sitively to
shrink.

"You never spoke to Mr. Witham?" Miss Pinnegar asked.

"He never spoke to me," replied Alvina.

"He raised his hat to me."

"_You_ ought to have married him, Miss Pinnegar," said Alvina. "He
would have been right for you." And she laughed rather mockingly.

"There is no need to make provision for me," said Miss Pinnegar.

And after this, she was a long time before she forgave Alvina, and
was really friendly again. Perhaps she would never have forgiven her
if she had not found her weeping rather bitterly in her mother's
abandoned sitting-room.

Now so far, the story of Alvina is commonplace enough. It is more or
less the story of thousands of girls. They all find work. It is the
ordinary solution of everything. And if we were dealing with an
ordinary girl we should have to carry on mildly and dully down the
long years of employment; or, at the best, marriage with some dull
school-teacher or office-clerk.

But we protest that Alvina is not ordinary. Ordinary people,
ordinary fates. But extraordinary people, extraordinary fates. Or
else no fate at all. The all-to-one-pattern modern system is too
much for most extraordinary individuals. It just kills them off or
throws them disused aside.

There have been enough stories about ordinary people. I should think
the Duke of Clarence must even have found malmsey nauseating, when
he choked and went purple and was really asphyxiated in a butt of
it. And ordinary people are no malmsey. Just ordinary tap-water. And
we have been drenched and deluged and so nearly drowned in perpetual
floods of ordinariness, that tap-water tends to become a really
hateful fluid to us. We loathe its out-of-the-tap tastelessness. We
detest ordinary people. We are in peril of our lives from them: and
in peril of our souls too, for they would damn us one and all to the
ordinary. Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary
points. But nowadays you may look for them with a microscope, they
are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and
mechanical days.

There was no hope for Alvina in the ordinary. If help came, it would
have to come from the extraordinary. Hence the extreme peril of her
case. Hence the bitter fear and humiliation she felt as she drudged
shabbily on in Manchester House, hiding herself as much as possible
from public view. Men can suck the heady juice of exalted
self-importance from the bitter weed of failure--failures are