Through leafy side-streets and little squares of Georgian houses, Gwenna's taxi took her to a newer road that sloped sharply from the Heath at the top to the church and schools at the bottom.
The taxi stopped at the glass porch of the large, red-brick building with the many casement-windows, out of which some enterprising committee had formed the Ladies' Residential Club. It was a place where a mixed assembly of young women (governesses, art-students, earnest suffrage workers, secretaries and so on) lived cheaply enough and with a good deal of fun and noise, of feud and good-fellowship. The head of it was a clergyman's widow and the sort of lady who is never to be seen otherwise than wearing a neat delaine blouse of the Edwardian era, a gold curb tie-pin, a hairnet and a disapproving glance.
Gwenna passed this lady in the tessellated hall; she then almost collided with the object of the lady's most constant disapproval.
This was a very tall, dark girl with an impish face, a figure boyishly slim. She looked almost insolently untidy, for she wore a shabby brown hat, something after the pattern of a Boy Scout's, under which her black hair was preparing to slide down over the collar of a rain-coat which (as its owner would have told you) had seen at least two reigns. It was also covered with loose white hairs, after the fashion of garments whose wearers are continually with dogs.
Gwenna caught joyously at the long arm in the crumpled sleeve.
"Oh, Leslie!" she cried eagerly.
For this was the bosom-chum.
"Ha, Taffy-child! Got back early for this orgie of ours? Good," exclaimed Leslie Long in a clear, nonchalant voice. It was very much the same voice, Gwenna noticed now, as those people's at the flying-ground, who belonged to that easy, lordly world of which Gwenna knew nothing. Leslie, now, did seem to know something about it. Yet she was the hardest-up girl in the whole club. She had been for a short time a Slade student, for a shorter time still a probationer at some hospital. Now all her days were given up to being paid companion to an old lady in Highgate who kept seventeen toy-Poms; but her evenings remained her own.
"Afraid this party isn't going to be much of a spree for you," she told Gwenna as they went upstairs. "I don't know who's going, but my brother-in-law's friends seldom are what you could describe as 'men.' Being a stockbroker and rich, he feels he must go in heavily for Art and Music. Long hair to take you in, probably. Hope you don't awfully mind coming to the rescue——"
"Don't mind what it is, as long as I'm going out somewhere, and with you, Leslie!" the younger girl returned blithely. "Will you do me up the back, presently?"