cauce! She wasn’t intended to attract attention to herself.” Miss Pinnegar actually walked down the hill with her, and began to cry when she saw the ox-blood red erection, with its gas-flares in front. It was the first time she had seen it. She went on with Alvina to the little stage door at the back, and up the steps into the scrap of dressing-room. But she fled out again from the sight of Miss Poppy in her yellow hair and green knickers with green-lace frills. Poor Miss Pinnegar! She stood outside on the trodden grass behind the Band of Hope, and really cried. Luckily she had put a veil on.

She went valiantly round to the front entrance, and climbed the steps. The crowd was just coming. There was James’s face peeping inside the little ticket-window.

“One!” he said officially, pushing out the ticket. And then he recognized her. “Oh,” he said, “You’re not going to pay.”

“Yes I am,” she said, and she left her fourpence, and James’s coppery, grimy fingers scooped it in, as the youth behind Miss Pinnegar shoved her forward.

“Arf way down, fourpenny,” said the man at the door, poking her in the direction of Mr. May, who wanted to put her in the red velvet. But she marched down one of the pews, and took her seat.

The place was crowded with a whooping, whistling, excited audience. The curtain was down. James had let it out to his fellow tradesmen, and it represented a patchwork of local adverts. There was a fat porker and a fat pork-pie, and the pig was saying: “You all know where to find me. Inside the crust at Frank Churchill’s, Knarborough Road, Woodhouse.” Round about the name of W. H. Johnson floated a bowler hat, a collar-and-necktie, a pair of braces and an umbrella. And so on and so on. It all made you feel very homely. But Miss Pinnegar was sadly hot and squeezed in her pew.

Time came, and the colliers began to drum their feet. It was exactly the excited, crowded audience Mr. May wanted. He darted out to drive James round in front of the curtain. But James, fascinated by raking in the money so fast, could not be shifted from the pay-box, and the two men nearly had a fight. At last Mr. May was seen shooing James, like a scuffled chicken, down the side gangway and on to the stage.

James before the illuminated curtain of local adverts, bowing and beginning and not making a single word audible! The crowd quieted itself, the eloquence flowed on. The crowd was sick of James, and began to shuffle. “Come down, come down!” hissed Mr. May frantically from in front. But James did not move. He would flow on all night. Mr. May waved excitedly at Alvina, who sat obscurely at the piano, and darted on to the stage. He raised his voice and drowned James. James ceased to wave his penny-blackened hands, Alvina struck up “Welcome All” as loudly and emphatically as she could.

And all the time Miss Pinnegar sat like a sphinx—like a sphinx. What she thought she did not know herself. But stolidly she stared at James, and anxiously she glanced sideways at the pounding Alvina. She knew Alvina had to pound until she received the cue that Mr. May was fitted in his pug-dog “Costoom.”

A twitch of the curtain. Alvina wound up her final flourish, the curtain rose, and:

“Well really!” said Miss Pinnegar, out loud.

There was Mr. May as a pug dog begging, too lifelike and too impossible. The audience shouted. Alvina sat with her hands in her lap. The Pug was a great success.

Curtain! A few bars of Toreador—and then Miss Poppy’s sheets of music. Soft music. Miss Poppy was on the ground under a green scarf. And so the accumulating dilation, on to the whirling climax of the perfect arum lily. Sudden curtain, and a yell of ecstasy from the colliers. Of all blossoms, the arum, the arum lily is most mystical and portentous.

Now a crash and rumble from Alvina’s piano. This is the storm from whence the rainbow emerges. Up goes the curtain—Miss Poppy twirling till her skirts lift as in a breeze, rise up and become a rainbow above her now darkened legs. The footlights are all but extinguished. Miss Poppy is all but extinguished also.

The rainbow is not so moving as the arum lily. But the Catherine wheel, done at the last moment on one leg and then an amazing leap into the air backwards, again brings down the house.

Miss Poppy herself sets all store on her cup and saucer. But the audience, vulgar as ever, cannot quite see it.

And so, Alvina slips away with Miss Poppy’s music-sheets, while Mr. May sits down like a professional at the piano and makes things fly for the up-and-down-stairs Baxter Bros. Meanwhile, Alvina’s pale face hovering like a ghost in the side darkness, as it were under the stage.

The lamps go out: gurglings and kissings—and then the dither on the screen: “The Human Bird,” in awful shivery letters. It’s not a very good machine, and Mr. May is not a very good operator. Audience distinctly critical. Lights up—an “Chot-let, penny a bar! Chot-let, penny a bar!” even as in Alvina’s dream—and then “The Pancake”—so the first half over. Lights up for the interval.

Miss Pinnegar sighed and folded her hands. She looked neither to right nor to left. In spite of herself, in spite of outraged shame and decency, she was excited. But she felt such excitement was not wholesome. In vain the boy most pertinently yelled “Chot-let” at her. She looked neither to right nor left. But when she saw Alvina nodding to her with a quick smile from the side gangway under the stage, she almost burst into tears. It was too much for her, all at once. And Alvina looked almost indecently excited. As she slipped across in front of the audience, to the piano, to play the seductive “Dream Waltz!” she looked almost fussy, like her father. James, needless to say, flittered and hurried hither and thither around the audience and the stage, like a wagtail on the brink of a pool.

The second half consisted of a comic drama acted by two Baxter Bros., disguised as women, and Miss Poppy disguised as a man—with a couple of locals thrown in to do the guardsman and the Count. This went very well. The winding up was the first instalment of “The Silent Grip.”

When lights went up and Alvina solemnly struck “God Save Our Gracious King,” the audience was on its feet and not very quiet, evidently hissing with excitement like doughnuts in the pan even when the pan is taken off the fire. Mr. Houghton thanked them for their courtesy and attention, and hoped—And nobody took the slightest notice.

Miss Pinnegar stayed last, waiting for Alvina. And Alvina, in her excitement, waited for Mr. May and her father.

Mr. May fairly pranced into the empty hall.

“Well!” he said, shutting both his fists and flourishing them in Miss Pinnegar’s face. “How did it go?”

“I think it went very well,” she said.

“Very well! I should think so, indeed. It went like a house on fire. What? Didn’t it?” And he laughed a high, excited little laugh.

James was counting pennies for his life, in the cash-place, and dropping them into a Gladstone bag. The others had to wait for him. At last he locked his bag.

“Well,” said Mr. May, “done well?”

“Fairly well,” said James, huskily excited. “Fairly well.”

“Only fairly? Oh-h!” And Mr. May suddenly picked up the bag. James turned as if he would snatch it from him. “Well! Feel that, for fairly well!” said Mr. May, handing the bag to Alvina.

“Goodness!” she cried, handing it to Miss Pinnegar.

“Would you believe it?” said Miss Pinnegar, relinquishing it to James. But she spoke coldly, aloof.

Mr. May turned off the gas at the meter, came talking through the darkness of the empty theatre, picking his way with a flash-light.

“C’est le premier pas qui coute,” he said, in a sort of American French, as he locked the doors and put the key in his pocket. James tripped silently alongside, bowed under the weight of his Gladstone bag of pennies.

“How much have we taken, father?” asked Alvina gaily.

“I haven’t counted,” he snapped.

When he got home he hurried upstairs to his bare chamber. He swept his table clear, and then, in an expert fashion, he seized handfuls of coin and piled them in little columns on his board. There was an army of fat pennies, a dozen to a column, along the back, rows and rows of fat brown rank-and-file. In front of these, rows of slim halfpence, like an advance-guard. And commanding all, a stout column of half-crowns, a few stoutish and important florin-figures, like general and colonels, then quite a file of shillings, like so many captains, and a little cloud of silvery lieutenant sixpences. Right at the end, like a frail drummer boy, a thin stick of threepenny pieces.

There they all were: burly dragoons of stout pennies, heavy and holding their ground, with a screen of halfpenny light infantry, officered by the immovable half-crown general, who in his turn was flanked by all his staff of florin colonels and shilling captains, from whom lightly moved the nimble sixpenny lieutenants all ignoring the wan, frail Joey of the threepenny-bits.

Time after time James ran his almighty eye over his army. He loved them. He loved to feel that his table was pressed down, that it groaned under their weight. He loved to see the pence, like innumerable pillars of cloud, standing waiting to lead on into wildernesses of unopened resource, while the silver, as pillars of light, should guide the way down the long night of fortune. Their weight sank sensually into his muscle, and gave him gratification. The dark redness of bronze, like full-blooded fleas, seemed alive and pulsing, the silver was magic as if winged.

Mr. May and Alvina became almost inseparable, and Woodhouse buzzed with scandal. Woodhouse could not believe that Mr. May was absolutely final in his horror of any sort of coming-on-ness in a woman. It could not believe that he was only so fond of Alvina because she was like a sister to him, poor, lonely, harassed soul that he was: a pure sister who really hadn’t any body. For although Mr. May was rather fond, in an epicurean way, of his own body, yet other people’s bodies rather made him shudder. So that his grand utterance on Alvina was: “She’s not physical, she’s mental.”

He even explained to her one day how it was, in his naïve fashion.

