it jolly for Jane to be connected with Leila Yorke and the Potter
press, and were scarcely worth undeceiving. And naval officers, though
charming, were apt to be a little elementary, Jane discovered, in their
general outlook.

However, the job was all right; not a bad plum to have picked out of the
hash, on the whole. And the life was all right. The rooms were jolly
(only the new geyser exploded too often), and Katherine Varick, though
she made stinks in the evenings, not bad to live with, and money not too
scarce, as money goes, and theatres and dinners frequent. Doing one's
bit, putting one's shoulder to the wheel, proving the mettle of the women
of England, certainly had its agreeable side.

6

In intervals of office work and social life, Jane was writing odds and
ends, and planning the books she meant to write after the war. She
hadn't settled her line yet. Articles on social and industrial questions
for the papers, she hoped, for one thing; she had plenty to say on this
head. Short stories. Poems. Then, perhaps, a novel.... About the nature
of the novel Jane was undecided, except that it would be more unlike the
novels of Leila Yorke than any novels had ever been before. Perhaps a
sarcastic, rather cynical novel about human nature, of which Jane did
not think much. Perhaps a serious novel, dealing with social or
political conditions. Perhaps an impressionist novel, like Dorothy
Richardson's. Only they were getting common; they were too easy. One
could hardly help writing like that, unless one tried not to, if one had
lately read any of them.

Most contemporary novels Jane found very bad, not worth writing. Those
solemn and childish novels about public schools, for instance, written by
young men. Jane wondered what a novel about Roedean or Wycombe Abbey
would be like. The queer thing was that some young woman didn't write
one; it need be no duller than the young men's. Rather duller, perhaps,
because schoolgirls were more childish than schoolboys, the problems of
their upbringing less portentous. But there were many of the same
ingredients--the exaltation of games, hero-worship, rows, the clever new
literary mistress who made all the stick-in-the-mud other mistresses
angry.... Only were the other mistresses at girls' schools
stick-in-the-mud? No, Jane thought not; quite a decent modern set, on the
whole, for people of their age. Better than schoolmasters, they must be.

How dull it all was! Some woman ought t