Thus Sally's thoughts ran, not coherently or explicitly, but in vehement revolts and resolves. Thus she ruminated, while Miss Jubb was out of the room or had her attention so distracted that she could not observe an idle apprentice. When Miss Jubb came back to the room or to supervision work had a little to be hurried, so that she might not find occasion for complaint. For Miss Jubb had a sharp tongue, and although she took the pins out of her mouth before she talked she showed that they had left their influence upon her tongue, which was sharp to a fault. And there, across the room, was the rosy-cheeked May Pearcey, so silly, so incapable of more than momentary resentment, that she was always forgetting that Sally and she no longer spoke, but was always trying to encourage Sally into a return to their former relation. Sometimes Sally would glower across at May, bitterly hating her and riddling her plumpness and folly with the keen eye of malice. May, unconscious of the scrutiny, would go on with her work, self-satisfied, much coarser and more physical in her appetites than Sally, still in spite of all the rebuffs she had received grinning about her boys and what they had said and what they had meant....

"Oo, he is awful!" she would burst out to Sally. "The things he said. I dint half blush."

May had enjoyed his boldness, it seemed. She told Sally what he had said. She told her things and things in the irresistible splurge of the silly girl whose mind is full of adolescent impurity. Well, Sally knew all that. She knew all the things that boys said; and a few more things she had noticed and thought for herself. She was not a prude. May didn't know anything that Sally did not know; but she talked about it. Sally did not talk. Her sexual knowledges, so far as they went, were as close and searching as a small-tooth comb, and collected as much that was undesirable. She despised May. May was a fool. She was soppy, talking about all these things as if they were new marvels, when they were as old as the hills and as old as the crude coquetries of boys and girls. May was the soppiest girl in Holloway. Yet the boys liked her for her plump face and arms and legs, and her red cheeks, and her self-conscious laugh, and her eyes that held guilt and evil and general silliness and vanity. The boys liked May. They did not like Sally. She was too small and sandy; too obviously critical and contemptuous in face of their small stock of talk, and too greedy of their poor and pompously-displayed schemes for economical entertainment. Sally's teeth showed like the teeth of a cat, very small and sharp, emblems of her nature. Conceit took firmer root in her heart because of her contempt for May and her inevitable suppressions of pain and resentment in face of neglect, as well as her suppressions of knowledge gained by a mental process so quick that May could never have had the smallest notion of it. Sally became secret, and her determination was made more emphatic. She began to study her face, and her body. One day her mother found her naked in front of a mirror, twisting herself so that she could see the poise of her figure. It was a pretty figure, if underdeveloped, and from that time of thorough examination onwards Sally never had the smallest doubt of her own attractiveness and its principal constituents. Only her face was wrong, she felt with bitter chagrin; her face and her hair. If her face were fatter and less freckled, and if her hair were not so sandy and pale, she would be pretty. Really pretty. Pretty enough to make a man go silly. Well, such things could be cured, couldn't they? Or, if not cured, then at least improved.... That was a notion that dwelt constantly in Sally's thoughts.

v

The point was, that she must have actual experience in rousing men. It was not that she had determined upon marriage as a way out of her present difficulties. At the back of her mind, perhaps, was always the knowledge that she must get a man to work for her; but this never became an obsession. She was simply a growing girl, hungry for experience, and at the outset hampered by circumstance. Unless something happened to her, Sally was doomed to poverty and suffering. Therefore, full of raw confidence, she was determined that she should be the heroine of her own romance. Her impulse was not to give, but to take. She did not long to be the loving help of a good man, but was ever craftily bent upon exploiting the weaker sides of those she met for the furtherance of her own ends.

It was several days before she met Toby again; but she waited with a kind of patience wholly in keeping with the rest of her nature. She always expected to meet him upon the stairs, and never did so. In the streets she looked for him. Nights, however, were dark and Toby apparently elusive. But one evening she was running down the three steps at the front door just as he arrived home. With a quick breath she ventured a "good evening." When he answered, she was filled with a pleasure which she would have found it hard to explain. "Evening," said Toby, surlily, and passed on. Sally gave a small grimace, a faint jerk of the head. That was done. A few more days passed. Still in the darkness she saw him a third time, now as she closed the door of the room, while Toby hurried to the floor above. By questions, she had found out that he lived exactly over them, and that his aunt had the room next to his, in the front of the house. This aunt she never saw, as she was very exclusive, and did not associate at all with her neighbours. Toby's surname she could not learn; but his aunt was called Mrs. Tapping. The aunt had an annuity. Toby worked somewhere in the neighbourhood; and Sally soon discovered the time of his departure and return. She knew these so well that she could have told you to the minute when his foot might be expected upon the stairs. If he happened to be late she could have remarked upon it to her mother if she had been in the habit of telling her mother anything at all.

Later, when they had been in the house about three weeks, she had a triumph. She was going out one evening and was barely down the first two or three stairs when she heard him running behind her. He was forced to pull up, and, from a peep, she saw that he was still half a flight above. Their progress from that instant coincided. They reached the front door almost at the same time. She left it open, and as Toby came out she turned and smiled "good evening." He replied. Sally followed with "Beautiful, isn't it!" and then went slowly towards Tollington Park. Would he follow? She was almost breathless, her eyes downcast, her ears strained. He did not follow. Sally frowned. A sneer came to her lips. Then a pensiveness succeeded, and resolve became fixed. All right; he did not follow. He was a man. All the more worthy of her address.

Moreover, she had noticed him more clearly than ever before, because the gas in the hall had lighted his face as she turned upon the threshold. He was strong, and she adored strength. He was broad and muscular and dark. He had dark eyes under heavy brows. His age she supposed to be about twenty or slightly above. As she recollected these details Sally's face became inscrutable. All the same, her walk had lost its savour, and she returned home earlier than usual. How miserable it was that she had no other girl of her own age to go about with. Boys always went in twos. So did girls. The one gave the other courage. Yet Sally was done with May. May was soppy. She did not, in thinking this, do anything but envy May; but all the same she knew that Toby's solitariness matched her own. It was an augury. She lay awake until he came home, listening to her mother breathing; and then, in a few minutes, heard eleven o'clock strike.

vi

The next time this happened, and they met so definitely, Toby looked sharply at her. Sally did nothing, but paused an instant. He followed her with his eyes. Then, he stepped to her side. It was the moment and Sally stopped sharply, shrinking a little from him.