"Well, you see," Beth answered, "I went to the Italian restaurant when I was out."
"Oh, did you?" he said. "That's right. I wish you would go every day, and have a good hot meal. Will you promise me?"
"I'll go every day that I possibly can," Beth answered, smiling brightly as she saw him fall-to contentedly with the appetite of a thriving convalescent. Practising pious frauds upon him had become a confirmed habit by this time—of which she should have been ashamed; but instead, she felt a satisfying sense of artistic accomplishment when they answered, and was only otherwise affected with a certain wonderment at the very slight and subtle difference there is between truth and falsehood as conveyed by the turn of a phrase.
But now the money ran shorter and shorter; she had nothing much left to sell; and it was a question whether she could possibly hold out until her half-year's dividend was due. Perhaps the old lawyer would let her anticipate it for once. She wrote and asked him, but while she was waiting for a reply the pressure became acute.
Out of doors one day, walking along dejectedly, wondering what she should do when she came to her last shilling, her eye rested on a placard in the window of a fashionable hairdresser's shop, and she read mechanically: "A GOOD PRICE GIVEN FOR FINE HAIR." She passed on, however, and was half-way down the street before it occurred to her that her own hair was of the finest; but the moment she thought of it, she turned back, and walked into the hairdresser's shop in a business-like way without hesitation. A gentleman was sitting beside the counter at one end of the shop, waiting to be attended on; Beth took a seat at the other end, and waited too. She sat there, deep in thought and motionless, until she was roused by somebody saying, "What can I do for you, miss?"
Then she looked up and saw the proprietor, a man with a kindly face.
"Can I speak to you for a moment?" she asked.
"Come this way, if you please," he replied, after a glance at her glossy dark-brown hair and shabby gloves.
When she went in that day, Arthur uttered an exclamation.
"Do you mean to say you've had your hair cut short?" he asked, speaking to her almost roughly. "Are you going to join the unsexed crew that shriek on platforms?"