thirty horses galloping over
a hard road, with the power of six of them in its inside. He asked
me down to dinner one night; I went. It meant business. His wife
weighs the ounce that he ought to weigh if he didn't weigh seventeen
stone, and they sit at each end of a huge table in a tiny room filled
with maroon plush against a green carpet, and all through dinner they
talk about carburetters and low-tension magnetos, and Mr. Cheeseman
discusses what friend living in the row of houses, of which theirs
is one, they would get most out of in return for a drive in the motor
next Sunday. 'There's one fellow I know,' I remember him saying.
'He's something to do with the stage--his brother's in the
booking-office at Daly's. He might get us some seats if we took him
out.'"

Sally laughed. The first moment that her lips had parted to the sound
since Janet had been with her.

"It's true," said Janet. "I'm not making it up. He got that
car--allowing for his trade discount--for a hundred and thirty-five
pounds--cape-cart hood and all. It only costs him thirteen pounds
a year in tyres--and it can do twenty-five miles to a gallon of petrol
with him inside, and he reckons he's been saved five shillings a week
regularly in dinners since he got it. Well, what else do you think
a man buys a motor-car for if he can't afford it? Some one has to
pay for it--why not his friends? That's the English system of
hospitality--what I buy you pay for; what you pay for I get, and what
I've got I must have bought, otherwise I shouldn't have it. It's the
principle of the _reductio ad absurdum_, if you know what that is.
Everybody gets what they want, everybody else pays for it, and
everybody's happy. I'll do your washing if you'll do mine. Can you
have a more generous hospitality than that?"

Sally laughed again, and then Janet launched her boat of enterprise.

"You're fond of kiddies, aren't you, Sally?" she asked suddenly.

A tender look crept into Sally's eyes. "You know I am," she replied.

"Well--why don't you go down to your people at Cailsham and help them
for a little while in the school?"

The look of tenderness died out. Her eyes roamed pitiably about the
room.

"I couldn't leave here," she said powerlessly.

"Why not?"

"I couldn't. It's all reminding me I know; but I couldn't be happy
anywhere else. I should be miserable away from here."

The meeting of such obstacles as this, Janet had anticipated. She
knew well that slough o