ng while since she had smoked, or even thought of it; and
though she really did not care very much for smoking, she chose an
expensive Egyptian now with the utmost pleasure. What a sensation of
leisure it gave, this loitering at will, over a cup of coffee and a
cigarette! Besides, it gave her longer to watch her enemies, to learn
the modes and tricks of the day.

After lunch she sauntered back into Regent Street and stopped by an
American Beauty Parlour. She went in and inquired the price of a
manicure. It would be one-and-sixpence. So she entered a warm wee
cubicle full of beauty apparatus, sat down, and gave her right hand
for the manicurist's ministrations.

The manicurist was a lithe, tall girl, with a small young, wicked
face; and meekly demure. Her hair was sleeked down provocatively over
her ears, in which emerald drops dangled. She was an Enemy. As she
took her client's hand and dabbled the finger-tips in a tiny red bowl
of orange-flower water, Marie wondered, without charity, who had given
her those earrings of green fire, and why.

The girl talked sweetly, as she was taught to do. She remarked on the
coldness of the day and the trials of shopping in such bleak weather;
on the bustle of the shops preparing for Christmas; on the smallness
of Madame's hands.

They were a charming shape, might she say? But Madame had abused them.
Madame had perhaps been gardening? Gardening was becoming so
fashionable, with a sweet glance at the client's _ensemble_. Was
that the reason for those broken cuticles, those swollen fingertips
and brittle nails? It was a thousand pities.

Knowing, as she spoke, the futility, the obviousness of the lie, yet
somehow unable to help speaking it, Marie answered in abrupt
confusion. Yes, she had been gardening; it--it was a favourite hobby
nowadays; all her friends....

With that sleek face before her, those fragile fingertips handling
hers, she would not for a fortune have confessed: "I spoil my hands
because I spend my days between the stove and the sink; because I've
cooked and swept and sewed for a man and three children; because I
wash and iron." Secretly the manicurist would laugh and ridicule; in
her smooth white face and twinkly eardrops was the story of what she
would think of such a domestic fool; of the woman who was the slave of
man and home; who had lost her looks and hope in the servitude of
married poverty.

Presently the finger-nails were done; they did not look a grea