weeks or more,
arranging Alvina's unarrangeable future for her. Offers of charity
were innumerable--for three weeks.

Meanwhile, the lawyer went on with the proving of the will and the
drawing up of a final account of James's property; Mr. May went on
with the Endeavour, though Alvina did not go down to play; Miss
Pinnegar went on with the work-girls: and Alvina went on unmaking
her mind.

Ciccio did not come during the first week. Alvina had a post-card
from Madame, from Cheshire: rather far off. But such was the buzz
and excitement over her material future, such a fever was worked up
round about her that Alvina, the petty-propertied heroine of the
moment, was quite carried away in a storm of schemes and benevolent
suggestions. She answered Madame's post-card, but did not give much
thought to the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. As a matter of fact, she was
enjoying a real moment of importance, there at the centre of
Woodhouse's rather domineering benevolence: a benevolence which she
unconsciously, but systematically frustrated. All this scheming for
selling out and making reservations and hanging on and fixing prices
and getting private bids for Manchester House and for the Endeavour,
the excitement of forming a Limited Company to run the Endeavour, of
seeing a lawyer about the sale of Manchester House and the
auctioneer about the sale of the furniture, of receiving men who
wanted to pick up the machines upstairs cheap, and of keeping
everything dangling, deciding nothing, putting everything off till
she had seen somebody else, this for the moment fascinated her, went
to her head. It was not until the second week had passed that her
excitement began to merge into irritation, and not until the third
week had gone by that she began to feel herself entangled in an
asphyxiating web of indecision, and her heart began to sing because
Ciccio had never turned up. Now she would have given anything to see
the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras again. But she did not know where they were.
Now she began to loathe the excitement of her property: doubtfully
hers, every stick of it. Now she would give anything to get away
from Woodhouse, from the horrible buzz and entanglement of her
sordid affairs. Now again her wild recklessness came over her.

She suddenly said she was going away somewhere: she would not say
where. She cashed all the money she could: a hundred-and-twenty-five
pounds. She took the train to Cheshire, to the last address of the
Natcha-Kee-