“There are two kinds of friendships,” he said, “physical and mental. The physical is a thing of the moment. Of cauce you quite like the individual, you remain quite nice with them, and so on,—to keep the thing as decent as possible. It is quite decent, so long as you keep it so. But it is a thing of the moment. Which you know. It may last a week or two, or a month or two. But you know from the beginning it is going to end—quite finally—quite soon. You take it for what it is. But it’s so different with the mental friendships. They are lasting. They are eternal—if anything human (he said yuman) ever is eternal, ever can be eternal.” He pressed his hands together in an odd cherubic manner. He was quite sincere: if man ever can be quite sincere.

Alvina was quite content to be one of his mental and eternal friends, or rather friendships—since she existed in abstractu as far as he was concerned. For she did not find him at all physically moving. Physically he was not there: he was oddly an absentee. But his naïveté roused the serpent’s tooth of her bitter irony.

“And your wife?” she said to him.

“Oh, my wife! Dreadful thought! There I made the great mistake of trying to find the two in one person! And didn’t I fall between two stools! Oh dear, didn’t I? Oh, I fell between the two stools beautifully, beautifully! And then—she nearly set the stools on top of me. I thought I should never get up again. When I was physical, she was mental—Bernard Shaw and cold baths for supper!—and when I was mental she was physical, and threw her arms round my neck. In the morning, mark you. Always in the morning, when I was on the alert for business. Yes, invariably. What do you think of it? Could the devil himself have invented anything more trying? Oh dear me, don’t mention it. Oh, what a time I had! Wonder I’m alive. Yes, really! Although you smile.”

Alvina did more than smile. She laughed outright. And yet she remained good friends with the odd little man.

He bought himself a new, smart overcoat, that fitted his figure, and a new velour hat. And she even noticed, one day when he was curling himself up cosily on the sofa, that he had pale blue silk underwear, and purple silk suspenders. She wondered where he got them, and how he afforded them. But there they were.

James seemed for the time being wrapt in his undertaking—particularly in the takings part of it. He seemed for the time being contented—or nearly so, nearly so. Certainly there was money coming in. But then he had to pay off all he had borrowed to buy his erection and its furnishings, and a bulk of pennies sublimated into a very small £.s.d. account, at the bank.

The Endeavour was successful—yes, it was successful. But not overwhelmingly so. On wet nights Woodhouse did not care to trail down to Lumley. And then Lumley was one of those depressed, negative spots on the face of the earth which have no pull at all. In that region of sharp hills with fine hill-brows, and shallow, rather dreary canal-valleys, it was the places on the hill-brows, like Woodhouse and Hathersedge and Rapton which flourished, while the dreary places down along the canals existed only for work-places, not for life and pleasure. It was just like James to have planted his endeavour down in the stagnant dust and rust of potteries and foundries, where no illusion could bloom.

He had dreamed of crowded houses every night, and of raised prices. But there was no probability of his being able to raise his prices. He had to figure lower than the Woodhouse Empire. He was second-rate from the start. His hope now lay in the tramway which was being built from Knarborough away through the country—a black country indeed—through Woodhouse and Lumley and Hathersedge, to Rapton. When once this tramway-system was working, he would have a supply of youths and lasses always on tap, as it were. So he spread his rainbow wings towards the future, and began to say:

“When we’ve got the trams, I shall buy a new machine and finer lenses, and I shall extend my premises.”

Mr. May did not talk business to Alvina. He was terribly secretive with respect to business. But he said to her once, in the early year following their opening:

“Well, how do you think we’re doing, Miss Houghton?”

“We’re not doing any better than we did at first, I think,” she said.

“No,” he answered. “No! That’s true. That’s perfectly true. But why? They seem to like the programs.”

“I think they do,” said Alvina. “I think they like them when they’re there. But isn’t it funny, they don’t seem to want to come to them. I know they always talk as if we were second-rate. And they only come because they can’t get to the Empire, or up to Hathersedge. We’re a stop-gap. I know we are.”

Mr. May looked down in the mouth. He cocked his blue eyes at her, miserable and frightened. Failure began to frighten him abjectly.

“Why do you think that is?” he said.

“I don’t believe they like the turns,” she said.

“But look how they applaud them! Look how pleased they are!”

“I know. I know they like them once they’re there, and they see them. But they don’t come again. They crowd the Empire—and the Empire is only pictures now; and it’s much cheaper to run.”

He watched her dismally.

“I can’t believe they want nothing but pictures. I can’t believe they want everything in the flat,” he said, coaxing and miserable. He himself was not interested in the film. His interest was still the human interest in living performers and their living feats. “Why,” he continued, “they are ever so much more excited after a good turn, than after any film.”

“I know they are,” said Alvina. “But I don’t believe they want to be excited in that way.”

“In what way?” asked Mr. May plaintively.

“By the things which the artistes do. I believe they’re jealous.”

“Oh nonsense!” exploded Mr. May, starting as if he had been shot. Then he laid his hand on her arm. “But forgive my rudeness! I don’t mean it, of cauce! But do you mean to say that these collier louts and factory girls are jealous of the things the artistes do, because they could never do them themselves?”

“I’m sure they are,” said Alvina.

“But I can’t believe it,” said Mr. May, pouting up his mouth and smiling at her as if she were a whimsical child. “What a low opinion you have of human nature!”

“Have I?” laughed Alvina. “I’ve never reckoned it up. But I’m sure that these common people here are jealous if anybody does anything or has anything they can’t have themselves.”

“I can’t believe it,” protested Mr. May. “Could they be so silly! And then why aren’t they jealous of the extraordinary things which are done on the film?”

“Because they don’t see the flesh-and-blood people. I’m sure that’s it. The film is only pictures, like pictures in the Daily Mirror. And pictures don’t have any feelings apart from their own feelings. I mean the feelings of the people who watch them. Pictures don’t have any life except in the people who watch them. And that’s why they like them. Because they make them feel that they are everything.”

“The pictures make the colliers and lasses feel that they themselves are everything? But how? They identify themselves with the heroes and heroines on the screen?”

“Yes—they take it all to themselves—and there isn’t anything except themselves. I know it’s like that. It’s because they can spread themselves over a film, and they can’t over a living performer. They’re up against the performer himself. And they hate it.”

Mr. May watched her long and dismally.

“I can’t believe people are like that!—sane people!” he said. “Why, to me the whole joy is in the living personality, the curious personality of the artiste. That’s what I enjoy so much.”

“I know. But that’s where you’re different from them.”

“But am I?”

“Yes. You’re not as up to the mark as they are.”

“Not up to the mark? What do you mean? Do you mean they are more intelligent?”

“No, but they’re more modern. You like things which aren’t yourself. But they don’t. They hate to admire anything that they can’t take to themselves. They hate anything that isn’t themselves. And that’s why they like pictures. It’s all themselves to them, all the time.”

He still puzzled.

“You know I don’t follow you,” he said, a little mocking, as if she were making a fool of herself.

“Because you don’t know them. You don’t know the common people. You don’t know how conceited they are.”

He watched her a long time.

“And you think we ought to cut out the variety, and give nothing but pictures, like the Empire?” he said.

“I believe it takes best,” she said.

“And costs less,” he answered. “But then! It’s so dull. Oh my word, it’s so dull. I don’t think I could bear it.”

“And our pictures aren’t good enough,” she said. “We should have to get a new machine, and pay for the expensive films. Our pictures do shake, and our films are rather ragged.”

“But then, surely they’re good enough!” he said.

That was how matters stood. The Endeavour paid its way, and made just a margin of profit—no more. Spring went on to summer, and then there was a very shadowy margin of profit. But James was not at all daunted. He was waiting now for the trams, and building up hopes since he could not build in bricks and mortar.

The navvies were busy in troops along the Knarborough Road, and down Lumley Hill. Alvina became quite used to them. As she went down the hill soon after six o’clock in the evening, she met them trooping home. And some of them she liked. There was an outlawed look about them as they swung along the pavement—some of them; and there was a certain lurking set of the head which rather frightened her because it fascinated her. There was one tall young fellow with a red face and fair hair, who looked as if he had fronted the seas and the arctic sun. He looked at her. They knew each other quite well, in passing. And he would glance at perky Mr. May. Alvina tried to fathom what the young fellow’s look meant. She wondered what he thought of Mr. May.

She was surprised to hear Mr. May’s opinion of the navvy.

“He’s a handsome young man, now!” exclaimed her companion one evening as the navvies passed. And all three turned round, to find all three turning round. Alvina laughed, and made eyes. At that moment she would cheerfully have gone along with the navvy. She was getting so tired of Mr. May’s quiet prance.

On the whole, Alvina enjoyed the cinema and the life it brought her. She accepted it. And she became somewhat vulgarized in her bearing. She was déclassée: she had lost her class altogether. The other daughters of respectable tradesmen avoided her now, or spoke to her only from a distance. She was supposed to be “carrying on” with Mr. May.

Alvina did not care. She rather liked it. She liked being déclassée. She liked feeling an outsider. At last she seemed to stand on her own ground. She laughed to herself as she went back and forth from Woodhouse to Lumley, between Manchester House and the Pleasure Palace. She laughed when she saw her father’s theatre-notices plastered about. She laughed when she saw his thrilling announcements in the Woodhouse Weekly. She laughed when she knew that all the Woodhouse youths recognized her, and looked on her as one of their inferior entertainers. She was off the map: and she liked it.

