to us two bachelor girls.

How long should I be able to afford to share it?

[21]

[21]

CHAPTER III THINKING IT OVER——

THINKING IT OVER——

I always expect to be in long before Cicely Harradine, the girl who shares the place with me. We first made friends in a ten-shillings-a-week bedroom at the Twentieth Century Club, when she was left much as I was, a waif without any friends that counted, and with just a tiny lump of capital. This she used up in paying her fees at the Slade School of Art, where she’d gone, in her innocence, with a view to taking up fashion-drawing. They all used to say at home that she’d “a gift” for sketching, and she’d heard—we’ve all heard!—that there are fortunes to be made out of fashion-plates. Only she hadn’t realized that for a girl of her sort, lovely and good-hearted and “gormless,” there’s only one way of getting a fortune; namely, by marrying it. And how can you marry, as she often says plaintively, if you never even see any “possible” men? All the people she seems to see nowadays—besides Slade students—are the gorgeous Jewesses who deal[22] at the “studio” where Cicely’s one real “gift” (that of a tall, willowy figure) is now turned to advantage by showing off the evening-frocks and opera-wraps of Madame Chérisette, in Bond Street, in the show-rooms she can seldom leave until well after seven o’clock.

[22]

So to-day I was astonished to find the second-hand, cretonne-covered couch in our sitting-room already occupied by what looked like a bundle of rugs, dishevelled red curls, and arnica bandages, whence proceeded the sound of dismal sobs.

“Cicely!” I cried, alarmed. “You back already? Why, what’s happened?”

“Oh, my dear, such an awful catastrophe!” wailed the voice of Cicely, while the willowy figure twisted itself into sitting up against our cheap flock cushions. “What do you think? When I went out to lunch this morning I managed to slip on a bit of banana-skin that some perfect pig had flung down at the 

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