ustache, he substituted a pensive manipulation
of his exceptional eyebrows.

Mr. Vergoe was dead, and most of his property adorned his
granddaughter's room in Cranbourne Street. She was still a second-line
girl in the _Corps de Ballet_ of the Orient Palace of Varieties. Jenny,
however, possessed the picture of the famous dead Columbine. It hung
above the bed she shared with May, beside a memorial card of the donor
set in a shining black Oxford frame. The room itself grew smaller every
year. Jenny could not imagine that once to Edie and herself it had been
illimitable. Nowadays it seemed to be all mahogany wardrobe, and
semicircular marble-topped washstand and toilet-table and iron bedstead.
On the door were many skirts and petticoats. On the walls were
shrivelled fans with pockets that held curl-papers mostly. There was
also a clouded photograph of Alfie, Edie, Jenny and May, of which the
most conspicuous feature was the starched frills of Jenny, those
historic frills that once, free of petticoats, had seemed a talisman to
masculinity. The toilet-table was inhabited by a collection of articles
that presented the most sudden and amazing contrasts. Next to a comb
that might easily have been rescued from a dustbin was a brush backed
with silver repousse. Beside seven broken pairs of nail-scissors was a
scent-bottle with golden stopper. Jenny's nightgown was daintily
ribboned and laced, and looked queerly out of place on the pock-marked
quilt.

Mrs. Purkiss still visited her sister, but Jenny was not allowed to
associate with Percy or Claude, both more pasty-faced than ever, because
Percy was going to be a missionary and Claude was suspected of premature
dissipation, having been discovered kissing the servant in the bathroom.

Mrs. Raeburn, in the jubilee of her age, was still a handsome woman, and
was admired even by Jenny for her smartness. She still worried about the
future of her children. She was more than ever conscious of her
husband's inferiority and laughed over most of the facts of her life.
May's back, however, and Jenny's perpetual riotousness caused her many
misgivings. But Alfie was doing well, and Edie seemed happy, making
dresses over at Brixton. There had been no recurrence of Mr. Timpany,
and she now viewed that episode much as she would have regarded a
trifling piece of domestic negligence. As for the Miss Horners, their
visit had long faded absolutely from her mind. It would have taken a
very great em