For after all, she got a good deal of fun out of it. There was not only the continual activity. There were the artistes. Every week she met a new set of stars—three or four as a rule. She rehearsed with them on Monday afternoons, and she saw them every evening, and twice a week at matinees. James now gave two performances each evening—and he always had some audience. So that Alvina had opportunity to come into contact with all the odd people of the inferior stage. She found they were very much of a type: a little frowsy, a little flea-bitten as a rule, indifferent to ordinary morality, and philosophical even if irritable. They were often very irritable. And they had always a certain fund of callous philosophy. Alvina did not like them—you were not supposed, really, to get deeply emotional over them. But she found it amusing to see them all and know them all. It was so different from Woodhouse, where everything was priced and ticketed. These people were nomads. They didn’t care a straw who you were or who you weren’t. They had a most irritable professional vanity, and that was all. It was most odd to watch them. They weren’t very squeamish. If the young gentlemen liked to peep round the curtain when the young lady was in her knickers: oh, well, she rather roundly told them off, perhaps, but nobody minded. The fact that ladies wore knickers and black silk stockings thrilled nobody, any more than grease-paint or false moustaches thrilled. It was all part of the stock-in-trade. As for immorality—well, what did it amount to? Not a great deal. Most of the men cared far more about a drop of whiskey than about any more carnal vice, and most of the girls were good pals with each other, men were only there to act with: even if the act was a private love-farce of an improper description. What’s the odds? You couldn’t get excited about it: not as a rule.

Mr. May usually took rooms for the artistes in a house down in Lumley. When any one particular was coming, he would go to a rather better-class widow in Woodhouse. He never let Alvina take any part in the making of these arrangements, except with the widow in Woodhouse, who had long ago been a servant at Manchester House, and even now came in to do cleaning.

Odd, eccentric people they were, these entertainers. Most of them had a streak of imagination, and most of them drank. Most of them were middle-aged. Most of them had an abstracted manner; in ordinary life, they seemed left aside, somehow. Odd, extraneous creatures, often a little depressed, feeling life slip away from them. The cinema was killing them.

Alvina had quite a serious flirtation with a man who played a flute and piccolo. He was about fifty years old, still handsome, and growing stout. When sober, he was completely reserved. When rather drunk, he talked charmingly and amusingly—oh, most charmingly. Alvina quite loved him. But alas, how he drank! But what a charm he had! He went, and she saw him no more.

The usual rather American-looking, clean-shaven, slightly pasty young man left Alvina quite cold, though he had an amiable and truly chivalrous galanterie. He was quite likeable. But so unattractive. Alvina was more fascinated by the odd fish: like the lady who did marvellous things with six ferrets, or the Jap who was tattooed all over, and had the most amazing strong wrists, so that he could throw down any collier, with one turn of the hand. Queer cuts these!—but just a little bit beyond her. She watched them rather from a distance. She wished she could jump across the distance. Particularly with the Jap, who was almost quite naked, but clothed with the most exquisite tattooing. Never would she forget the eagle that flew with terrible spread wings between his shoulders, or the strange mazy pattern that netted the roundness of his buttocks. He was not very large, but nicely shaped, and with no hair on his smooth, tattooed body. He was almost blue in colour—that is, his tattooing was blue, with pickings of brilliant vermilion: as for instance round the nipples, and in a strange red serpent’s-jaws over the navel. A serpent went round his loins and haunches. He told her how many times he had had blood-poisoning, during the process of his tattooing. He was a queer, black-eyed creature, with a look of silence and toad-like lewdness. He frightened her. But when he was dressed in common clothes, and was just a cheap, shoddy-looking European Jap, he was more frightening still. For his face—he was not tattooed above a certain ring low on his neck—was yellow and flat and basking with one eye open, like some age-old serpent. She felt he was smiling horribly all the time: lewd, unthinkable. A strange sight he was in Woodhouse, on a sunny morning; a shabby-looking bit of riff-raff of the East, rather down at the heel. Who could have imagined the terrible eagle of his shoulders, the serpent of his loins, his supple, magic skin?

The summer passed again, and autumn. Winter was a better time for James Houghton. The trams, moreover, would begin to run in January.

He wanted to arrange a good program for the week when the trams started. A long time ahead, Mr. May prepared it. The one item was the Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe. The Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe consisted of five persons, Madame Rochard and four young men. They were a strictly Red Indian troupe. But one of the young men, the German Swiss, was a famous yodeller, and another, the French Swiss, was a good comic with a French accent, whilst Madame and the German did a screaming two-person farce. Their great turn, of course, was the Natcha-Kee-Tawara Red Indian scene.

The Natcha-Kee-Tawaras were due in the third week in January, arriving from the Potteries on the Sunday evening. When Alvina came in from Chapel that Sunday evening, she found her widow, Mrs. Rollings, seated in the living room talking with James, who had an anxious look. Since opening the Pleasure Palace James was less regular at Chapel. And moreover, he was getting old and shaky, and Sunday was the one evening he might spend in peace. Add that on this particular black Sunday night it was sleeting dismally outside, and James had already a bit of a cough, and we shall see that he did right to stay at home.

Mrs. Rollings sat nursing a bottle. She was to go to the chemist for some cough-cure, because Madame had got a bad cold. The chemist was gone to Chapel—he wouldn’t open till eight.

Madame and the four young men had arrived at about six. Madame, said Mrs. Rollings, was a little fat woman, and she was complaining all the time that she had got a cold on her chest, laying her hand on her chest and trying her breathing and going “He-e-e-er! Herr!” to see if she could breathe properly. She, Mrs. Rollings, had suggested that Madame should put her feet in hot mustard and water, but Madame said she must have something to clear her chest. The four young men were four nice civil young fellows. They evidently liked Madame. Madame had insisted on cooking the chops for the young men. She herself had eaten one, but she laid her hand on her chest when she swallowed. One of the young men had gone out to get her some brandy, and he had come back with half-a-dozen large bottles of Bass as well.

Mr. Houghton was very much concerned over Madame’s cold. He asked the same questions again and again, to try and make sure how bad it was. But Mrs. Rollings didn’t seem quite to know. James wrinkled his brow. Supposing Madame could not take her part! He was most anxious.

“Do you think you might go across with Mrs. Rollings and see how this woman is, Alvina?” he said to his daughter.

“I should think you’ll never turn Alvina out on such a night,” said Miss Pinnegar. “And besides, it isn’t right. Where is Mr. May? It’s his business to go.”

“Oh!” returned Alvina. “I don’t mind going. Wait a minute, I’ll see if we haven’t got some of those pastilles for burning. If it’s very bad, I can make one of those plasters mother used.”

And she ran upstairs. She was curious to see what Madame and her four young men were like.

With Mrs. Rollings she called at the chemist’s back door, and then they hurried through the sleet to the widow’s dwelling. It was not far. As they went up the entry they heard the sound of voices. But in the kitchen all was quiet. The voices came from the front room.

Mrs. Rollings tapped.

“Come in!” said a rather sharp voice. Alvina entered on the widow’s heels.

“I’ve brought you the cough stuff,” said the widow. “And Miss Huff’n’s come as well, to see how you was.”

Four young men were sitting round the table in their shirt-sleeves, with bottles of Bass. There was much cigarette smoke. By the fire, which was burning brightly, sat a plump, pale woman with dark bright eyes and finely-drawn eyebrows: she might be any age between forty and fifty. There were grey threads in her tidy black hair. She was neatly dressed in a well-made black dress with a small lace collar. There was a slight look of self-commiseration on her face. She had a cigarette between her drooped fingers.

She rose as if with difficulty, and held out her plump hand, on which four or five rings showed. She had dropped the cigarette unnoticed into the hearth.

“How do you do,” she said. “I didn’t catch your name.” Madame’s voice was a little plaintive and plangent now, like a bronze reed mournfully vibrating.

“Alvina Houghton,” said Alvina.

“Daughter of him as owns the thee-etter where you’re goin’ to act,” interposed the widow.

“Oh yes! Yes! I see. Miss Houghton. I didn’t know how it was said. Huff-ton—yes? Miss Houghton. I’ve got a bad cold on my chest—” laying her plump hand with the rings on her plump bosom. “But let me introduce you to my young men—” A wave of the plump hand, whose forefinger was very slightly cigarette-stained, towards the table.

The four young men had risen, and stood looking at Alvina and Madame. The room was small, rather bare, with horse-hair and white-crochet antimacassars and a linoleum floor. The table also was covered with a brightly-patterned American oil-cloth, shiny but clean. A naked gas-jet hung over it. For furniture, there were just chairs, arm-chairs, table, and a horse-hair antimacassar-ed sofa. Yet the little room seemed very full—full of people, young men with smart waistcoats and ties, but without coats.

“That is Max,” said Madame. “I shall tell you only their names, and not their family names, because that is easier for you—”

In the meantime Max had bowed. He was a tall Swiss with almond eyes and a flattish face and a rather stiff, ramrod figure.

“And that is Louis—” Louis bowed gracefully. He was a Swiss Frenchman, moderately tall, with prominent cheekbones and a wing of glossy black hair falling on his temple.

“And that is Géoffroi—Geoffrey—” Geoffrey made his bow—a broad-shouldered, watchful, taciturn man from Alpine France.

