No doubt that was because she was so clean and fit. No one even had ever tried to seduce her. That was certainly because she was so clean-run. She didn't obviously offer--What was it the fellow called it?--promise of pneumatic bliss to the gentlemen with sergeant-majors' horse-shoe moustaches and gurglish voices! She never would. Then perhaps she would never marry. And never be seduced!

Nunlike! She would have to stand at an attitude of attention beside a telephone all her life; in an empty schoolroom with the world shouting from the playground. Or not even shouting from the playground any more. Gone to Piccadilly!

...But, hang it all, she wanted some fun! Now!

For years now she had been--oh, yes, nunlike!--looking after the lungs and limbs of the girls of the adenoidy, nonconformistish--really undenominational or so little Established as made no difference!--Great Public Girls' School. She had had to worry about impossible but not repulsive little Cockney creatures' breathing when they had their arms extended...You mustn't breathe rhythmically with your movements. No. No. No!...Don't breathe out with the first movement and in with the second! Breathe naturally! Look at me!...She breathed perfectly!

Well, for years that! War-work for a b----y Pro-German. Or Pacifist. Yes, that too she had been for years. She hadn't liked being it because it was the attitude of the superior and she did not like being superior. Like Edith Ethel!

But now! Wasn't it manifest? She could put her hand whole-heartedly into the hand of any Tom, Dick, or Harry. And wish him luck! Whole-heartedly! Luck for himself and for his enterprise. She came back: into the fold: into the Nation even. She could open her mouth! She could let out the good little Cockney yelps that were her birthright! She could be free, independent!

Even her dear, blessed, muddle-headed, tremendously eminent mother by now had a depressed looking Secretary. She, Valentine Wannop, didn't have to sit up all night typing after all day enjoining perfection of breathing in the playground...By Jove, they could go all, brother, mother in untidy black and mauve, secretary in untidy black without mauve, and she, Valentine, out of her imitation Girl Scout's uniform and in--oh, white muslin or Harris tweeds--and with Cockney yawps discuss the cooking under the stone-pines of Amalfi. By the Mediterranean...No one, then, would be able to say that she had never seen the sea of Penelope, the Mother of the Gracchi, Delia, Lesbia, Nausicaa, Sappho...

'Saepe te in somnis vidi!'

She said:

'Good...God!'

Not in the least with a Cockney intonation but like a good Tory English gentleman confronted by an unspeakable proposition. Well: it was an unspeakable proposition. For the voice from the telephone had been saying to her inattention, rather crawlingly, after no end of details as to the financial position of the house of Macmaster:

'So I thought, my dear Val, in remembrance of old times; that...If in short I were the means of bringing you together again...For I believe you have not been corresponding...You might in return...You can see for yourself that at this moment the sum would be absolutely crushing...

II

Ten minutes later she was putting to Miss Wanostrocht, firmly if without ferocity, the question:

'Look here, Head, what did that woman say to you? I don't like her; I don't approve of her and I didn't really listen to her. But I want to hear!'

Miss Wanostrocht, who had been taking her thin, black cloth coat from its peg behind the highly varnished pitch-pine door of her own private cell, flushed, hung up her garment again and turned from the door. She stood, thin, a little rigid, a little flushed, faded and a little as it were at bay.

'You must remember,' she began, 'that I am a schoolmistress.' She pressed, with a gesture she constantly had, the noticeably golden plait of her dun-coloured hair with the palm of her thin left hand. None of the gentlewomen of that school had had quite enough to eat--for years now. 'It's,' she continued, 'an instinct to accept any means of knowledge. I like you so much, Valentine--if in private you'll let me call you that. And it seemed to me that if you were in ..

'In what?' Valentine asked. 'Danger?...Trouble?'

'You understand,' Miss Wanostrocht replied, 'that...person seemed as anxious to communicate to me facts about yourself as to give you--that was her ostensible reason for ringing you up--news. About a...another person. With whom you once had...relations.