events, she went out to visit friends, and laughed and talked and
played games. But all the time, what was there actually in her life?
Not much. She was withering towards old-maiddom. Already in her
twenty-eighth year, she spent her days grubbing in the house, whilst
her father became an elderly, frail man still too lively in mind and
spirit. Miss Pinnegar began to grow grey and elderly too, money
became scarcer and scarcer, there was a black day ahead when her
father would die and the home be broken up, and she would have to
tackle life as a worker.

There lay the only alternative: in work. She might slave her days
away teaching the piano, as Miss Frost had done: she might find a
subordinate post as nurse: she might sit in the cash-desk of some
shop. Some work of some sort would be found for her. And she would
sink into the routine of her job, as did so many women, and grow old
and die, chattering and fluttering. She would have what is called
her independence. But, seriously faced with that treasure, and
without the option of refusing it, strange how hideous she found it.

Work!--a job! More even than she rebelled against the Withams did
she rebel against a job. Albert Witham was distasteful to her--or
rather, he was not exactly distasteful, he was chiefly incongruous.
She could never get over the feeling that he was mouthing and
smiling at her through the glass wall of an aquarium, he being on
the watery side. Whether she would ever be able to take to his
strange and dishuman element, who knows? Anyway it would be some
sort of an adventure: better than a job. She rebelled with all her
backbone against the word _job_. Even the substitutes, _employment_
or _work_, were detestable, unbearable. Emphatically, she did not
want to work for a wage. It was too humiliating. Could anything be
more _infra dig_ than the performing of a set of special actions day
in day out, for a life-time, in order to receive some shillings
every seventh day. Shameful! A condition of shame. The most vulgar,
sordid and humiliating of all forms of slavery: so mechanical. Far
better be a slave outright, in contact with all the whims and
impulses of a human being, than serve some mechanical routine of
modern work.

She trembled with anger, impotence, and fear. For months, the
thought of Albert was a torment to her. She might have married him.
He would have been strange, a strange fish. But were it not better
to take the strange leap, over into h