benefit. It was "Book-keeping." Sally was taken
aback. She scanned the details. Two lessons a week, on Mondays and
Thursdays, at eight o'clock. A disdain filled her. She would not be as
the other girls. She would learn book-keeping. She would understand
figures. Then she could help Gaga with precisely that work which he
confessed himself unable to do. Sally memorised the details. It was
enough; she was ready for anything. As the following Monday was the
first night of the session she would be present then.

And so, her ambition mounting once more to arrogance, Sally returned to
bed and her mother, and bread and margarine, and the dingy room on the
second-floor-back.

xi

The book-keeping class was held in one of the ordinary classrooms,
separated from others by high partitions of wood which were continued to
the ceiling in panes of glass. The room was filled with forms and desks,
but the class was so small that all those composing it (and there were
fewer still after the first six lessons) were put into the first two or
three rows of desks. The teacher was a little sandy man who made
well-trodden jokes and talked in a wheezy voice well suited to his
appearance. He used the blackboard, and stood upon tiptoe to scrawl upon
it in a large handwriting. That was at the beginning. Later, methods
developed; but for the present Sally and the others were merely
initiated into the first movements of the difficult craft. With
amazement she began to learn the mysteries of the signs "Dr." and "Cr.",
the words "Balances", "carried forward", etc. and the meanings of such
things as ruled diagonal lines. It was to her like the game of learning
chess, and she had the additional pleasure of knowing that with the
solution of each problem she was adding appreciably to her knowledge,
and to a knowledge which henceforward would not be wasted, as she could
turn it, as of all things she most desired, to immediate use. Madam's
accounts would no longer be a source of trouble or bewilderment to her.
She knew very soon that they would be mere child's play to her
instructed intelligence.

From the teacher and the lessons, Sally turned to her fellow pupils.
There were about twenty of these, the sexes almost equally represented,
but with the girls in a slight majority. One or two of the young men
were pale and spectacled, and so they did not interest her. The girls
were generally of a higher class than her own, were obviously already
employed a