“And that is Francesco—Frank—” Francesco gave a faint curl of his lip, half smile, as he saluted her involuntarily in a military fashion. He was dark, rather tall and loose, with yellow-tawny eyes. He was an Italian from the south. Madame gave another look at him. “He doesn’t like his English name of Frank. You will see, he pulls a face. No, he doesn’t like it. We call him Ciccio also—” But Ciccio was dropping his head sheepishly, with the same faint smile on his face, half grimace, and stooping to his chair, wanting to sit down.

“These are my family of young men,” said Madame. “We are drawn from three races, though only Ciccio is not of our mountains. Will you please to sit down.”

They all took their chairs. There was a pause.

“My young men drink a little beer, after their horrible journey. As a rule, I do not like them to drink. But tonight they have a little beer. I do not take any myself, because I am afraid of inflaming myself.” She laid her hand on her breast, and took long, uneasy breaths. “I feel it. I feel it here.” She patted her breast. “It makes me afraid for tomorrow. Will you perhaps take a glass of beer? Ciccio, ask for another glass—” Ciccio, at the end of the table, did not rise, but looked round at Alvina as if he presumed there would be no need for him to move. The odd, supercilious curl of the lip persisted. Madame glared at him. But he turned the handsome side of his cheek towards her, with the faintest flicker of a sneer.

“No, thank you. I never take beer,” said Alvina hurriedly.

“No? Never? Oh!” Madame folded her hands, but her black eyes still darted venom at Ciccio. The rest of the young men fingered their glasses and put their cigarettes to their lips and blew the smoke down their noses, uncomfortably.

Madame closed her eyes and leaned back a moment. Then her face looked transparent and pallid, there were dark rings under her eyes, the beautifully-brushed hair shone dark like black glass above her ears. She was obviously unwell. The young men looked at her, and muttered to one another.

“I’m afraid your cold is rather bad,” said Alvina. “Will you let me take your temperature?”

Madame started and looked frightened.

“Oh, I don’t think you should trouble to do that,” she said.

Max, the tall, highly-coloured Swiss, turned to her, saying:

“Yes, you must have your temperature taken, and then we s’ll know, shan’t we. I had a hundred and five when we were in Redruth.”

Alvina had taken the thermometer from her pocket. Ciccio meanwhile muttered something in French—evidently something rude—meant for Max.

“What shall I do if I can’t work tomorrow!” moaned Madame, seeing Alvina hold up the thermometer towards the light. “Max, what shall we do?”

“You will stay in bed, and we must do the White Prisoner scene,” said Max, rather staccato and official.

Ciccio curled his lip and put his head aside. Alvina went across to Madame with the thermometer. Madame lifted her plump hand and fended off Alvina, while she made her last declaration:

“Never—never have I missed my work, for a single day, for ten years. Never. If I am going to lie abandoned, I had better die at once.”

“Lie abandoned!” said Max. “You know you won’t do no such thing. What are you talking about?”

“Take the thermometer,” said Geoffrey roughly, but with feeling.

“Tomorrow, see, you will be well. Quite certain!” said Louis. Madame mournfully shook her head, opened her mouth, and sat back with closed eyes and the stump of the thermometer comically protruding from a corner of her lips. Meanwhile Alvina took her plump white wrist and felt her pulse.

“We can practise—” began Geoffrey.

“Sh!” said Max, holding up his finger and looking anxiously at Alvina and Madame, who still leaned back with the stump of the thermometer jauntily perking up from her pursed mouth, while her face was rather ghastly.

Max and Louis watched anxiously. Geoffrey sat blowing the smoke down his nose, while Ciccio callously lit another cigarette, striking a match on his boot-heel and puffing from under the tip of his rather long nose. Then he took the cigarette from his mouth, turned his head, slowly spat on the floor, and rubbed his foot on his spit. Max flapped his eyelids and looked all disdain, murmuring something about “ein schmutziges italienisches Volk,” whilst Louis, refusing either to see or to hear, framed the word “chien” on his lips.

Then quick as lightning both turned their attention again to Madame.

Her temperature was a hundred and two.

“You’d better go to bed,” said Alvina. “Have you eaten anything?”

“One little mouthful,” said Madame plaintively.

Max sat looking pale and stricken, Louis had hurried forward to take Madame’s hand. He kissed it quickly, then turned aside his head because of the tears in his eyes. Geoffrey gulped beer in large throatfuls, and Ciccio, with his head bent, was watching from under his eyebrows.

“I’ll run round for the doctor—” said Alvina.

“Don’t! Don’t do that, my dear! Don’t you go and do that! I’m likely to a temperature—”

“Liable to a temperature,” murmured Louis pathetically.

“I’ll go to bed,” said Madame, obediently rising.

“Wait a bit. I’ll see if there’s a fire in the bedroom,” said Alvina.

“Oh, my dear, you are too good. Open the door for her, Ciccio—”

Ciccio reached across at the door, but was too late. Max had hastened to usher Alvina out. Madame sank back in her chair.

“Never for ten years,” she was wailing. “Quoi faire, ah, quoi faire! Que ferez-vous, mes pauvres, sans votre Kishwégin. Que vais-je faire, mourir dans un tel pays! La bonne demoiselle—la bonne demoiselle—elle a du coeur. Elle pourrait aussi être belle, s’il y avait un peu plus de chair. Max, liebster, schau ich sehr elend aus? Ach, oh jeh, oh jeh!”

“Ach nein, Madame, ach nein. Nicht so furchtbar elend,” said Max.

“Manca il cuore solamente al Ciccio,” moaned Madame. “Che natura povera, senza sentimento—niente di bello. Ahimé, che amico, che ragazzo duro, aspero—”

“Trova?” said Ciccio, with a curl of the lip. He looked, as he dropped his long, beautiful lashes, as if he might weep for all that, if he were not bound to be misbehaving just now.

So Madame moaned in four languages as she posed pallid in her arm-chair. Usually she spoke in French only, with her young men. But this was an extra occasion.

“La pauvre Kishwégin!” murmured Madame. “Elle va finir au monde. Elle passe—la pauvre Kishwégin.”

Kishwégin was Madame’s Red Indian name, the name under which she danced her Squaw’s fire-dance.

Now that she knew she was ill, Madame seemed to become more ill. Her breath came in little pants. She had a pain in her side. A feverish flush seemed to mount her cheek. The young men were all extremely uncomfortable. Louis did not conceal his tears. Only Ciccio kept the thin smile on his lips, and added to Madame’s annoyance and pain.

Alvina came down to take her to bed. The young men all rose, and kissed Madame’s hand as she went out: her poor jewelled hand, that was faintly perfumed with eau de Cologne. She spoke an appropriate good-night, to each of them.

“Good-night, my faithful Max, I trust myself to you. Good-night, Louis, the tender heart. Good-night valiant Geoffrey. Ah Ciccio, do not add to the weight of my heart. Be good braves, all, be brothers in one accord. One little prayer for poor Kishwégin. Good-night!”

After which valediction she slowly climbed the stairs, putting her hand on her knee at each step, with the effort.

“No—no,” she said to Max, who would have followed to her assistance. “Do not come up. No—no!”

Her bedroom was tidy and proper.

“Tonight,” she moaned, “I shan’t be able to see that the boys’ rooms are well in order. They are not to be trusted, no. They need an overseeing eye: especially Ciccio; especially Ciccio!”

She sank down by the fire and began to undo her dress.

“You must let me help you,” said Alvina. “You know I have been a nurse.”

“Ah, you are too kind, too kind, dear young lady. I am a lonely old woman. I am not used to attentions. Best leave me.”

“Let me help you,” said Alvina.

“Alas, ahimé! Who would have thought Kishwégin would need help. I danced last night with the boys in the theatre in Leek: and tonight I am put to bed in—what is the name of this place, dear?—It seems I don’t remember it.”

“Woodhouse,” said Alvina.

“Woodhouse! Woodhouse! Is there not something called Woodlouse? I believe. Ugh, horrible! Why is it horrible?”

Alvina quickly undressed the plump, trim little woman. She seemed so soft. Alvina could not imagine how she could be a dancer on the stage, strenuous. But Madame’s softness could flash into wild energy, sudden convulsive power, like a cuttle-fish. Alvina brushed out the long black hair, and plaited it lightly. Then she got Madame into bed.

“Ah,” sighed Madame, “the good bed! The good bed! But cold—it is so cold. Would you hang up my dress, dear, and fold my stockings?”

Alvina quickly folded and put aside the dainty underclothing. Queer, dainty woman, was Madame, even to her wonderful threaded black-and-gold garters.

“My poor boys—no Kishwégin tomorrow! You don’t think I need see a priest, dear? A priest!” said Madame, her teeth chattering.

“Priest! Oh no! You’ll be better when we can get you warm. I think it’s only a chill. Mrs. Rollings is warming a blanket—”

Alvina ran downstairs. Max opened the sitting-room door and stood watching at the sound of footsteps. His rather bony fists were clenched beneath his loose shirt-cuffs, his eyebrows tragically lifted.

“Is she much ill?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But I don’t think so. Do you mind heating the blanket while Mrs. Rollings makes thin gruel?”

