§ 2
Long lingering September evenings with the sun splashing over the roofs of Upton Rising; the soft scented dusk creeping through gravelled roads; tier upon tier of houses astride the hill, with every window like a crimson star.... In the high road the newsboys were calling, the trams swirled citywards like golden meteors flying through space.... In the quiet residential roads was always the chatter of the lawn-mower, the drowsy murmur of hedge-clipping.... In these delectable hours of twilight Catherine passed from Upton Rising into Bockley.... Every night she passed, with swollen satchel under her arm—Luke’s Grove, over Makepiece Common, then along the Ridegway into the Bockley High Street.... And from the High Street into Kitchener Road there was a bewildering choice of routes, differing only in degrees of frowsiness....
Men passed her by like dim shadows heralded by the glowing tips of their cigarettes....
The policeman on point-duty in the Bockley High Street knew her. He said, “’d evenin’, miss,” and Catherine and the other girls who accompanied her on her way home used to giggle hysterically, for he was tall and handsome and presumably young.
Catherine went home with Madge Saunders and Helen Trant. Madge was fat, good-natured, but lymphatic and uninteresting. Her father was on the council and kept a big drapery stores in the High Street. He called his daughter “Maggers,” and was excessively jovial and contented. When Catherine went to tea at the Saunders’, he called her “Carrots.” His humour was exhausted in the invention of nicknames....
Helen Trant was almost the antithesis of Catherine and equally of Madge. She was quiet, undemonstrative, but her quietness was not the quietness of laziness. She worked hard, was moderately clever, almost excessively conscientious, and in a quiet, unobtrusive way immensely powerful and self-reliant. She was a scholarship girl, and her father was in a good position in a London Insurance Office. Neither Madge nor Helen was good-looking, but Helen had a quiet dignity that made a fair substitute for beauty.... They were a rather distinctive trio as they sauntered home together.
As they passed the policeman on point-duty Catherine made provocative eyes at him. Madge rolled into heavy, undisciplined laughter. And Helen sometimes smiled, but when she did it was the smile as of one who knew all about policemen, their lives, wages, conditions of existence, their baulked aspirations, confident hopes and undying ambitions.... She looked to have the sympathy of one who knows everything without being told anything....
Miss Forsdyke, in a spiteful mood, said:
“I wish, Helen, you would be more particular in your choice of companions....”
Yet Catherine and Helen became close friends, and Madge was merely an adjunct to their evening journeys home....