I want you to come here whenever you can.
You haven't seen our boy, Tim, yet--one and a half--and there are so
many things I want to show you. Will you count yourself a friend of the
house?"

Maggie blushed and twisted her hands together.

"You're very good," she said, "but ... I don't know ... perhaps you
won't like me, or what I do."

"I do like you," said Katherine. "And if I like any one I don't care
what they do."

"All the same," said Maggie, "I don't belong ... to your world, your
life. I should shock you, I know. You might be sorry afterwards that
you knew me. Supposing I broke away ..."

"But I broke away myself," said Katherine, "it is sometimes the only
thing to do. I made my mother, who had been goodness itself to me,
desperately unhappy."

"Why did you do that?" asked Maggie.

"Because I wanted to marry my husband."

"Well, I love a man too," said Maggie.

"Oh, I do hope you'll be happy!" said Katherine. "As happy as I am."

"No," said Maggie, shaking her head, "I don't expect to be happy."

She seemed to herself as she said that to be hundreds of miles away
from Katherine Mark and her easy life, the purple curtains and her
amber light.

"Not happy but satisfied," she said.

She saw that it was five minutes past six. "I must go," she said.

When they said good-bye Katherine bent forward and kissed her.

"If ever, in your life. I can help in any way at all," she said, "come
to me."

"I'll do that," promised Maggie. She coloured, and then herself bent
forward and kissed Katherine. "I shall like to think of you--and all
this--" she said and went.

She was let out into the outer world by the smiling maid-servant.
Bryanston Square was dark with purple colour as though the purple
curtains inside the house had been snipped off from a general curtained
world. There was a star or two and some gaunt trees with black pointing
fingers, and here a lighted window and there a shining doorway; behind
it all the rumble of a world that disregarded love and death and all
the Higher Catechism.

Maggie confronted a policeman.

"Please, can you tell me where the Marble Arch is?" she asked.

"Straight ahead, Miss," he answered, pointing down the street, "you
can't miss it."

And she could not. It soon gleamed white ahead of her against the thick
folds of the sky. When she saw it her heart raced in front of her, like
a pony, suddenly released, kicking its heels. And her thoughts were so
strangely wild!