alceolaria, scarlet geranium, blue lobelia, and all the bright
easy-to-grow London flowers. All the villas belonging to the gardens
seem alike, too, with their green front doors, their white steps, their
brightly polished door-knockers and their well-kept curtains.

From the look of these typically English, cheerful, middle-class,
not-too-well-off little homes you'd know just the sort of people who
live in them. The plump, house-keeping mother, the season-ticket father,
the tennis-playing sons, the girls in dainty blouses, who put their
little newly whitened shoes to dry on the bathroom window-sill, and who
call laughing remarks to each other out of the window.

"I say, Gladys! don't forget it's the theatre to-night!"

"Oh, rather not! See you up at the Tennis Club presently?"

"No; I'm meeting Vera to shop and have lunch in Oxford Street."

"Dissipated rakes! '_We don't have much money, but we do see life_,'
eh?"

Yes! From what I see of them, they do get heaps of fun out of their
lives, these young people who make up such a large slice of the
population of our great London. There's laughter and good-fellowship and
enjoyment going on all up and down our road.

Except here. No laughter and parties and tennis club appointments at No.
45, where I, Beatrice Lovelace, live with my Aunt Anastasia. No gay
times _here_!

When we came here six years ago (I was eighteen) Aunt Anastasia was
_rigidly_ firm about our having absolutely nothing to do with the people
of the neighbourhood.

"They are not OUR kind," she said with her stately, rather thin
grey-haired head in the air. "And though we may have come down in the
world, we are still Lovelaces, as we were in the old days when your dear
grandfather had Lovelace Court. Even if we do seem to have dropped out
of OUR world, we need not associate with any other. Better _no_ society
than the wrong society."

So, since "our" world takes no further notice of us, we have no society
at all. I can't _tell_ you how frightfully, increasingly, indescribably
dull and lonely it all is!

I simply long for somebody fresh of my own age to talk to. And I see so
many of them about here!

"It's like starving in the midst of plenty," I said to myself this
evening as I was watering the pinks in the side borders. The girls at
No. 46, to the right of our garden, were shrieking with laughter
together on their lawn over some family joke or other--I listened
enviously to their merriment.

I