The discussion was brief. “Then I’ll send your agent the contract to-morrow,” Joan overheard him say a minute later. They returned home by train. Joan insisted on travelling third class, and selected a compartment containing a stout woman and two children. Arthur had to be at the works. An important contract had got behindhand and they were working overtime. She and her father dined alone. He made her fulfil her promise to talk about herself, and she told him all she thought would interest him. She passed lightly over her acquaintanceship with Phillips. He would regard it as highly undesirable, she told herself, and it would trouble him. He was reading her articles in the Sunday Post, as also her Letters from Clorinda: and of the two preferred the latter as being less subversive of law and order. Also he did not like seeing her photograph each week, displayed across two columns with her name beneath in one inch type. He supposed he was old-fashioned. She was getting rather tired of it herself.!

“Well, he’s wrong, anyhow,” retorted Flossie. “It’s no good our waiting for man. He is too much afraid of us to be of any real help to us. We shall have to do it ourselves.” She gave Joan a hug and was gone. Madge looked at her in silence for quite a while. “How confident you are,” she said. “How I envy you.”

“Oh, a little,” she answered. “He’s absolutely sincere; and he means business. He won’t stop at the bottom of the ladder now he’s once got his foot upon it.” “Shall I shut the door?” suggested Joan. “As a matter of fact they don’t,” she explained. “But it’s what people talk about whenever they discuss you.”