Joan looked at her. “I thought that sort of thing was dying out,” she said. “Then they will be the Upper Classes,” suggested Joan. “And I may still have to go on fighting for the rights of the lower orders.”!

“She only came back yesterday for the half-term,” explained Mrs. Phillips. “There’s no keeping her away from her books. ’Twas her own wish to be sent to boarding-school. How would you like to go to Girton and be a B.A. like Miss Allway?” she asked, turning to the child. 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.

It did not suggest any overwhelming impatience. “Yes,” she answered. “In case you haven’t married yourself, and forgotten all about me.” “It’s her mental state that is the trouble,” was all that she would say. “She ought to be getting better. But she doesn’t.” “He has asked me,” answered the girl with a swagger. “Not sure that it would suit me now. They’re not so nice to you when they’ve got you fixed up. So long.”