he danced, as you may imagine, in a very far from grown-up way, rather
like a baby that has thought of a new funny way of annoying its Nana;
and she sang, too, like a child that inadvertently bursts into loud
tuneless song, because it is morning and yet too early to get up. A
little wandering of the voice, a little wandering of the feet.... The
may tree in the middle of the garden seemed to be her partner. A small
blot moved up and down the chequered trunk of the tree, and that was the
shadow of a grey squirrel, watching the dancing. The squirrel wore the
same fur as the two-and-a-half-guinea young lady wears, and sometimes it
looked with a tilted head at the witch, and sometimes it buried its face
in its hands and sat for a while shaken with secret laughter. There was
certainly something more funny than beautiful about the witch's dancing.
She laughed herself most of the time. She was wearing a mackintosh,
which was in itself rather funny, but her feet were bare.

A voice broke in: "Good for you, cully."

It was Sarah Brown's fellow-lodger leaning from her window.

The squirrel rippled higher up the may tree.

The pleasure of the thing broke like an eggshell. Sarah Brown turned
back towards her bed. It was too early to get up. It was too late to go
to sleep again. Eunice, her hot-water bottle, she knew, lay cold as a
serpent to shock her feet if she returned. Besides, the Dog David was
asleep on the middle of the counterpane, and she was too good a mother
to wake him. There are a good many things to do when you find yourself
awake too early. It is said that some people sit up and darn their
stockings, but I refer now to ordinary people, not to angels. Utterly
resourceless people find themselves reduced to reading the penny stamps
on yesterday's letters. There is a good deal of food for thought on a
penny stamp, but nothing really uplifting. Some people I know employ
this morning leisure in scrubbing their consciences clean, thus
thriftily making room for the sins of the coming day. But Sarah Brown's
conscience was dreadfully receptive, almost magnetic; little sins like
smuts lay always deep upon it. There were a few regrettable seconds in
every minute she lived, I think, though she never enjoyed the
compensations attached to a really considerable sin. Anyway her
conscience would have been a case for pumice-stone, and when she was
happy she always tried to forget it. Yet she was not without a good many
very small and