ure, and Lilian
certainly so regarded it. She pictured the shut shops, and shops and yet
again shops, filled with elegance and costliness--robes, hats, stockings,
shoes, gloves, incredibly fine lingerie, furs, jewels, perfumes--designed
and confected for the setting-off of just such young attractiveness as
hers. She pictured herself rifling those deserted and silent shops by some
magic means and emerging safe, undetected, in batiste so rare that her
skin blushed through it, in a frock that was priceless and yet nothing at
all, and in warm marvellous sables that no blast of wind or misfortune
could ever penetrate--and diamonds in her hair. She pictured thousands of
smart women, with imperious command over rich, attendant males, who at
that very moment were moving quickly in automobiles from theatres towards
the dancing-clubs that clustered round Felix Grig's typewriting office. At
that very moment she herself ought to have been dancing. Not in a smart
club; no! Only in the basement of a house where an acquaintance of hers
lodged; and only with clerks and things like that; and only a gramophone.
But still a dance, a respite from the immense ennui and solitude called
existence!"

After Lilian's mother died she had been "Papa's cherished darling. Then
Mr. Share caught pneumonia, through devotion to duty and died in a few
days; and at last Lilian felt on her lovely cheek the winds of the world;
at last she was free. Of high paternal finance she had never in her life
heard one word. In the week following the funeral she learnt that she
would be mistress of the furniture and a little over one hundred pounds
net. Mr. Share had illustrated the ancient maxim that it is easier to make
money than to keep it. He had held shipping shares too long and had sold a
fully-paid endowment insurance policy in the vain endeavour to replace by
adventurous investment that which the sea had swallowed up. And Lilian was
helpless. She could do absolutely nothing that was worth money. She could
not begin to earn a livelihood. As for relatives, there was only her
father's brother, a Board School teacher with a large vulgar family and an
income far too small to permit of generosities. Lilian was first
incredulous, then horror-struck.

"Leaving the youth of the world to pick up art as best it could without
him, and fleeing to join his wife in paradise, the loving, adoring father
had in effect abandoned a beautiful idolised daughter to the alternatives