tanding on the step of young Willie Hopkins' new
bicycle and floating round Highbury Barn with curls and petticoats
flying, and peals of wild laughter. It was much more pleasant to shock
old ladies by puffing the smoke of cigarettes before them, or to play
Follow my Leader over the corrugated-iron roof of an omnibus depot.

Sometimes she took to playing truant for wind-blown afternoons by
Highgate Ponds in the company of boys, and always made the same excuse
to Madame of being wanted at home, until Madame grew suspicious and
wrote to Mrs. Raeburn.

Her mother asked why Jenny had not gone to her dancing-lesson, and where
she had been.

"I _was_ there," vowed Jenny. "Madame can't have noticed me."

So Mrs. Raeburn wrote and explained the mistake, and Jenny managed with
great anxiety to obtain possession of the letter, ostensibly in order to
post it, but really in order to tear it to a hundred pieces round the
corner.

She was naturally a truthful child, but the long restraint of childhood
had to be mitigated somehow, and lying to those in authority was no
sacrifice of her egotism, the basis of all essential truthfulness. With
her contemporaries she was always proudly, indeed painfully, frank.

This waiting to grow up was unendurable. Everybody else was emancipated
except herself. Ruby went away to be married--a source of much
speculation to Jenny, who could not understand anybody desiring to live
in a state of such corporeal intimacy with Ruby.

"I'm positive he don't know she snores," said Jenny to her mother.

"Well, what's it got to do with you?"

What, indeed, had anything to do with her? It was shocking how utterly
unimportant she was to Hagworth Street.

Edie had gone away to learn dressmaking, and Alfie had vanished into
some Midland town to learn something else, and occupying his room there
was another lodger whom she liked. Then one day he came into the kitchen
in a queer brown suit and said he was "off to the Front."

"Gone for a soldier?" said her father, when he heard of it. "Good Lord!
some people don't know when they're well off, and that's a fact."

There was nobody to inflame Jenny with the burning splendors of
patriotism. It became merely a matter of clothes, like everything else.
She gathered it was the correct thing to wear khaki ties, sometimes with
scarlet for the soldiers or blue for the sailors. It was also not
outrageous to wear a Union Jack waistcoat. But any conception of a small
na