e me?"

"I'll go every day that I possibly can," Beth answered, smiling
brightly as she saw him fall-to contentedly with the appetite of a
thriving convalescent. Practising pious frauds upon him had become a
confirmed habit by this time--of which she should have been ashamed;
but instead, she felt a satisfying sense of artistic accomplishment
when they answered, and was only otherwise affected with a certain
wonderment at the very slight and subtle difference there is between
truth and falsehood as conveyed by the turn of a phrase.

But now the money ran shorter and shorter; she had nothing much left
to sell; and it was a question whether she could possibly hold out
until her half-year's dividend was due. Perhaps the old lawyer would
let her anticipate it for once. She wrote and asked him, but while she
was waiting for a reply the pressure became acute.

Out of doors one day, walking along dejectedly, wondering what she
should do when she came to her last shilling, her eye rested on a
placard in the window of a fashionable hairdresser's shop, and she
read mechanically: "A GOOD PRICE GIVEN FOR FINE HAIR." She passed on,
however, and was half-way down the street before it occurred to her
that her own hair was of the finest; but the moment she thought of it,
she turned back, and walked into the hairdresser's shop in a
business-like way without hesitation. A gentleman was sitting beside
the counter at one end of the shop, waiting to be attended on; Beth
took a seat at the other end, and waited too. She sat there, deep in
thought and motionless, until she was roused by somebody saying, "What
can I do for you, miss?"

Then she looked up and saw the proprietor, a man with a kindly face.

"Can I speak to you for a moment?" she asked.

"Come this way, if you please," he replied, after a glance at her
glossy dark-brown hair and shabby gloves.

When she went in that day, Arthur uttered an exclamation.

"Do you mean to say you've had your hair cut short?" he asked,
speaking to her almost roughly. "Are you going to join the unsexed
crew that shriek on platforms?"

"I don't know any unsexed crew that shriek on platforms," she
answered, "and I am surprised to hear you taking the tone of cheap
journalism. There has been nothing in the woman movement to unsex
women except the brutalities of the men who oppose them."

He coloured somewhat, but said no more--only sat looking into the fire
with an expression on his face that cu