simple accompaniment to it with very few
mistakes. She remembered Mrs. Perce's words. What if she _could_ do
something with her voice? Did she sing well? She allowed herself to
glimpse another glorious future.

In the middle of the walk Sally stopped dead.

"Oh, _doesn't_ it...." she said aloud. "Well, we'll just _see_. We'll
just see about it. That's all." And having as it were made her formal
protest she resumed the journey, and arrived home tired out, ready for
bed; and before she had been in bed more than two minutes she was fast
asleep, dreaming of motor cars and footmen standing on the pavement with
fur rugs in their hands. In her dream she was alone in the cars. Even
the chauffeur had no smallest resemblance to Toby. And yet she still
loved him with all her heart, and when she was with him she felt that
she extraordinarily belonged to him. Love had again at last encountered
ambition, and battle was joined.

iii

Dreams of luxurious motor-cars, and footmen with fur capes and long
fawn-coloured overcoats, holding fur rugs to cover her knees, were now
constant in Sally's mind. She saw such things occasionally in Regent
Street, and loved to look in at the windows of motor broughams
upholstered in fawn-coloured corduroy, with arm straps and little
hanging vases of fresh flowers. The freshness of these cars was her
delight. She had no notion of the income it was necessary to have in
order to possess such cars, with their attendant footman and chauffeur;
but that income, whatever it was, became her ideal. Money! Lots of
money! With money you could have comfort. When she said that, and was
warned by conventional wiseacres that money did not produce happiness,
she sneered at the timid ones. "Bet _I'd_ be happy," she said. "What's
happiness?" She wondered what it was. For her it had been oblivion in
Toby's arms. It was so no longer. That was not all she desired. It was
not by any means all. And she shrank more and more strongly from a life
of squalid toil such as her mother had had--such as she would still have
had if Mr. Minto had been a sober man. All her life she had slaved and
slaved, and now she was worn out with it. Not for Sally! She had other
plans. She had gone to the West End, and the West End was in her blood.
She was looking round at life with some of her old calculating
determination to exploit it. The death of her father, the passion for
Toby,--these had distracted her. With increasing confidence in her