point of fact she wore no stays.
She thought with pride that she looked more like eighteen than sixteen years old, although she was not, and knew that she never would be, very tall.
Dragging a black velveteen tam-o'-shanter from her pocket, Elsie pulled it rakishly on over her curls, her fingers quickly and skilfully pouching the worn material so that it sagged over to one side. The hands with which she manipulated the tam-o'-shanter were freckled too, like her face, and of the same uniform soft pink. The fingers were short, planted very far apart, and broad at the base and inclining to curve backwards.
She wiped them on the roller-towel, as Nellie Simmons had done, only far more hurriedly, and then went quietly out at the side door. It opened straight into a small blind alley, and Elsie ran up it, and into the road at a corner of which her home was situated. Turning her back on No. 15, from which she had just emerged, she kept on the same side of the road, hoping to escape observation even if Mrs. Palmer were to look out of the window.
Very soon, however, she was obliged to cross the road, and then she rang the bell of a tall house that was the counterpart of the one she lived in, and indeed of all the other hundred and eighty yellow-and-red brick houses in Hillbourne Terrace.
Irene Tidmarsh opened the door, a lanky, big-eyed creature, with two prominent front teeth and an immense plait of ugly brown hair. Her arms and legs were thick and shapeless.
"Hallo, Elsie!"
"Hallo, Ireen. Look here, I can't stay. I only want to ask you if you'll swear we've been to the pictures together to-night, if anyone ever asks. Quick! Be a sport, and promise.''
"What's up?" Irene asked wearily.
"Oh, only my fun. I don't particularly want mother to know about me going out to-night, that's all. If I can say I was with you if I'm asked, it'll be all right, only you'll have to back me up if she doesn't believe me."
"Oh, all right, I don't care. You're a caution, Elsie Palmer—you and your made-up tales. Don't see much difference between them and downright lies, sometimes."
"Well, what am I to do? I can't ever go anywhere, or have any amusement, without mother and Geraldine wanting to know all about it, and if I've been behaving myself, and 'cetera and 'cetera."
"Who is it this time. Elsie?"
"Only this fellow who's leaving to-morrow, the one that's been P.G. with us such a time, you know."
"Oh, Roberts?"
"'M. Well, so long, dear. Thanks awfully and all that. Ta-ta. Don't forget."
"Ta-ta," repeated Irene. "You'll have to tell me all about it on Sunday, mind."
"Awight."
Elsie turned and hurried homeward again, shrugging her shoulders up to her ears as the wind whistled shrilly down the street.
It was September, and cold.
When she was indoors again, she pulled off her tam-o'-shanter and stuffed it once more into the pocket of her serge skirt. Then she went upstairs to the room at the top of the house that she shared with Geraldine.
"I wish you'd knock."
"Whatever for? It's my room as much as yours, isn't it?" Elsie said without acrimony.
"Have you been washing up all this time?"
"Nellie went off early."
"The slut! Whatever for? Did you tell mother?"
"No. It wouldn't be a bit of good. She won't say anything to Nellie just now, whatever she does, with these new people just coming in."
"Oh, my head!" groaned Geraldine, not attending.
She lay on her bed, her white blouse crumpled, and a machine-made knitted coat, of shrimp-pink wool, drawn untidily over her shoulders. Her black Oxford shoes lay on the mat between the two beds, and her black stockings showed long darns and a hole in either heel.
Elsie began to arrange her hair before the looking-glass in a painted deal frame that stood on the deal chest-of-drawers. Presently she pulled a little paper bag from one of the drawers and began to suck sweets.
"No good offering you any, I suppose?"
"Don't talk of such a thing. Elsie, I can't come down to supper to-night. Do be a dear and bring me up a cup of tea—nice and strong. I've got a sort of craving for hot tea when I'm like this, really I have."
"You don't want much, do you, asking me to carry tea up four flights of stairs? I'll see what I can do." Elsie began to hum, in a small, rather tuneful little voice. She let her skirt fall round her feet as she sang and pulled off her blouse, revealing beautifully modelled breasts and shoulders. Her arms were a little too short, but the line from breastbone to knee was unusually good, the legs plump and shapely, with slender ankles and the instep well arched. She wore serge knickerbockers and a flimsy under-bodice of yellow cotton voile over a thick cotton chemise.
"Are you going out again?" asked Geraldine in a vexed, feeble voice.
"I may go round and sit with Ireen for a bit, after supper. I think she wants to go to the pictures, or something."
"How's Mr. Tidmarsh?"
"Going to die, I should think, by all accounts," glibly replied Elsie, although as a matter of fact she had forgotten to make any enquiry for Irene's father, who had for months past been dying from some obscure and painful internal growth.
"Why doesn't he go to a hospital?"
"Don't ask me. Ireen's always begging him to, but he won't."
"Old people are awfully selfish, I think," said Geraldine thoughtfully.
"Yes, aren't they? Look, I'm going to put this collar on my Sunday serge. That ought to smarten it up a bit."
She pinned the cheap lace round the low-cut V at the neck of an old navy-blue dress, and fastened it with a blue-stoned brooch in the shape of a circle. Her throat rose up, fresh and warm and youthful, from the new adornment.
"Isn't it time I put my hair up, don't you think?"
"No. You're only a kid. I didn't put mine up till I was eighteen. Mother wouldn't let me."
Elsie dragged a thick grey pilot cloth coat from behind the curtain of faded red rep that hung across a row of pegs and constituted the sisters' wardrobe, caught up the black tam-o'-shanter again and ran downstairs.
All the time that she was laying the table in the dining-room, which was next to the kitchen on the ground floor, Elsie hummed to herself.
The table-cloth was stained in several places, and she arranged the Britannia-metal forks and spoons, the coarse, heavy plates and the red glass water-jug so as to cover the spots as much as possible. In the middle of the table stood a thick fluted green glass with paper chrysanthemums in it.
Elsie added the cruet, two half-loaves of bread on a wooden platter with " Bread " carved upon it in raised letters, and put a small red glass beside each plate. Finally she quickly pleated half a dozen coloured squares of Japanese paper, and
