wondered which of them was getting teased, and whether it was the one
with my own name, Beatrice--I know some of them by name as well as I
know them by sight, the pretty, good-humoured-looking girls who live in
this road, the cheery young men! And yet, in all these years, I've never
been allowed to have a neighbour or an acquaintance. I've never
exchanged a single----

"Good evening!" said a pleasant, man's voice into the midst of my
reverie.

Startled, I glanced up.

The voice came over the palings between our garden and that of No. 44.
Through the green trellis that my aunt had had set up over the palings
("so that we should be more private") I beheld a gleam of white
flannel-clad shoulders and of smooth, fair hair.

It was the young man who's lately come to live next door.

I've always thought he looked rather nice, and rather as if he would
like to say good morning or something whenever I've met him going by.

I suppose I ought not to have noticed even that? And, of course,
according to my upbringing, I ought certainly not to have noticed him
now. I ought to have fixed a silent, Medusa-like glare upon the
trellis. I ought then to have taken my battered little green
watering-can to fill it for the fourteenth time at the scullery-tap.
Then I ought to have begun watering the Shirley poppies on the other
side of the garden.

But how often the way one's been brought up contradicts what one feels
like doing! And alas! How very often the second factor wins the day!

It won the evening, that time.

I said: "Good evening."

And I thought that would be the end of it, but no.

The frank and boyish voice (quite as nice a voice as my soldier-brother
Reggie's, far away in India!) took up quite quickly and eagerly: "Er--I
say, isn't it rather a long job watering the garden that way?"

It was, of course. But we couldn't afford a hose. Why, they cost about
thirty shillings.

He said: "Do have the 'lend' of our hose to do the rest of them, won't
you?" And thereupon he stretched out a long, white-sleeved arm over the
railings and put the end of the hose straight into my hand.

"Oh, thank you; but I will not trouble you. Good evening."

Of course, that would have been the thing to say, icily, before I walked
off.

Unfortunately I only got as far as "Oh, thank you----" And then my
fingers must have fumbled the tap on or something. Anyhow, a great spray
of water immediately poured forth from out of the hose through t