up and addressed it, reconsidered that, and made the
scrap more secure in a yellow envelope. It had an embossed post-office
stamp, which she sacrificed with resignation. Then she went back to an
extremely uninteresting vegetable curry, with the reflection--"Can she
possibly imagine that one doesn't see it yet?"

Alicia came before five. She brought a novel of Gissing's, in order
apparently that they might without fail talk about Gissing. Hilda was
agreeable; she would talk about Gissing, or about anything, tipped on
the edge of her bed--Alicia had surmounted that degree of intimacy at
a bound by the declaration that she could no longer endure the blue
umbrellas--and clasping one knee, with an uncertain tenure of a chipped
bronze slipper deprived of its heel. Wonderful silk draperies fell about
her, with ink-spots on the sleeves; her hair was magnificent.

"It's so curious to me," she was saying of the novel, "that anyone
should learn all that life as you do, at a distance, in a book. It's
like looking at it through the little end of an opera-glass."

"I fancy that the most desirable way," said Alicia, glancing at the
door.

"Don't you believe it. The best way is to come out of it, to grow out
of it. Then all the rest has the charm of novelty and the value of
contrast, and the distinction of being the best. You, poor dear, were
born an artificial flower in a cardboard box. But you couldn't help it."

"Everybody doesn't grow out of it." The concentration in Alicia's eyes
returned again with vacillating wings.

"She can't be here for a quarter of an hour yet." The slipper dropped at
this point, and Hilda stooped to put it on again. She kept her foot in
her hands, and regarded it pensively.

"Shoes are the one thing one shouldn't buy in the native quarter," she
continued; "at all events, ready-made."

"You have an audacity--" Alicia ended abruptly in a wan smile.

"Haven't I? Are you quite sure he wants to marry her?"

"I know it."

"From him?"

"From him."

"Oh!"--Hilda deliberated a moment nursing her slipper--"Really? Well, we
can't let that happen."

"Why not?"

"You have a hardihood! Is no reason plain to you? Don't you see
anything?"

Alicia smiled again painfully, as if against a tension of her lips. "I
see only one thing that matters--he wants it," she said.

"And won't be happy till he gets it! Rubbish, my dear! We are an
intolerably self-sacrificing sex." Hilda felt about for pillows, and
st