Max and Louis stood heating blankets. Louis’ trousers were cut rather tight at the waist, and gave him a female look. Max was straight and stiff. Mrs. Rollings asked Geoffrey to fill the coal-scuttles and carry one upstairs. Geoffrey obediently went out with a lantern to the coal-shed. Afterwards he was to carry up the horse-hair arm-chair.

“I must go home for some things,” said Alvina to Ciccio. “Will you come and carry them for me?”

He started up, and with one movement threw away his cigarette. He did not look at Alvina. His beautiful lashes seemed to screen his eyes. He was fairly tall, but loosely built for an Italian, with slightly sloping shoulders. Alvina noticed the brown, slender Mediterranean hand, as he put his fingers to his lips. It was a hand such as she did not know, prehensile and tender and dusky. With an odd graceful slouch he went into the passage and reached for his coat.

He did not say a word, but held aloof as he walked with Alvina.

“I’m sorry for Madame,” said Alvina, as she hurried rather breathless through the night. “She does think for you men.”

But Ciccio vouchsafed no answer, and walked with his hands in the pockets of his water-proof, wincing from the weather.

“I’m afraid she will never be able to dance tomorrow,” said Alvina.

“You think she won’t be able?” he said.

“I’m almost sure she won’t.”

After which he said nothing, and Alvina also kept silence till they came to the black dark passage and encumbered yard at the back of the house.

“I don’t think you can see at all,” she said. “It’s this way.” She groped for him in the dark, and met his groping hand.

“This way,” she said.

It was curious how light his fingers were in their clasp—almost like a child’s touch. So they came under the light from the window of the sitting-room.

Alvina hurried indoors, and the young man followed.

“I shall have to stay with Madame tonight,” she explained hurriedly. “She’s feverish, but she may throw it off if we can get her into a sweat.” And Alvina ran upstairs collecting things necessary. Ciccio stood back near the door, and answered all Miss Pinnegar’s entreaties to come to the fire with a shake of the head and a slight smile of the lips, bashful and stupid.

“But do come and warm yourself before you go out again,” said Miss Pinnegar, looking at the man as he drooped his head in the distance. He still shook dissent, but opened his mouth at last.

“It makes it colder after,” he said, showing his teeth in a slight, stupid smile.

“Oh well, if you think so,” said Miss Pinnegar, nettled. She couldn’t make heads or tails of him, and didn’t try.

When they got back, Madame was light-headed, and talking excitedly of her dance, her young men. The three young men were terrified. They had got the blankets scorching hot. Alvina smeared the plasters and applied them to Madame’s side, where the pain was. What a white-skinned, soft, plump child she seemed! Her pain meant a touch of pleurisy, for sure. The men hovered outside the door. Alvina wrapped the poor patient in the hot blankets, got a few spoonfuls of hot gruel and whiskey down her throat, fastened her down in bed, lowered the light and banished the men from the stairs. Then she sat down to watch. Madame chafed, moaned, murmured feverishly. Alvina soothed her, and put her hands in bed. And at last the poor dear became quiet. Her brow was faintly moist. She fell into a quiet sleep, perspiring freely. Alvina watched her still, soothed her when she suddenly started and began to break out of the bedclothes, quieted her, pressed her gently, firmly down, folded her tight and made her submit to the perspiration against which, in convulsive starts, she fought and strove, crying that she was suffocating, she was too hot, too hot.

“Lie still, lie still,” said Alvina. “You must keep warm.”

Poor Madame moaned. How she hated seething in the bath of her own perspiration. Her wilful nature rebelled strongly. She would have thrown aside her coverings and gasped into the cold air, if Alvina had not pressed her down with that soft, inevitable pressure.

So the hours passed, till about one o’clock, when the perspiration became less profuse, and the patient was really better, really quieter. Then Alvina went downstairs for a moment. She saw the light still burning in the front room. Tapping, she entered. There sat Max by the fire, a picture of misery, with Louis opposite him, nodding asleep after his tears. On the sofa Geoffrey snored lightly, while Ciccio sat with his head on the table, his arms spread out, dead asleep. Again she noticed the tender, dusky Mediterranean hands, the slender wrists, slender for a man naturally loose and muscular.

“Haven’t you gone to bed?” whispered Alvina. “Why?”

Louis started awake. Max, the only stubborn watcher, shook his head lugubriously.

“But she’s better,” whispered Alvina. “She’s perspired. She’s better. She’s sleeping naturally.”

Max stared with round, sleep-whitened, owlish eyes, pessimistic and sceptical:

“Yes,” persisted Alvina. “Come and look at her. But don’t wake her, whatever you do.”

Max took off his slippers and rose to his tall height. Louis, like a scared chicken, followed. Each man held his slippers in his hand. They noiselessly entered and peeped stealthily over the heaped bedclothes. Madame was lying, looking a little flushed and very girlish, sleeping lightly, with a strand of black hair stuck to her cheek, and her lips lightly parted.

Max watched her for some moments. Then suddenly he straightened himself, pushed back his brown hair that was brushed up in the German fashion, and crossed himself, dropping his knee as before an altar; crossed himself and dropped his knee once more; and then a third time crossed himself and inclined before the altar. Then he straightened himself again, and turned aside.

Louis also crossed himself. His tears burst out. He bowed and took the edge of a blanket to his lips, kissing it reverently. Then he covered his face with his hand.

Meanwhile Madame slept lightly and innocently on.

Alvina turned to go. Max silently followed, leading Louis by the arm. When they got downstairs, Max and Louis threw themselves in each other’s arms, and kissed each other on either cheek, gravely, in Continental fashion.

“She is better,” said Max gravely, in French.

“Thanks to God,” replied Louis.

Alvina witnessed all this with some amazement. The men did not heed her. Max went over and shook Geoffrey, Louis put his hand on Ciccio’s shoulder. The sleepers were difficult to wake. The wakers shook the sleeping, but in vain. At last Geoffrey began to stir. But in vain Louis lifted Ciccio’s shoulders from the table. The head and the hands dropped inert. The long black lashes lay motionless, the rather long, fine Greek nose drew the same light breaths, the mouth remained shut. Strange fine black hair, he had, close as fur, animal, and naked, frail-seeming, tawny hands. There was a silver ring on one hand.

Alvina suddenly seized one of the inert hands that slid on the table-cloth as Louis shook the young man’s shoulders. Tight she pressed the hand. Ciccio opened his tawny-yellowish eyes, that seemed to have been put in with a dirty finger, as the saying goes, owing to the sootiness of the lashes and brows. He was quite drunk with his first sleep, and saw nothing.

“Wake up,” said Alvina, laughing, pressing his hand again.

He lifted his head once more, suddenly clasped her hand, his eyes came to consciousness, his hand relaxed, he recognized her, and he sat back in his chair, turning his face aside and lowering his lashes.

“Get up, great beast,” Louis was saying softly in French, pushing him as ox-drivers sometimes push their oxen. Ciccio staggered to his feet.

“She is better,” they told him. “We are going to bed.”

They took their candles and trooped off upstairs, each one bowing to Alvina as he passed. Max solemnly, Louis gallant, the other two dumb and sleepy. They occupied the two attic chambers.

Alvina carried up the loose bed from the sofa, and slept on the floor before the fire in Madame’s room.

Madame slept well and long, rousing and stirring and settling off again. It was eight o’clock before she asked her first question. Alvina was already up.

“Oh—alors—Then I am better, I am quite well. I can dance today.”

“I don’t think today,” said Alvina. “But perhaps tomorrow.”

“No, today,” said Madame. “I can dance today, because I am quite well. I am Kishwégin.”

“You are better. But you must lie still today. Yes, really—you will find you are weak when you try to stand.”

Madame watched Alvina’s thin face with sullen eyes.

“You are an Englishwoman, severe and materialist,” she said.

Alvina started and looked round at her with wide blue eyes.

“Why?” she said. There was a wan, pathetic look about her, a sort of heroism which Madame detested, but which now she found touching.

“Come!” said Madame, stretching out her plump jewelled hand. “Come, I am an ungrateful woman. Come, they are not good for you, the people, I see it. Come to me.”

Alvina went slowly to Madame, and took the outstretched hand. Madame kissed her hand, then drew her down and kissed her on either cheek, gravely, as the young men had kissed each other.

“You have been good to Kishwégin, and Kishwégin has a heart that remembers. There, Miss Houghton, I shall do what you tell me. Kishwégin obeys you.” And Madame patted Alvina’s hand and nodded her head sagely.

“Shall I take your temperature?” said Alvina.

“Yes, my dear, you shall. You shall bid me, and I shall obey.”

So Madame lay back on her pillow, submissively pursing the thermometer between her lips and watching Alvina with black eyes.

“It’s all right,” said Alvina, as she looked at the thermometer. “Normal.”

“Normal!” re-echoed Madame’s rather guttural voice. “Good! Well, then when shall I dance?”

Alvina turned and looked at her.

“I think, truly,” said Alvina, “it shouldn’t be before Thursday or Friday.”

“Thursday!” repeated Madame. “You say Thursday?” There was a note of strong rebellion in her voice.

“You’ll be so weak. You’ve only just escaped pleurisy. I can only say what I truly think, can’t I?”

“Ah, you Englishwomen,” said Madame, watching with black eyes. “I think you like to have your own way. In all things, to have your own way. And over all people. You are so good, to have your own way. Yes, you good Englishwomen. Thursday. Very well, it shall be Thursday. Till Thursday, then, Kishwégin does not exist.”

