house that had
been handsome in the 'sixties, when it was her girlhood's home. Maisie
hated it all: the chairs covered in Berlin-wool needlework, the dark,
polished surfaces of the tables and bureaux, the tinkling lustres of
Bohemian glass, the shining brass trivet on which the toast kept itself
warm, the crude colours of the tea-service, the smell of eau-de-Cologne
mingling with the faint scent of beeswax and cedar-wood. She would have
liked to change the old water-colours in their rubbed gilt frames for
dark-mounted autotypes. How should she know that those hideous pigs were
Morlands, and that the cow picture was a David Cox. She would have liked
Japanese blue transfers instead of the gold-and-white china--old
Bristol, by the way, but Maisie knew nothing of Bristol. The regular,
sober orderliness of the house chafed and fretted her; the recurrent
duties, all dull; the few guests who came to tea. Decent poverty cannot
give dinner parties or dances. She visited her school friends, and when
she came home again it seemed to her sometimes as though the atmosphere
of the place would choke her.

"I want to go out and earn my own living," she said to her cousin Edward
one Sunday afternoon when her mother was resting and he and she were
roasting chestnuts on the bars of the dining-room fire. "I'm simply
useless here."

Edward was a second cousin. To him the little house was the ideal home,
just as Maisie was--well, not, perhaps, the ideal girl, but the only
girl in the world, which comes to much the same thing. But he never told
her so: he dared not risk losing the cousin's place and missing for ever
the lover's.

So, in his anxiety lest she should know how much he cared, he scolded
her a good deal. But he took her to picture galleries and to _matinees_,
and softened her life in a hundred ways that she never noticed. He was
only "Poor old Edward," and he knew it.

"How can you?" he said. "Why, what on earth would Aunt do without you?
Here, have this one--it's a beauty."

"I ought to have been taught a trade, like other poor girls," she went
on, waving away the roasted chestnut. "Lots of the girls I was at school
with are earning as much as a pound a week now--typewriting or painting
birthday cards, and some of them are in the Post Office--and I do
nothing but drudge away at home. It's too bad."

Edward would have given a decent sum at that moment to be inspired with
exactly the right thing to say. As it was he looked at