came to anything. She belonged to the type of woman who can take her
pick of the men, and remains unmarried while her plainer friends are
rearing families.

The natural destiny of the Waterloo girls was the factory, or the
workshops of anaemic dressmakers, stitching slops at racing speed for
the warehouses. A few of the better sort, marked out by their face and
figure, found their way to the tea-rooms and restaurants. But the
Duchess had encouraged her daughter's belief that she was too fine a
lady to soil her hands with work, and she strummed idly on the
dilapidated piano while her mother roughened her fine hands with
washing and scrubbing. This was in the early days, when Dad,
threatened with starvation, had passed the hotels at a run to avoid
temptation, for which he made amends by drinking himself blind for a
week at a time. Then, after years of genteel poverty, the Duchess had
consented to Clara giving lessons on the piano--that last refuge of the
shabby-genteel. But pupils were scarce in Waterloo, and Clara's manner
chilled the enthusiasm of parents who only paid for lessons on the
understanding that their child was to become the wonder of the world
for a guinea a quarter.

This morning Clara was busy practising scales, while her mother dusted
and swept with feverish haste, for Mr Jones, the owner of the great
boot-shop, was bringing his son in the afternoon to arrange for lessons
on the piano. The Duchess knew the singular history of Jonah, the boot
king, and awaited his arrival with intense curiosity. She had married
a failure, and adored success. She decided to treat Jonah as an equal,
forgiving his lowly origin with a confused idea that it was the proper
thing for millionaires to spring from the gutter, the better to show
their contempt for the ordinary advantages of education and family.
She had decided to wear her black silk, faded and darned, but by
drawing the curtains; she hoped it would pass. From some receptacle
unknown to Dad she had fished out a few relics of her former
grandeur--an old-fashioned card-tray of solid silver, and the quaint
silver tea-set with the tiny silver spoons that her grandmother had
sent as a wedding present from England.

Clara had just finished a variation with three tremendous fortissimo
chords when she heard the wheels of a cab. This was an event in
itself, for cabs in Buckland Street generally meant doctors, hospitals,
or sudden death. She ran to the window a