n't
get used to these new-fangled fashions and never shall."

"What of it?" said Jenny, with marked indifference.

"Oh, nothing at all, if it pleases you. You've got to wear it and I
suppose there's nothing more to be said. But I think that hat is vulgar.
Vulgar it would have been called when I was a girl. And I can't think
what you want to go all of a sudden for like this. It isn't often I make
a beefsteak pudding."

Jenny was in a flutter to be away.

"Good-bye, Mrs. Dale," she said firmly.

"Well, good-bye, Jenny. You mustn't mind shaking hands with me all
covered in suet. As I say, it's very seldom I do make a beefsteak
pudding. I won't disturb my old man. He's busy this morning. Come and
tell us how you get on soon."

It was a relief to be seated inside the tram and free of Stacpole
Terrace. It was pleasant to change cars at the Nag's Head and behold
again the well-known landscape of Highbury. A pageant of childish
memories, roused by the sight of the broad pavements of Islington, was
marshalled in Jenny's brain. Somehow on the visits she had paid her home
during the last year these aspects were obscured by the consciousness
of no longer owning any right to them. Now, really going home, she
turned into Hagworth Street with a glow of pride at seeing again its
sobriety and dignity so evident after the extravagant stucco and Chinese
balconies of Camden Town's terraces and squares. There was Seventeen,
looking just the same, prophetic of refuge and solid comfort to the
exile. She wondered what freak of folly had ever made her fancy home was
dingy and unpleasant, home that held her bright-eyed mother's laugh, her
absurd father always amusing, and her little sister May. Home was an
enchanted palace with more romance in each dear room than was to be
found elsewhere in the world. Home was alive with the past and preserved
the links which bound together all the detached episodes of Jenny's
life. As she turned into the garden that once had seemed a district, as
she rattled the letter-box--in the days of her estrangement she always
rang the bell--remorse came welling up in tears. She remembered what
good times had been recurrent through the past, tea-parties and
pantomimes and learning to ride a bicycle in the warm sunsets of June.
And in the house opposite nothing was altered, not a fold of the lace
curtains, not a leaf of the dusty aspidistra that took all the light in
the ground-floor window.

What a long time the