“I hope nobody saw me,” he said with a laugh. “But I couldn’t bear to leave her there, unhonoured.” “No, it isn’t,” she contradicted. “It’s simple and big and kind. I always used to feel it disapproved of me. I believe it has come to love me, in its solemn old brick way.”!

“No, dear,” answered Mary. “It’s only one or two who have nowhere else to go.” “I heard him at the Albert Hall last week,” said Flossie. “He’s quite wonderful.”

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. She laughed. But the next moment she was serious. “That shows how far it has gone,” she told him, “that you don’t even know it. You pretend to be a philosopher. But you’re really a man.”