And she subsided, already rather weak, upon her pillow again. When she had taken her tea and was washed and her room was tidied, she summoned the young men. Alvina had warned Max that she wanted Madame to be kept as quiet as possible this day.

As soon as the first of the four appeared, in his shirt-sleeves and his slippers, in the doorway, Madame said:

“Ah, there you are, my young men! Come in! Come in! It is not Kishwégin addresses you. Kishwégin does not exist till Thursday, as the English demoiselle makes it.” She held out her hand, faintly perfumed with eau de Cologne—the whole room smelled of eau de Cologne—and Max stooped his brittle spine and kissed it. She touched his cheek gently with her other hand.

“My faithful Max, my support.”

Louis came smiling with a bunch of violets and pinky anemones. He laid them down on the bed before her, and took her hand, bowing and kissing it reverently.

“You are better, dear Madame?” he said, smiling long at her.

“Better, yes, gentle Louis. And better for thy flowers, chivalric heart.” She put the violets and anemones to her face with both hands, and then gently laid them aside to extend her hand to Geoffrey.

“The good Geoffrey will do his best, while there is no Kishwégin?” she said as he stooped to her salute.

“Bien sûr, Madame.”

“Ciccio, a button off thy shirt-cuff. Where is my needle?” She looked round the room as Ciccio kissed her hand.

“Did you want anything?” said Alvina, who had not followed the French.

“My needle, to sew on this button. It is there, in the silk bag.”

“I will do it,” said Alvina.

“Thank you.”

While Alvina sewed on the button, Madame spoke to her young men, principally to Max. They were to obey Max, she said, for he was their eldest brother. This afternoon they would practise well the scene of the White Prisoner. Very carefully they must practise, and they must find some one who would play the young squaw—for in this scene she had practically nothing to do, the young squaw, but just sit and stand. Miss Houghton—but ah, Miss Houghton must play the piano, she could not take the part of the young squaw. Some other then.

While the interview was going on, Mr. May arrived, full of concern.

“Shan’t we have the procession!” he cried.

“Ah, the procession!” cried Madame.

The Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe upon request would signalize its entry into any town by a procession. The young men were dressed as Indian braves, and headed by Kishwégin they rode on horseback through the main streets. Ciccio, who was the crack horseman, having served a very well-known horsey Marchese in an Italian cavalry regiment, did a bit of show riding.

Mr. May was very keen on the procession. He had the horses in readiness. The morning was faintly sunny, after the sleet and bad weather. And now he arrived to find Madame in bed and the young men holding council with her.

“How very unfortunate!” cried Mr. May. “How very unfortunate!”

“Dreadful! Dreadful!” wailed Madame from the bed.

“But can’t we do anything?”

“Yes—you can do the White Prisoner scene—the young men can do that, if you find a dummy squaw. Ah, I think I must get up after all.”

Alvina saw the look of fret and exhaustion in Madame’s face.

“Won’t you all go downstairs now?” said Alvina. “Mr. Max knows what you must do.”

And she shooed the five men out of the bedroom.

“I must get up. I won’t dance. I will be a dummy. But I must be there. It is too dre-eadful, too dre-eadful!” wailed Madame.

“Don’t take any notice of them. They can manage by themselves. Men are such babies. Let them carry it through by themselves.”

“Children—they are all children!” wailed Madame. “All children! And so, what will they do without their old gouvernante? My poor braves, what will they do without Kishwégin? It is too dreadful, too dre-eadful, yes. The poor Mr. May—so disappointed.”

“Then let him be disappointed,” cried Alvina, as she forcibly tucked up Madame and made her lie still.

“You are hard! You are a hard Englishwoman. All alike. All alike!” Madame subsided fretfully and weakly. Alvina moved softly about. And in a few minutes Madame was sleeping again.

Alvina went downstairs. Mr. May was listening to Max, who was telling in German all about the White Prisoner scene. Mr. May had spent his boyhood in a German school. He cocked his head on one side, and, laying his hand on Max’s arm, entertained him in odd German. The others were silent. Ciccio made no pretence of listening, but smoked and stared at his own feet. Louis and Geoffrey half understood, so Louis nodded with a look of deep comprehension, whilst Geoffrey uttered short, snappy “Ja!—Ja!—Doch!—Eben!” rather irrelevant.

“I’ll be the squaw,” cried Mr. May in English, breaking off and turning round to the company. He perked up his head in an odd, parrot-like fashion. “I’ll be the squaw! What’s her name? Kishwégin? I’ll be Kishwégin.” And he bridled and beamed self-consciously.

The two tall Swiss looked down on him, faintly smiling. Ciccio, sitting with his arms on his knees on the sofa, screwed round his head and watched the phenomenon of Mr. May with inscrutable, expressionless attention.

“Let us go,” said Mr. May, bubbling with new importance. “Let us go and rehearse this morning, and let us do the procession this afternoon, when the colliers are just coming home. There! What? Isn’t that exactly the idea? Well! Will you be ready at once, now?”

He looked excitedly at the young men. They nodded with slow gravity, as if they were already braves. And they turned to put on their boots. Soon they were all trooping down to Lumley, Mr. May prancing like a little circus-pony beside Alvina, the four young men rolling ahead.

“What do you think of it?” cried Mr. May. “We’ve saved the situation—what? Don’t you think so? Don’t you think we can congratulate ourselves.”

They found Mr. Houghton fussing about in the theatre. He was on tenterhooks of agitation, knowing Madame was ill.

Max gave a brilliant display of yodelling.

“But I must explain to them,” cried Mr. May. “I must explain to them what yodel means.”

And turning to the empty theatre, he began, stretching forth his hand.

“In the high Alps of Switzerland, where eternal snows and glaciers reign over luscious meadows full of flowers, if you should chance to awaken, as I have done, in some lonely wooden farm amid the mountain pastures, you—er—you—let me see—if you—no—if you should chance to spend the night in some lonely wooden farm, amid the upland pastures, dawn will awake you with a wild, inhuman song, you will open your eyes to the first gleam of icy, eternal sunbeams, your ears will be ringing with weird singing, that has no words and no meaning, but sounds as if some wild and icy god were warbling to himself as he wandered among the peaks of dawn. You look forth across the flowers to the blue snow, and you see, far off, a small figure of a man moving among the grass. It is a peasant singing his mountain song, warbling like some creature that lifted up its voice on the edge of the eternal snows, before the human race began—”

During this oration James Houghton sat with his chin in his hand, devoured with bitter jealousy, measuring Mr. May’s eloquence. And then he started, as Max, tall and handsome now in Tyrolese costume, white shirt and green, square braces, short trousers of chamois leather stitched with green and red, firm-planted naked knees, naked ankles and heavy shoes, warbled his native Yodel strains, a piercing and disturbing sound. He was flushed, erect, keen tempered and fierce and mountainous. There was a fierce, icy passion in the man. Alvina began to understand Madame’s subjection to him.

Louis and Geoffrey did a farce dialogue, two foreigners at the same moment spying a purse in the street, struggling with each other and protesting they wanted to take it to the policeman, Ciccio, who stood solid and ridiculous. Mr. Houghton nodded slowly and gravely, as if to give his measured approval.

Then all retired to dress for the great scene. Alvina practised the music Madame carried with her. If Madame found a good pianist, she welcomed the accompaniment: if not, she dispensed with it.

“Am I all right?” said a smirking voice.

And there was Kishwégin, dusky, coy, with long black hair and a short chamois dress, gaiters and moccasins and bare arms: so coy, and so smirking. Alvina burst out laughing.

“But shan’t I do?” protested Mr. May, hurt.

“Yes, you’re wonderful,” said Alvina, choking. “But I must laugh.”

“But why? Tell me why?” asked Mr. May anxiously. “Is it my appearance you laugh at, or is it only me? If it’s me I don’t mind. But if it’s my appearance, tell me so.”

Here an appalling figure of Ciccio in war-paint strolled on to the stage. He was naked to the waist, wore scalp-fringed trousers, was dusky-red-skinned, had long black hair and eagle’s feathers—only two feathers—and a face wonderfully and terribly painted with white, red, yellow, and black lines. He was evidently pleased with himself. His curious soft slouch, and curious way of lifting his lip from his white teeth, in a sort of smile, was very convincing.

“You haven’t got the girdle,” he said, touching Mr. May’s plump waist—“and some flowers in your hair.”

Mr. May here gave a sharp cry and a jump. A bear on its hind legs, slow, shambling, rolling its loose shoulders, was stretching a paw towards him. The bear dropped heavily on four paws again, and a laugh came from its muzzle.

“You won’t have to dance,” said Geoffrey out of the bear.

“Come and put in the flowers,” said Mr. May anxiously, to Alvina.

In the dressing-room, the dividing-curtain was drawn. Max, in deerskin trousers but with unpainted torso looked very white and strange as he put the last touches of war-paint on Louis’ face. He glanced round at Alvina, then went on with his work. There was a sort of nobility about his erect white form and stiffly-carried head, the semi-luminous brown hair. He seemed curiously superior.

Alvina adjusted the maidenly Mr. May. Louis arose, a brave like Ciccio, in war-paint even more hideous. Max slipped on a tattered hunting-shirt and cartridge belt. His face was a little darkened. He was the white prisoner.

