rs are
made to be useful."

Nearly every spare minute of every day during those intervening weeks
Marie spent in renovating a frock. She had vast ideas, but no money
except a few shillings hoarded only a woman knows how, in spite of the
pressing claims of the greasy books. Her wedding frock, four years
old, emerged from the tissue paper where it had lain these many
months, yellowed and soiled, in dire need of the cleaner's
ministrations or the dyer's art. Marie could not afford the cleaner,
and did not dare the wash-tub and soap, but she bought one of those
fourpenny-ha'penny dyes with which impecunious women achieve amazing
results, wherewith she dyed the frock, and the bath, and her own hands
a shade of blue satisfactory at least by artificial light. Under it
she would wear the purple petticoat, whose flounces would cause the
skirt to sway and swing in the present mode, and she would evolve
herself a hat. She folded a newspaper round, shaped it to her head,
covered it with black velvet, borrowed a great old cameo clasp of her
mother's, and had a turban, a saucy thing whose rake brought back for
a while the lamp to her eyes and the rose to her cheek. The
housemaid's gloves and the rubber gloves had never been renewed, and
the supply of Julia's wornout suedes could not cope with the
destruction of them at No. 30, so that Marie's fine hands were fine no
longer. They were reddened and roughened and thickened like the hands
of other household women, but each afternoon in the slow fortnight she
sat down to careful manicuring. When the result of these pains was
fulfilled; when she stood before the glass in her pink bedroom gasping
at her reflection, she could have sung and danced and wept in this
glad renewal of her youth.

She had rendezvous with Osborn at the chosen restaurant at seven.
Never, it seemed to her, had she felt lighter-footed and
lighter-hearted. It was as if the old days were back, the old days
when an unlessoned girl met an unlessoned man to dream of heaven
together, in some restaurant room full of the lessons and sophistries
of love. Westwards she travelled by Tube, emerged at Leicester Square,
and walked on flying feet past the Haymarket, across the great stream
of traffic at the top, into Shaftesbury Avenue, and into the foyer of
a famous restaurant. She sat down on a velvet couch, snuggled her furs
around her, and felt a lady of luxury. Osborn kept her waiting some
ten minutes, but soon the damper whi