t knowing your own mind. I miss you tremendously. I
feel this beautiful city is wasted without you. I'm sure if you
determined not to bother about anything but love, you'd never
regret it. You wouldn't really. Dearest, sweetest Jenny, do come.
I'm longing for my treasure. It's wonderfully romantic sitting here
in the patio of the hotel--a sort of indoor garden--and thinking so
hard of my gay and sweet one away in London. Darling, I'm sending
you kisses thick as stars, all the way from Spain. All my heart,

Your lover,

Maurice.

Jenny was lying in bed when she received this letter. The unfamiliar
stamp and crackling paper suited somehow the bedroom at Stacpole Terrace
to which she was not yet accustomed. Such a letter containing such a
request would have seemed very much out of place in the little room she
shared at home with May. But here, so dismal was the prospect of life,
she felt inclined to abandon everything and join her lover.

The Dales were a slovenly family. Mr. Dale himself was a nebulous
creature whom rumor had endowed with a pension. It never specified for
what services nor even stated the amount in plain figures; and a more
widely extended belief that the household was maintained by the Orient
management through Winnie and Irene Dale's dancing, supplanted the more
dignified tradition. Mr. Dale was generally comatose on a flock-exuding
chair-bed in what was known as "dad's room." There in the dust,
surrounded by a fortification of dented hatboxes, he perused old Sunday
newspapers whose mildewed leaves were destroyed biennially like
Canterbury Bells. Mrs. Dale was a beady-eyed, round woman with a passion
for bonnets, capes, soliloquies and gin. Her appearance and her manners
were equally unpleasant. She possessed a batch of grievances of which
the one most often aired was her missing of the _Clacton Belle_ one
Sunday morning four years ago. Jenny disliked her more completely than
anybody in the world, regarding her merely as something too large and
too approximately human to extirpate. Winnie Dale, the smoothed-out
replica of her mother, was equally obnoxious. She had long lost all the
comeliness which still distinguished Irene, and possessed an irritating
habit of apostrophizing her affection for a fishmonger--some prosperous
libertine who occasionally cast an eye, glazed like one of his own cods,
at Jenny herself. Ethel, the third sister, was still in short