They arranged the scenery, while Alvina watched. It was soon done. A back cloth of tree-trunks and dark forest: a wigwam, a fire, and a cradle hanging from a pole. As they worked, Alvina tried in vain to dissociate the two braves from their war-paint. The lines were drawn so cleverly that the grimace of ferocity was fixed and horrible, so that even in the quiet work of scene-shifting Louis’ stiffish, female grace seemed full of latent cruelty, whilst Ciccio’s more muscular slouch made her feel she would not trust him for one single moment. Awful things men were, savage, cruel, underneath their civilization.

The scene had its beauty. It began with Kishwégin alone at the door of the wigwam, cooking, listening, giving an occasional push to the hanging cradle, and, if only Madame were taking the part, crooning an Indian cradle-song. Enter the brave Louis with his white prisoner, Max, who has his hands bound to his side. Kishwégin gravely salutes her husband—the bound prisoner is seated by the fire—Kishwégin serves food, and asks permission to feed the prisoner. The brave Louis, hearing a sound, starts up with his bow and arrow. There is a dumb scene of sympathy between Kishwégin and the prisoner—the prisoner wants his bonds cut. Re-enter the brave Louis—he is angry with Kishwégin—enter the brave Ciccio hauling a bear, apparently dead. Kishwégin examines the bear, Ciccio examines the prisoner. Ciccio tortures the prisoner, makes him stand, makes him caper unwillingly. Kishwégin swings the cradle. The prisoner is tripped up—falls, and cannot rise. He lies near the fallen bear. Kishwégin carries food to Ciccio. The two braves converse in dumb show, Kishwégin swings the cradle and croons. The men rise once more and bend over the prisoner. As they do so, there is a muffled roar. The bear is sitting up. Louis swings round, and at the same moment the bear strikes him down. Ciccio springs forward and stabs the bear, then closes with it. Kishwégin runs and cuts the prisoner’s bonds. He rises, and stands trying to lift his numbed and powerless arms, while the bear slowly crushes Ciccio, and Kishwégin kneels over her husband. The bear drops Ciccio lifeless, and turns to Kishwégin. At that moment Max manages to kill the bear—he takes Kishwégin by the hand and kneels with her beside the dead Louis.

It was wonderful how well the men played their different parts. But Mr. May was a little too frisky as Kishwégin. However, it would do.

Ciccio got dressed as soon as possible, to go and look at the horses hired for the afternoon procession. Alvina accompanied him, Mr. May and the others were busy.

“You know I think it’s quite wonderful, your scene,” she said to Ciccio.

He turned and looked down at her. His yellow, dusky-set eyes rested on her good-naturedly, without seeing her, his lip curled in a self-conscious, contemptuous sort of smile.

“Not without Madame,” he said, with the slow, half-sneering, stupid smile. “Without Madame—” he lifted his shoulders and spread his hands and tilted his brows—“fool’s play, you know.”

“No,” said Alvina. “I think Mr. May is good, considering. What does Madame do?” she asked a little jealously.

“Do?” He looked down at her with the same long, half-sardonic look of his yellow eyes, like a cat looking casually at a bird which flutters past. And again he made his shrugging motion. “She does it all, really. The others—they are nothing—what they are Madame has made them. And now they think they’ve done it all, you see. You see, that’s it.”

“But how has Madame made it all? Thought it out, you mean?”

“Thought it out, yes. And then done it. You should see her dance—ah! You should see her dance round the bear, when I bring him in! Ah, a beautiful thing, you know. She claps her hand—” And Ciccio stood still in the street, with his hat cocked a little on one side, rather common-looking, and he smiled along his fine nose at Alvina, and he clapped his hands lightly, and he tilted his eyebrows and his eyelids as if facially he were imitating a dance, and all the time his lips smiled stupidly. As he gave a little assertive shake of his head, finishing, there came a great yell of laughter from the opposite pavement, where a gang of pottery lasses, in aprons all spattered with grey clay, and hair and boots and skin spattered with pallid spots, had stood to watch. The girls opposite shrieked again, for all the world like a gang of grey baboons. Ciccio turned round and looked at them with a sneer along his nose. They yelled the louder. And he was horribly uncomfortable, walking there beside Alvina with his rather small and effeminately-shod feet.

“How stupid they are,” said Alvina. “I’ve got used to them.”

“They should be—” he lifted his hand with a sharp, vicious movement—“smacked,” he concluded, lowering his hand again.

“Who is going to do it?” said Alvina.

He gave a Neapolitan grimace, and twiddled the fingers of one hand outspread in the air, as if to say: “There you are! You’ve got to thank the fools who’ve failed to do it.”

“Why do you all love Madame so much?” Alvina asked.

“How, love?” he said, making a little grimace. “We like her—we love her—as if she were a mother. You say love—” He raised his shoulders slightly, with a shrug. And all the time he looked down at Alvina from under his dusky eyelashes, as if watching her sideways, and his mouth had the peculiar, stupid, self-conscious, half-jeering smile. Alvina was a little bit annoyed. But she felt that a great instinctive good-naturedness came out of him, he was self-conscious and constrained, knowing she did not follow his language of gesture. For him, it was not yet quite natural to express himself in speech. Gesture and grimace were instantaneous, and spoke worlds of things, if you would but accept them.

But certainly he was stupid, in her sense of the word. She could hear Mr. May’s verdict of him: “Like a child, you know, just as charming and just as tiresome and just as stupid.”

“Where is your home?” she asked him.

“In Italy.” She felt a fool.

“Which part?” she insisted.

“Naples,” he said, looking down at her sideways, searchingly.

“It must be lovely,” she said.

“Ha—!” He threw his head on one side and spread out his hands, as if to say—“What do you want, if you don’t find Naples lovely.”

“I should like to see it. But I shouldn’t like to die,” she said.

“What?”

“They say ‘See Naples and die,’” she laughed.

He opened his mouth, and understood. Then he smiled at her directly.

“You know what that means?” he said cutely. “It means see Naples and die afterwards. Don’t die before you’ve seen it.” He smiled with a knowing smile.

“I see! I see!” she cried. “I never thought of that.”

He was pleased with her surprise and amusement.

“Ah Naples!” he said. “She is lovely—” He spread his hand across the air in front of him—“The sea—and Posilippo—and Sorrento—and Capri—Ah-h! You’ve never been out of England?”

“No,” she said. “I should love to go.”

He looked down into her eyes. It was his instinct to say at once he would take her.

“You’ve seen nothing—nothing,” he said to her.

“But if Naples is so lovely, how could you leave it?” she asked.

“What?”

She repeated her question. For answer, he looked at her, held out his hand, and rubbing the ball of his thumb across the tips of his fingers, said, with a fine, handsome smile:

“Pennies! Money! You can’t earn money in Naples. Ah, Naples is beautiful, but she is poor. You live in the sun, and you earn fourteen, fifteen pence a day—”

“Not enough,” she said.

He put his head on one side and tilted his brows, as if to say “What are you to do?” And the smile on his mouth was sad, fine, and charming. There was an indefinable air of sadness or wistfulness about him, something so robust and fragile at the same time, that she was drawn in a strange way.

“But you’ll go back?” she said.

“Where?”

“To Italy. To Naples.”

“Yes, I shall go back to Italy,” he said, as if unwilling to commit himself. “But perhaps I shan’t go back to Naples.”

“Never?”

“Ah, never! I don’t say never. I shall go to Naples, to see my mother’s sister. But I shan’t go to live—”

“Have you a mother and father?”

“I? No! I have a brother and two sisters—in America. Parents, none. They are dead.”

“And you wander about the world—” she said.

He looked at her, and made a slight, sad gesture, indifferent also.

“But you have Madame for a mother,” she said.

He made another gesture this time: pressed down the corners of his mouth as if he didn’t like it. Then he turned with the slow, fine smile.

“Does a man want two mothers? Eh?” he said, as if he posed a conundrum.

“I shouldn’t think so,” laughed Alvina.

He glanced at her to see what she meant, what she understood.

“My mother is dead, see!” he said. “Frenchwomen—Frenchwomen—they have their babies till they are a hundred—”

“What do you mean?” said Alvina, laughing.

“A Frenchman is a little man when he’s seven years old—and if his mother comes, he is a little baby boy when he’s seventy. Do you know that?”

“I didn’t know it,” said Alvina.

“But now—you do,” he said, lurching round a corner with her.

They had come to the stables. Three of the horses were there, including the thoroughbred Ciccio was going to ride. He stood and examined the beasts critically. Then he spoke to them with strange sounds, patted them, stroked them down, felt them, slid his hand down them, over them, under them, and felt their legs.

Then, he looked up from stooping there under the horses, with a long, slow look of his yellow eyes, at Alvina. She felt unconsciously flattered. His long, yellow look lingered, holding her eyes. She wondered what he was thinking. Yet he never spoke. He turned again to the horses. They seemed to understand him, to prick up alert.

“This is mine,” he said, with his hand on the neck of the old thoroughbred. It was a bay with a white blaze.

“I think he’s nice,” she said. “He seems so sensitive.”

