Her smile soothed their feelings, and in her eyes reigned always that other Stella who lived behind her wits, a gay, serene, and friendly Stella, who did not know that she was a lady and never forgot that she was a human being.

Theoretically there is nothing but business in a business office, but practically in every smallest detail there is the pressure of personal influence. What gets done or, even more noticeably, what is left undone, is poised upon an inadmissible principle, the desire to please.

The office watched Stella, tested her, judged her, and once and for all made up its mind to please her.

Stella knew nothing at all about this probation. She only knew all about the office boy's mother, and where the girl typists spent their holidays, and when, if all went well, Mr. Belk would be able to marry his young lady. Mistakes and panic, telegrams and telephones, slipped into her hands, and were unraveled with the rapidity with which silk yields to expert fingers. She always made the stupidest clerk feel that mistakes, like the bites of a mosquito, might happen to any one even while she was making him see how to avoid them in future. She had the touch which takes the sting from small personal defeats. She always saw the person first and the defeat afterward.

Her day's work was a game of patience and skill, and she played it as she used to play chess with her father. It was a long game and sometimes it was a tiring one, but hardly a moment of it was not sheer drama; and the moment the town hall door swung behind her she forgot her municipal juggling and started the drama of play.

On Thursday afternoon she stood for a moment considering her course. There was the Underground, which was always quickest, or there was the drive above the golden summer dust on the swinging height of a motor-bus. She decided upon the second alternative, and slipped into infinity. She was cut off from duty, surrounded by strangers, unmoored from her niche in the world.

This was the moment of her day which Stella liked best; in it she could lose her own identity. She let her hands rest on her lap and her eyes on the soft green of the new-born leaves. She hung balanced on her wooden seat between earth and sky, on her way to Russian music.

The brief and tragic youth of London trees was at its loveliest. Kensington Gardens poured past her like a golden flame. The grass was as fresh as the grass of summer fields, swallows flitted over it, 

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