hing tender and absurd in the movements of all those
long black stockings, it was for the sake and on account of the long
black stockings worn by little Winny Dymond.

Winny Dymond was not proud, neither was she what he supposed you would
call beautiful. She was not one of those conspicuous by their flaming
and elaborate hair.

What he first noted in her with wonder and admiration was the absence of
weediness and flabbiness. Better known, she stirred in him, as a child
might, an altogether indescribable sense of tenderness and absurdity.
She stood out for him simply by the fact that, of all the young ladies
of the Polytechnic, she was the only one he really knew--barring Maudie
Hollis, and Maudie, though she was the proud beauty of the Polytechnic,
didn't count.

For Maudie was ear-marked, so to speak, as the property (when he could
afford a place to put her in) of Fred Booty. Ransome would no more have
dreamed of cultivating an independent acquaintance with Maudie than he
would of pocketing the silver cup that Booty won in last year's Hurdle
Race. It was because of Maudie, and at Booty's irresistible request,
that he, the slave of friendship, had consented, unwillingly and
perfunctorily at first, to become Miss Dymond's cavalier. Maudie, also
at Booty's passionate appeal, had for six months shared with Winny
Dymond a room off Wandsworth High Street, so that, as he put it, he
might feel that she was near him; with the desolating result that they
weren't by any means, no, not by a long chalk, so near. For Maudie, out
of levity or sheer exuberant kindness of the heart, had persuaded Winny
Dymond to join the Polytechnic. In her proud beauty and in her affianced
state she could afford to be exuberantly kind. And Booty in his vision
of nearness had been counting on the long journey by night from Regent
Street to Wandsworth High Street alone with Maudie; and, though Miss
Dymond practically effaced herself, it wasn't--with a girl of Maudie's
temperament--the same thing at all. For Maudie in company was apt to be
a little stiff and stand-offish in her manner.

Then (one afternoon in the autumn of last year it was) Booty sounded
Ransome, finding himself alone with him in the mahogany pen when the
senior clerks were at their tea. "I say," he said, "there's something I
want _you_ to do for me," and Ransome, in his recklessness, his
magnificence, said "Right-O!"

He said afterward that he had gathered from the expression of hi