"What?" said Mrs. Palmer from the kitchen.
"It's ready laid."
"What are you in such a hurry for? Miss M. and Mr. Williams haven't turned up yet."
"Mr. Roberts wants his supper early, I know."
"You've no business to know, then. Well, put the ham on the table and the cold sweets, and he can go in when he pleases. This is Liberty Hall, as I call it."
Elsie carried in the ham. placing the dish on the table beside the carving-knife and fork that were raised upon a " rest " of electro plate. The glass dishes containing a flabby pink decoction of cornflour, and the apple tart, with several slices of pastry gone from the crust, she laid at the other end of the table.
"Supper's in, Mr. Roberts," she cried through the open door of the drawing-room, but this time she did not go in, and flew back to the kitchen before Mr. Roberts appeared!
"Geraldine's asking for tea, mother."
"There's a kettle on. She can come and fetch it."
"I'll take it up," Elsie volunteered.
"You're very obliging, all of a sudden. I'm sure I only wish you and your sister were more like sisters, the way Aunt Ada and Aunt Gertie and Mother were. There wasn't any of this bickering between us girls that I hear between you and Geraldine."
"You've made up for it later, then," said Elsie pertly. "The aunts never come here but they find fault with things, and Aunt Ada cries, and I'm sure you and Aunt Gertie go at it hammer and tongs."
"Don't you dare to speak to me like that, Elsie Palmer," said her mother abstractedly. (" Give me a spoon, there's a good gurl.") " What you gurls are coming to, talking so to your own mother, is more than I can say. What's at the bottom of all this talk about carrying tea to Geraldine? What are you going to do about your own supper?"
"Have it in here. I don't want much, anyway. I'm not hungry. Tea and bread and jam'll do."
"Please yourself," said Mrs. Palmer.
She was a large, shapeless woman, slatternly and without method, chronically aggrieved because she was a widow with two daughters, obliged to support herself and them by receiving boarders, whom she always spoke of as guests.
"Where are these what-you-may-call-'ems—these Williamses—coming from?" Elsie asked, while she was jerking tea from the bottom of a cocoa-tin into a broken earthenware tea-pot.
"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," said her mother.
She had no slightest reason to conceal the little she knew of the new people who were coming, but it was her habit to reply more or less in this fashion, semi-snubbing, semi-facetious, whenever either of her daughters asked a question.
"I'm sure I don't want to know," said Elsie, also from habit.
She made the tea, poured out two cups-full and took one upstairs. As she had expected, the alarm clock on the wash-stand showed it to be eight o'clock.
Almost directly afterwards, she heard the front door slam.
No. 15 was a narrow, high house, with very steep stairs, but Elsie was used to them, although she grumbled at the number of times she went up and down them, and she and Geraldine and Mrs. Palmer all kept numerous articles of toilet and clothing in the kitchen, so as to save journeys backwards and forwards.
She now went down once more, and sitting at a corner of the newspaper-covered kitchen table, drank tea and ate bread-and-jam deliberately.
"That's the bell!"
Mrs. Palmer hoisted herself out of her chair, from which she had been reading the headlines of an illustrated daily paper, commenting on them half aloud with : " Fancy! . . . Whatever is the world coming to, is what I say. . . ."
"That'll be the Williamses, and about time too. You'll have to give me a hand upstairs with the boxes afterwards, Elsie, but I'll give 'em supper first."
She went out into the hall, and Elsie heard the sounds of anival, and her mother's voice saying : " Good evening, you've brought us some wet weather, I'm afraid. . . . You mustn't mind me joking, Mrs. Williams, it's my way. . . . Liberty Hall, you'll find this. . . ."
Elsie ran to the back kitchen, donned the pilot-cloth coat and the tam-o'-shanter, and slipped out through the side door into the wet drizzle of a cold autumn evening.
"Ooh!" She turned up the collar of the coat, and pushed her gloveless hands deep into her pockets as she hurried along the pavement. It shone wet and dark, giving blurred reflections of the lamps overhead. Every now and then a tram jerked and clanged its way along the broad suburban road.
Only a few shops were lit along the road. Most of the buildings on either side were houses that displayed a brass sign-plate on the door, or a card with " Apartments " in one of the windows. Right at the end of the street, a blur of bluish light streamed out from the Palatial Picture House.
"I thought you weren't coming," said young Roberts, reproachfully. "It's long after eight." He wore a light overcoat and he, also, had turned up his collar as a protection against the rain.
"I had to help mother, of course. And if you want to know, I ought to be there now." She laughed up at him provocatively.
"Come on in," he said, pulling her hand through his arm.
II
This was Elsie's real life.
Although quite incapable of formulating the thought to herself, she already knew instinctively that only in her relations with some man could she find self-expression.
In the course of the past two years she had gradually discovered that she possessed a power over men that other girls either did not possess at all, or in a very much lesser degree. From the exercise of unconscious magnetism, she had by imperceptible degrees passed to a breathless, intermittent exploitation of her own attractiveness.
She did not know why boys so often wished to kiss her, nor why she was sometimes followed, or spoken to, in the street, by men. At first she had thought that she must be growing prettier, but her personal preference was for dark eyes, a bright colour, and a slim, tall figure, and she honestly did not admire her own appearance. Moreover, her looks varied almost from day to day, and very often she seemed plain. She had never received any instruction in questions of sex, excepting whispered mis-information from girls at school as to the origin of babies. The signs of physical development that had come to her early were either not commented upon except in half-disgusted, half-facetious innuendo from Geraldine, or else dismissed by Mrs. Palmer curtly :
"Nice gurls don't think about those things. I'm ashamed of you, Elsie. You should try and be nice-minded, as mother's always told her gurls."
,A sort of garbled knowledge came to her after a time, knowledge that comprised the actual crude facts as to physical union between men and women, and explained in part certain violent bodily reactions to which she had been prone almost since childhood.
She
