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In the morning Sally had a heavy head as the result of her unusual entertainment, and she awoke to a sense of disillusion. The room was the same ugly room, but her dreams had fled. So must Cinderella have felt upon awaking after her first ball. The colours had faded; the rapturous consciousness of power had died in the night. Sally felt a little girl once more, younger and more impotent than she had been for months. The walk to Regent Street restored her. She once again imagined herself into the talk with Gaga; she stressed his offer of friendship and his plea for help. It would be all right; it was all right. She had made no mistake. Only, she was not as carelessly happy as she had been in the first realisation. She had recognised that the battle was not yet won, and that much had still to be done before she could claim the victory which last night had seemed in her hands. At all events, hatred of her little ugly home was undiminished. She felt horror of it.

Arrived at the work room, Sally saw it in a new light. She was permanently changed. The girls had become nothing; even Miss Summers had become a very good sort of woman, but subtly inferior. There was not one of the girls who could help Gaga as she was going to do; not one of them who could earn the advantages which Sally was going to reap. She settled almost with impatience to work which last night had been left unfinished. All the time that she was engaged upon it her thoughts were with other prospects, other deliberate intentions. She was restless and uneasy—first of all until she had seen Gaga and gauged her effect upon him in the morning's grey, finally because another secret conflict was going on beneath her attention. She did not understand what she was feeling, and this made her the more easily exasperated when cotton knotted or a sudden noise made her head throb. "I'm out of sorts," she thought. She tried to laugh in saying: "The morning after the night before." Her malaise was something more than that.

Gaga came into the room during the morning, haggard and anxious-looking. The lines in his pallid face were emphasised; his eyes had a faintly yellowish tinge like the white of a stale egg. In shooting her first lightning observation of him Sally clicked "Bilious." There was a little smile between them, and Gaga went out of the room again, languid and indifferent to everything that was occurring round him. Sally had an impulse to find some reason for going into his room, but she did not dare to go. She sewed busily. Perhaps she would see him later. She peeped into the room at lunch-time, but he was not there, and in the afternoon she heard from Miss Summers that he was unwell, and would not be coming back that day. She heard the news with relief; but also with sudden fright. If—if—if he should have become afraid of her! If he should have repented! If, instead of allowing her to help and to benefit, Gaga should become her enemy! Men were so strange in the way they behaved to girls—so suspicious and funny and brusque—that anything might have happened in Gaga's mind. Sally recollected herself. This mood was a bad mood; any loss of self-confidence was with her a sign of temporary ill-health. She magnificently recovered her natural conceitedness. She was Sally.

In the evening she went home early, to her mother's interest and pleasure; but there was nothing to do at home and the atmosphere was insufferable. It drove her forth, and she walked in the twilight, longing for Toby to be with her. He would not have understood all she was thinking—he would angrily have hated most of it—but his company would have distracted her mind and occupied her attention. She thought of Toby at sea on this beautiful evening, with the stars pale in an opal sky; and she could see him standing upon the deck of the "Florence Drake" in his blue jersey without a hat, with the breeze playing on his crisp hair and his brown face. A yearning for Toby filled her. Tears started to her eyes. She loved him, she felt, more than she had ever done: she needed him with her, not to understand her, but to brace her with the support of his strong arms. Sally dried her eyes and blew her nose. "Here!" she said to herself. "Stop it! I'm getting soppy!"

She presently passed the ugly building of a Board School, not the one which she had attended, but one nearer her present home. Outside it, and within the railings protecting the asphalted playground from the footpath, was a notice-board upon which was pasted a bill advertising the evening classes which would be held there during the Autumn Session. Idly, Sally stopped to read down the list of subjects—and the first that caught her eye, of course, was dressmaking. She gave a sniff. Funny lot of girls would go to that. Girls trying to do Miss Jubb out of a job. Sally glimpsed their efforts. She had seen girls in dresses which they had made themselves. Poor mites! she thought. Paper patterns for somebody twice their size, and bad calculations of the necessary reductions. Tape-measures round their own waists, and twisted two or three times at the back, which they could not see. Blunt scissors, clumsy hands, bad material.... It was a nightmare to Sally. She did not go far enough to imagine the despairs, the aching hands, the tears, which attended the realisation of an evening's botch. She was not really a very humane person. She had both too much imagination for that infirmity of the will, and not enough. She passed from dressmaking to the other subjects.

There was one that made her jump, so much did it seem to be named there for her own especial benefit. It was "Book-keeping." Sally was taken aback. She scanned the details. Two lessons a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, at eight o'clock. A disdain filled her. She would not be as the other girls. She would learn book-keeping. She would understand figures. Then she could help Gaga with precisely that work which he confessed himself unable to do. Sally memorised the details. It was enough; she was ready for anything. As the following Monday was the first night of the session she would be present then.

And so, her ambition mounting once more to arrogance, Sally returned to bed and her mother, and bread and margarine, and the dingy room on the second-floor-back.