had taken up much of Vivie Warren's work on the 1st
of August in that year, while Honoria Fraser was touring in
Switzerland. Miss Mullet and Miss Steynes were replaced (Steynes
staying on a little later to initiate the new-comers) by two young
women so commonplace yet such efficient machines that their names
are not worth hunting up or inventing. If I have to refer to them I
will call them Miss A. and Miss B.

Beryl Claridge was closely scanned by Bertie Adams, and frequently
compared in his mind with the absent and idealized Vivie. He decided
that although she was shrewd and clever and very good-looking, he
did not like her. She smoked too many cigarettes for 1901. She had
her curly hair "bobbed" (though the term was not invented then). She
put up her feet too high and too often; so much so that the
scandalized Bertie saw she wore black knickerbockers and no
petticoats under her smart "tailor-made." She snapped your head off,
was short, sharp and insolent, joked too much with the spectacled
women clerks (who became her willing slaves); then would ask Bertie
about his best girl and tell him he'd got jolly good teeth, a good
biceps and quite a nice beginning of a moustache.

But she was a worker: no doubt of that! Of course, in the dead
season there were not many clients to shock or to win over by her
nonchalant manners, only a few women who required advice as to
houses, stocks, and shares, law, or private enquiries as to the
good faith of husbands or fiances. Such as found their way up in the
lift were a little disappointed at seeing Beryl in Vivie's chair or
at not being received by their old friend Honoria Fraser. But Beryl
was too good a business woman to put them off with any license of
speech or manners. For the rest she spent August and early September
in "mugging up" the firm's business. Although deep down in her
curious little heart, under all her affectation of hardness and
insolent disdain of public or family opinion she firmly loved her
architect and the children she had borne him, she desired quite as
passionately to be self-supporting, to earn a sufficient income of
her own, to be dependent on no one. She might have her passing
caprices and her loose and flippant mode of talking, but she wasn't
going to be a failure, a cadger, a parasite, a "fallen" woman. She
fully realized that in England no woman _has_ fallen who is
self-supporting, whose income meets her expenses and who pays her
way. Given those gua