“What about the other people irritating us?” suggested Joan. “The Cyril Baptiste?” she asked. She had often wondered what he might be like.!

“Thought you looked a bit like it,” said the girl. “I’m in the chorus. It’s better than being in service or in a shop: that’s all you can say for it.” “Oh,” said Miss Tolley. “And were there any children?”

“It would be rather interesting, a fight between them,” said Joan. “Myself I should back Phillips.” Joan was making herself a cup of tea when there came a tap at the door. It was Mrs. Phillips. One of Joan’s earliest recollections was the picture of herself standing before the high cheval glass in her mother’s dressing-room. Her clothes lay scattered far and wide, falling where she had flung them; not a shred of any kind of covering was left to her. She must have been very small, for she could remember looking up and seeing high above her head the two brass knobs by which the glass was fastened to its frame. Suddenly, out of the upper portion of the glass, there looked a scared red face. It hovered there a moment, and over it in swift succession there passed the expressions, first of petrified amazement, secondly of shocked indignation, and thirdly of righteous wrath. And then it swooped down upon her, and the image in the glass became a confusion of small naked arms and legs mingled with green cotton gloves and purple bonnet strings.