“It was clever of him to make use of you,” he said. “If he’d sent it through anybody else, I’d have published it.” She felt so sorry for him. He looked such a boy, with the angry tears in his clear blue eyes, and that little childish quivering of the kind, strong, sulky mouth.!

“Oh, about as much as there always is wherever men and women work together,” answered Madge. “It’s a nuisance, but it has to be faced.” He glanced at the clock. “I’ll give you five minutes,” he said. “Interview me.”

“I have always loved him,” Joan answered. “It was he didn’t love me, for a time, as I thought. But I know now that he does.” The victory was won. Mrs. Phillips had turned away. The shopman was altering the order. Joan moved towards the door, and accidentally caught sight of Mrs. Phillips’s face. The flabby mouth was trembling. A tear was running down the painted cheek. 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.