“In England,” he answered suddenly, “horses live a long time, because they don’t live—never alive—see? In England railway-engines are alive, and horses go on wheels.” He smiled into her eyes as if she understood. She was a trifle nervous as he smiled at her from out of the stable, so yellow-eyed and half-mysterious, derisive. Her impulse was to turn and go away from the stable. But a deeper impulse made her smile into his face, as she said to him:

“They like you to touch them.”

“Who?” His eyes kept hers. Curious how dark they seemed, with only a yellow ring of pupil. He was looking right into her, beyond her usual self, impersonal.

“The horses,” she said. She was afraid of his long, cat-like look. Yet she felt convinced of his ultimate good-nature. He seemed to her to be the only passionately good-natured man she had ever seen. She watched him vaguely, with strange vague trust, implicit belief in him. In him—in what?

That afternoon the colliers trooping home in the winter afternoon were rejoiced with a spectacle: Kishwégin, in her deerskin, fringed gaiters and fringed frock of deerskin, her long hair down her back, and with marvellous cloths and trappings on her steed, riding astride on a tall white horse, followed by Max in chieftain’s robes and chieftain’s long head-dress of dyed feathers, then by the others in war-paint and feathers and brilliant Navajo blankets. They carried bows and spears. Ciccio was without his blanket, naked to the waist, in war-paint, and brandishing a long spear. He dashed up from the rear, saluted the chieftain with his arm and his spear on high as he swept past, suddenly drew up his rearing steed, and trotted slowly back again, making his horse perform its paces. He was extraordinarily velvety and alive on horseback.

Crowds of excited, shouting children ran chattering along the pavements. The colliers, as they tramped grey and heavy, in an intermittent stream uphill from the low grey west, stood on the pavement in wonder as the cavalcade approached and passed, jingling the silver bells of its trappings, vibrating the wonderful colours of the barred blankets and saddle cloths, the scarlet wool of the accoutrements, the bright tips of feathers. Women shrieked as Ciccio, in his war-paint, wheeled near the pavement. Children screamed and ran. The colliers shouted. Ciccio smiled in his terrifying war-paint, brandished his spear and trotted softly, like a flower on its stem, round to the procession.

Miss Pinnegar and Alvina and James Houghton had come round into Knarborough Road to watch. It was a great moment. Looking along the road they saw all the shopkeepers at their doors, the pavements eager. And then, in the distance, the white horse jingling its trappings of scarlet hair and bells, with the dusky Kishwégin sitting on the saddle-blanket of brilliant, lurid stripes, sitting impassive and all dusky above that intermittent flashing of colour: then the chieftain, dark-faced, erect, easy, swathed in a white blanket, with scarlet and black stripes, and all his strange crest of white, tip-dyed feathers swaying down his back: as he came nearer one saw the wolfskin and the brilliant moccasins against the black sides of his horse; Louis and Goeffrey followed, lurid, horrid in the face, wearing blankets with stroke after stroke of blazing colour upon their duskiness, and sitting stern, holding their spears: lastly, Ciccio, on his bay horse with a green seat, flickering hither and thither in the rear, his feathers swaying, his horse sweating, his face ghastlily smiling in its war-paint. So they advanced down the grey pallor of Knarborough Road, in the late wintry afternoon. Somewhere the sun was setting, and far overhead was a flush of orange.

“Well I never!” murmured Miss Pinnegar. “Well I never!”

The strange savageness of the striped Navajo blankets seemed to her unsettling, advancing down Knarborough Road: she examined Kishwégin curiously.

“Can you believe that that’s Mr. May—he’s exactly like a girl. Well, well—it makes you wonder what is and what isn’t. But aren’t they good? What? Most striking. Exactly like Indians. You can’t believe your eyes. My word what a terrifying race they—” Here she uttered a scream and ran back clutching the wall as Ciccio swept past, brushing her with his horse’s tail, and actually swinging his spear so as to touch Alvina and James Houghton lightly with the butt of it. James too started with a cry, the mob at the corner screamed. But Alvina caught the slow, mischievous smile as the painted horror showed his teeth in passing; she was able to flash back an excited laugh. She felt his yellow-tawny eyes linger on her, in that one second, as if negligently.

“I call that too much!” Miss Pinnegar was crying, thoroughly upset. “Now that was unnecessary! Why it was enough to scare one to death. Besides, it’s dangerous. It ought to be put a stop to. I don’t believe in letting these show-people have liberties.”

The cavalcade was slowly passing, with its uneasy horses and its flare of striped colour and its silent riders. Ciccio was trotting softly back, on his green saddle-cloth, suave as velvet, his dusky, naked torso beautiful.

“Eh, you’d think he’d get his death,” the women in the crowd were saying.

“A proper savage one, that. Makes your blood run cold—”

“Ay, an’ a man for all that, take’s painted face for what’s worth. A tidy man, I say.”

He did not look at Alvina. The faint, mischievous smile uncovered his teeth. He fell in suddenly behind Geoffrey, with a jerk of his steed, calling out to Geoffrey in Italian.

It was becoming cold. The cavalcade fell into a trot, Mr. May shaking rather badly. Ciccio halted, rested his lance against a lamp-post, switched his green blanket from beneath him, flung it round him as he sat, and darted off. They had all disappeared over the brow of Lumley Hill, descending. He was gone too. In the wintry twilight the crowd began, lingeringly, to turn away. And in some strange way, it manifested its disapproval of the spectacle: as grown-up men and women, they were a little bit insulted by such a show. It was an anachronism. They wanted a direct appeal to the mind. Miss Pinnegar expressed it.

“Well,” she said, when she was safely back in Manchester House, with the gas lighted, and as she was pouring the boiling water into the tea-pot, “You may say what you like. It’s interesting in a way, just to show what savage Red-Indians were like. But it’s childish. It’s only childishness. I can’t understand, myself, how people can go on liking shows. Nothing happens. It’s not like the cinema, where you see it all and take it all in at once; you know everything at a glance. You don’t know anything by looking at these people. You know they’re only men dressed up, for money. I can’t see why you should encourage it. I don’t hold with idle show-people, parading round, I don’t, myself. I like to go to the cinema once a week. It’s instruction, you take it all in at a glance, all you need to know, and it lasts you for a week. You can get to know everything about people’s actual lives from the cinema. I don’t see why you want people dressing up and showing off.”

They sat down to their tea and toast and marmalade, during this harangue. Miss Pinnegar was always like a douche of cold water to Alvina, bringing her back to consciousness after a delicious excitement. In a minute Madame and Ciccio and all seemed to become unreal—the actual unrealities: while the ragged dithering pictures of the film were actual, real as the day. And Alvina was always put out when this happened. She really hated Miss Pinnegar. Yet she had nothing to answer. They were unreal, Madame and Ciccio and the rest. Ciccio was just a fantasy blown in on the wind, to blow away again. The real, permanent thing was Woodhouse, the semper idem Knarborough Road, and the unchangeable grubby gloom of Manchester House, with the stuffy, padding Miss Pinnegar, and her father, whose fingers, whose very soul seemed dirty with pennies. These were the solid, permanent fact. These were life itself. And Ciccio, splashing up on his bay horse and green cloth, he was a mountebank and an extraneous nonentity, a coloured old rag blown down the Knarborough Road into Limbo. Into Limbo. Whilst Miss Pinnegar and her father sat frowsily on for ever, eating their toast and cutting off the crust, and sipping their third cup of tea. They would never blow away—never, never. Woodhouse was there to eternity. And the Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe was blowing like a rag of old paper into Limbo. Nothingness! Poor Madame! Poor gallant histrionic Madame! The frowsy Miss Pinnegar could crumple her up and throw her down the utilitarian drain, and have done with her. Whilst Miss Pinnegar lived on for ever.

This put Alvina into a sharp temper.

“Miss Pinnegar,” she said. “I do think you go on in the most unattractive way sometimes. You’re a regular spoil-sport.”

“Well,” said Miss Pinnegar tartly. “I don’t approve of your way of sport, I’m afraid.”

“You can’t disapprove of it as much as I hate your spoil-sport existence,” said Alvina in a flare.

“Alvina, are you mad!” said her father.

“Wonder I’m not,” said Alvina, “considering what my life is.”

Madame did not pick up her spirits, after her cold. For two days she lay in bed, attended by Mrs. Rollings and Alvina and the young men. But she was most careful never to give any room for scandal. The young men might not approach her save in the presence of some third party. And then it was strictly a visit of ceremony or business.

“Oh, your Woodhouse, how glad I shall be when I have left it,” she said to Alvina. “I feel it is unlucky for me.”

“Do you?” said Alvina. “But if you’d had this bad cold in some places, you might have been much worse, don’t you think.”

“Oh my dear!” cried Madame. “Do you think I could confuse you in my dislike of this Woodhouse? Oh no! You are not Woodhouse. On the contrary, I think it is unkind for you also, this place. You look—also—what shall I say—thin, not very happy.”

It was a note of interrogation.

“I’m sure I dislike Woodhouse much more than you can,” replied Alvina.

“I am sure. Yes! I am sure. I see it. Why don’t you go away? Why don’t you marry?”

“Nobody wants to marry me,” said Alvina.

Madame looked at her searchingly, with shrewd black eyes under her arched eyebrows.

“How!” she exclaimed. “How don’t they? You are not bad looking, only a little too thin—too haggard—”

She watched Alvina. Alvina laughed uncomfortably.