Almost directly afterwards, she heard the front door slam.
No. 15 was a narrow, high house, with very steep stairs, but Elsie was used to them, although she grumbled at the number of times she went up and down them, and she and Geraldine and Mrs. Palmer all kept numerous articles of toilet and clothing in the kitchen, so as to save journeys backwards and forwards.
She now went down once more, and sitting at a corner of the newspaper-covered kitchen table, drank tea and ate bread-and-jam deliberately.
"That's the bell!"
Mrs. Palmer hoisted herself out of her chair, from which she had been reading the headlines of an illustrated daily paper, commenting on them half aloud with : " Fancy! . . . Whatever is the world coming to, is what I say. . . ."
"That'll be the Williamses, and about time too. You'll have to give me a hand upstairs with the boxes afterwards, Elsie, but I'll give 'em supper first."
She went out into the hall, and Elsie heard the sounds of anival, and her mother's voice saying : " Good evening, you've brought us some wet weather, I'm afraid. . . . You mustn't mind me joking, Mrs. Williams, it's my way. . . . Liberty Hall, you'll find this. . . ."
Elsie ran to the back kitchen, donned the pilot-cloth coat and the tam-o'-shanter, and slipped out through the side door into the wet drizzle of a cold autumn evening.
"Ooh!" She turned up the collar of the coat, and pushed her gloveless hands deep into her pockets as she hurried along the pavement. It shone wet and dark, giving blurred reflections of the lamps overhead. Every now and then a tram jerked and clanged its way along the broad suburban road.
Only a few shops were lit along the road. Most of the buildings on either side were houses that displayed a brass sign-plate on the door, or a card with " Apartments " in one of the windows. Right at the end of the street, a blur of bluish light streamed out from the Palatial Picture House.
"I thought you weren't coming," said young Roberts, reproachfully. "It's long after eight." He wore a light overcoat and he, also, had turned up his collar as a protection against the rain.
"I had to help mother, of course. And if you want to know, I ought to be there now." She laughed up at him provocatively.
"Come on in," he said, pulling her hand through his arm.
II
This was Elsie's real life.
Although quite incapable of formulating the thought to herself, she already knew instinctively that only in her relations with some man could she find self-expression.
In the course of the past two years she had gradually discovered that she possessed a power over men that other girls either did not possess at all, or in a very much lesser degree. From the exercise of unconscious magnetism, she had by imperceptible degrees passed to a breathless, intermittent exploitation of her own attractiveness.
She did not know why boys so often wished to kiss her, nor why she was sometimes followed, or spoken to, in the street, by men. At first she had thought that she must be growing prettier, but her personal preference was for dark eyes, a bright colour, and a slim, tall figure, and she honestly did not admire her own appearance. Moreover, her looks varied almost from day to day, and very often she seemed plain. She had never received any instruction in questions of sex, excepting whispered mis-information from girls at school as to the origin of babies. The signs of physical development that had come to her early were either not commented upon except in half-disgusted, half-facetious innuendo from Geraldine, or else dismissed by Mrs. Palmer curtly :
"Nice gurls don't think about those things. I'm ashamed of you, Elsie. You should try and be nice-minded, as mother's always told her gurls."
,A sort of garbled knowledge came to her after a time, knowledge that comprised the actual crude facts as to physical union between men and women, and explained in part certain violent bodily reactions to which she had been prone almost since childhood.
She had not the least idea whether any other girl in the world ever felt as she did, and was inclined to believe herself unnatural and depraved.
This thought hardly ever depressed her. She thought that to remain technically " a good girl " was all that was required of her, and admitted no further responsibility.
Geraldine and she quarrelled incessantly. Geraldine. with her poor physique and constant indispositions, was angrily jealous of Elsie's superb health and uninterrupted preoccupation with her own affairs. She had only just begun to suspect that Elsie was never without a masculine admirer, and the knowledge, when it became a certainty, would embitter the relations between them still further on Geraldine's side.
On Elsie's side there was no bitterness, only contempt and unmalicious hostility. She disliked her elder sister, but was incapable of the mental effort implied by hatred. In the same way, she disliked her mother, almost without knowing that she did so.
Her home had always been ugly, sordid, and abounding in passionless discord. Elsie's real life, which was just beginning to give her the romance and excitement for which she craved, was lived entirely outside the walls of No. 15, Hillbourne Terrace.
To-night, as she entered the hot, dark, enervating atmosphere of the cinema theatre, she thrilled in response to the contrast with the street outside. When she heard the loud, emphasised rhythm of a waltz coming from the piano beneath the screen, little shivers of joy ran through her.
A girl with a tiny electric torch indicated to them a row of seats, and Elsie pushed her way along until the two empty places at the very end of the row were reached. It added the last drop to her cup of satisfaction that she should have only the wall on one side of her. Human proximity almost always roused her to a vague curiosity and consciousness, that would have interfered with her full enjoyment of the evening.
She settled herself in the soft, comfortable seat, slipping her arms from the sleeves of her coat, and leaning back against it, Roberts dropped a small box into her lap as he sat down beside her.
"Thanks awfully," she whispered.
A film was showing, and Elsie became absorbed at once in the presentment of it, although she had no idea of the story. It came to an end very soon, and a Topical Budget was shown. Elsie was less interested, and pulled the string off her box of chocolates.
"Have one?"
"I don't mind. Thanks."
"They're awfully good," She chewed and sucked bliss-fully,
"Ooh! Look at that ship! Isn't it funny?"
"Makes you feel seasick to look at it, doesn't it?" whispered Roberts, and she giggled ecstatically.
Words appeared on the screen.
Hearts and Crowns,' featuring Lallie Carmichael."
"How lovely!" said Elsie.
The story was complicated, and as most of the characters were Russian, Elsie did not always remember whether Sergius was the villain or the lawyer, and if Olga was the name of the " vampire " or of the soubrette. But the beautiful Lallie Carmichael was the heroine, and a clean-shaven American the hero. Elsie watched them almost breathlessly, and after a time it was she herself who was leaning back in the crowded restaurant, in a very low dress, and waving an ostrich-feather fan, torn between passion and loyalty. The American hero assumed no definite personality, other than that which his creator had endowed him. The scenes that she liked best were those between the two lovers, when they were shown alone together, and the American made passionate love to the princess.
At the end of the First Part, the lights went up.
Elsie turned her shining eyes and rumpled