green, gripped hold of my imagination; but here was an odd thing. It was powerless to banish another picture, in which there was no rose and no blue, but only dull neutral tints—the picture of a basement flat in a grey London road, with electric burners instead of sun, and for view, a vista of passing feet belonging to bodies cut off from sight.

I could not, even for Charmion, give up the prospect of that flat, and all that it had come to mean; but—let me acknowledge it honestly—it was balm and relief to know that I could have a means of escape, and that at culminating moments of weariness, when everything seemed wry and disappointing, and the whole weight of seven storeys seemed to be pressing down on my brains, I could bang my door, turn the key, and fly off to peace and beauty, and a healing pandering to personal tastes!

Woman is a complex character, and I am no better than my kind. I feel it in me to be an angel of self-denial and patience for, say, the third of the year! I know for a certain fact that I should have a bad lapse if I tried to keep it up for the remaining thirds. Now, thanks to Charmion, the way was made easy, and I could put my hand to the plough without fear of drawing back.

I leapt out of bed in a tingle of excitement. Impossible to lie still when things were happening at such a rapid rate. The sun was shining, and, looking at a belt of trees in the distance, I could catch a faint shimmer of green. It is perhaps the most intoxicating moment of the year, when that first gleam of spring greets the eye, and this special year it held an added exhilaration, for it seemed to speak of the budding of fresh personal life.

I laughed; I sang; the depression of the last weeks fell from me like a cloak, and I faced the future glad and undismayed. With the reading of that letter had come an end to indecision. I now knew exactly what I was about to do. Write to Charmion, and fix the earliest possible date for a meeting in town. From town we would inspect Pastimes, the while I instituted inquiries for a suitable flat. The two homes secured, I would then return to The Clough, and divide my furniture into two batches, send them off to their several destinations, and follow myself, hot foot. It would take some time to put both dwellings in order, but it would be interesting work. I love the making of interiors, and if Pastimes must be fitted beautifully to do justice to itself, still more would it be needful to turn the uninspiring “flat” into a haven of comfort and cheer.

At this precise moment my prancing brought me in front of the long mirror, and what I beheld therein brought me up with a gasp. Twenty-six is quite a venerable age, but at moments of happiness and exhilaration it has a disconcerting trick of switching back to seventeen. That smiling, bright-eyed, pink-and-white-cheeked girl in the glass, with two long pigtails of hair hanging to her waist, looked really absurdly juvenile! Given a small stretch of imagination, you might have believed that she was a flapper preparing for her last term at school; by no possible mental effort could you have placed her as a douce maiden lady, living alone in London, devoting herself to good works in a manner as adventurous as it was unusual.

Mothers of children would insinuate that I was a child myself; troubled matrons would purse their lips, and say, “I can’t tell you, my dear. You are too young.” Certainly, oh, most certainly, men of all ages would put me down as a designing minx! In vain industry, self-sacrifice and generosity—that young face, that bright youthful colouring would nullify all my efforts.

It was true—it was true! I looked, as Aunt Eliza had pointed out, a dozen years too young for the part. People would stare, people would talk, people would advise me to go back and live with my aunts, and wait ten years.

In a frenzy of impatience I seized the two long plaits, and twisted them now this way, now that. Astonishing the difference which hair-dressing can make! I have read of a heroine who passed successfully as her own twin sister by the simple device of plainly brushed hair and puritanical garments, the sister, of course, sporting marcelle waves and Parisian costumes. I dipped my brush in the water-jug and dragged back my own hair in a plastered mass, clamping the plaits to my head. I looked like a Dutch doll! Clean and chubby, and, alas! considerably younger than before. I parted it in the middle, and glued it over my ears. I looked like a naughty schoolgirl, who had had her hair dressed by a maiden aunt. I piled the plaits in a coronet over my forehead; I looked like a portrait of a Norwegian damsel dressed for her bridal. I threw down the brush in disgust, and stamped with impatience.

No use! Not a bit of use! All the hair-dressing in the world could not make me look old, or even approximately middle-aged. The ugliest flannel blouse that was ever made, while it would certainly be hideously unbecoming, could not add one year, let alone ten, to my age.

It was a bitter blow. All that morning I went about pondering the desperate question of how to look old. Aunt Emmeline had prophesied that I should know soon enough, “with those beaked features,” but I wanted to know now, not in any permanent, disagreeable fashion, but as a kind of sleight-of-hand trick, by which I could be mature one day and the next in blooming youth. Elderly in London, young at Pastimes. A douce, unremarkable “body” in the basement flat, and in Surrey a lady of leisure, rings on her fingers and bells on her toes!

Aunt Eliza would have cried once more, “Oh, don’t be silly!” if I had confronted her with such a problem. I said, “Don’t be silly!” to myself many times over in the course of that day, but I persisted in being silly all the same. At the back of my mind lingered the conviction that if I went on thinking long enough a solution would come.

How could I manage to look old? I asked the question of myself every hour of the next few days. I asked it of everyone I met, and was fatuously assured that I demanded the impossible; at long last I asked it of old Bridget, whose sound common sense had come to my rescue times and again.

“Sure, my dear, your husband will manage that for you!” was Bridget’s instant solution.

“Not the husband I shall choose!” I replied with easy assurance.

A moment’s pause was devoted to the problematical Prince Charming whose mission it would be to keep me young, then I asked tentatively:—

“What shall I look like, Bridget, when I am old?”

Bridget folded her arms and regarded me with a critical stare.

“Your hair will turn grey, and them fine straight brows of yours will grow thin, or maybe fall out altogether, and leave you with none. An’ you’ll wear spectacles, and have lines round your eyes. But it’s neither the grey hairs nor the specs that spoils the looks. It’s not them that’s the worst!”

I stared at her open-mouthed, trembling between shrinking and curiosity.

“It’s the shape of the cheeks!” said Bridget darkly. “Yourself now, and the ladies of your age, it’s pretty, slim bits of faces you have, going to a peak at the chin. When you’re old, it runs to squares and doubles. Look to your cheeks, miss, if you wants to keep young!” She unfolded her arms, stretched them at full length, and comfortably folded them again. Her broad chest heaved in a cackle of amused reminiscence.

“Sure, d’ye reminder Miss Kathleen when she play-acted the ould lady, the last Christmas party?”

Poor old Bridget! She got the surprise of her life in my reception of that simple question. Jumping out of my chair, dancing round, whooping and hurraying “like a daft thing,” as she afterwards described my movements. Then to find herself at one moment enthusiastically patted on the back, and at the next to be pushed towards the door, and exhorted to hurry!—hurry!—to mount to the attic, and bring down the old tin