ll, it was a much finer thing to be scrupulous
about one's work--that was the real morality, the real
life. Elfrida closed her eyes and felt a little shudder
of consciousness of how real it was. When she opened
them again she was putting down her protest with a strong
hand, crushing her rebellious instincts unmercifully.
She did not allow herself a moment's self-deception. She
did not insult her intelligence by the argument that it
was a perfectly harmless and proper thing to offer a
piece of work to an editor in person--that everybody did
it--that she might thereby obtain some idea of what
would suit his paper if her article did not. She was
perfectly straightforward in confronting Golightly Ticke's
idea, and she even disrobed it, to her own consciousness,
of any garment of custom and conventionality it might
have had to his. Another woman might have taken it up
and followed it without an instant's hesitation, as a
matter concerning which there could be no doubt, a matter
of ordinary expediency--of course a man would be nicer
to a woman than to another man; they always were; it was
natural. But Elfrida, with her merciless insight, had to
harden her heart and ply her self-respect with assurances
that it was all in the game, and it was a superb thing
to be playing the game. Deliberately she chose the things
she looked best in, and went out.

CHAPTER IX.

The weather had cleared to a compromise. The dome of St.
Paul's swelled dimly out of the fog as Elfrida turned
into Fleet Street, and the railway bridge that hangs over
the heads of the people at the bottom of Ludgate Hill
seemed a curiously solid structure connecting space with
space. Fleet Street, wet and brown, and standing in all
unremembered fashions, lifted its antiquated head and
waited for more rain; the pavements glistened briefly,
till the tracking heels of the crowd gave them back their
squalor; and there was everywhere that newness of turmoil
that seems to burst even in the turbulent streets of the
City when it stops raining. The girl made her way toward
Charing Cross with the westward-going crowd. It went with
a steady, respectable jog-trot, very careful of its skirts
and umbrellas and the bottoms of its trousers; she took
pleasure in hastening past it with her light gait. She
would walk to the _Consul_ office, which was in the
vicinity of the Haymarket; indeed, she must, for the sake
of economy. "I ought really to be _very_ careful," thought