ing time, sensible only of
having no free will.

Why couldn't she grow up all of a sudden and do as she liked? But then
grown-up people, whom she always regarded as entirely at liberty, did
not seem to be able to do as they liked. Her mother had said, "No, thank
you," to a cosy house, just as she was taught to say, "No, thank you,"
to old gentlemen who offered her pennies to turn somersaults over
railings--surely a harmless way of getting money. But her mother had not
wanted to say "No, thank you." That Jenny recognized as a fact,
although, if she had been asked why, she would have had nothing
approaching a reason.

"I will do as I like," Jenny vowed to herself. "I will, I will. I won't
be told." Here she bit the sheet in rage at her powerlessness. Desire
for action was stirring strongly in her now. "Why can't I grow up all at
once? Why must I be a little girl? Why can't I be like a kitten?"
Kittens had become cats within Jenny's experience.

"I will be disobedient. I will be disobedient. I won't be stopped."
Suddenly a curious sensation seized her of not being there at all. She
bit the bedclothes again. Then she sat up in bed and looked at her
petticoats hanging over the chair. She was there, after all, and she
fell asleep with wilful ambitions dancing lightly through the gay
simplicities of her child's brain, and, as she lay there with tightly
closed, determined lips, her mother with shaded candle looked down at
her and wondered whether, after all, she and Jenny would not have been
better off under the rich-voiced, cigar-haunted protection of Mr.
Timpany.

And then Mrs. Raeburn went to bed and fell asleep to the snoring of
Charlie, just as truly unsatisfied as most of the women in this world.

Only Charlie was all right. He had spent a royal evening in bragging to
a circle of pipe-armed friends of his firmness and virility at a moment
of conjugal stress.

And outside the cold January stars were reflected in the puddles of
Hagworth Street.

Chapter VI: _Shepherd's Calendar_

It was unlikely that Jenny's dancing could always be kept a secret. The
day came at last when her mother, in passing the playground of the
school, looked over the railings and saw her daughter's legs above a
semicircle of applauding children. Mrs. Raeburn was more than shocked:
she was profoundly alarmed. The visit of the aunts rose up before her
like a ghost from the heart of forgotten years. They had faded into a
gradual and se