ix

The thing determined, Sally was faced with a great difficulty. She did not know how to do things. She had to find out. You couldn't make a fool of yourself and ask at a shop. She had talked to May once or twice about ... making your hair look nice ... well, dyeing it, if you wanted to know; and May could only show her advertisements clipped from the Sunday paper. She had not kept those advertisements: she had not liked the look of them. Mother wouldn't know. She must do it at once. A bold plan had come into her mind. She was near the end of her second year with Miss Jubb. She could go into the West End if only she looked nice enough. If she could do it to-night or to-morrow she could meet May Pearcey first thing on Monday morning, get her to tell Miss Jubb Sally was ill, and perhaps go after some situation during the day. What a game! But how was she to get the stuff? That was the difficulty. No, it was the easiest thing of all. Mrs. Perce! Mrs. Perce used peroxide, because she had once been a barmaid. But that meant a long time. Sally must have something quick in its action. Mrs. Perce would know. Mrs. Perce knew everything of that kind. The notion of going shopping with her mother was abandoned. She had more important things to do. She would go and see Mrs. Perce immediately after tea. Then, while old Perce was playing the piano, she would get to know everything. Sally became wildly animated. She glimpsed the future. Transformed, she would conquer. Toby would be won. She would be in the West End. A whole new vista opened before her, glittering with promise. Never had she been so excited, even when Toby first spoke to her.

Mrs. Minto wearily threw off her dingy cloak and raked the fire, so that the kettle began to boil. She looked in a lethargic way at Sally, as a cat looks at a stranger in whom it is not at all interested; and then mechanically took down the tea-caddy from the mantelpiece. As she stooped over the kettle there seemed to be cramp in all her limbs. The little bell-pull of hair was smaller than ever, and the hair itself was more grey. Her whole bearing expressed a lifeless dejection. Panting faintly as the result of her late posture, Mrs. Minto brought the teapot to the spotless table, and clumsily touched the teacups and spoons so that they jarred upon Sally's nerves. Everything her mother did now annoyed Sally. The slow motions, the awkward way in which her fingers turned to thumbs, the shortsightedness that made her unable to thread a needle or read a paper except through an old magnifying glass, the general air of debility and discouragement. Sally felt furious with her all the time—"Old fool ... old fool!" she would frantically murmur to herself; and then would fall again into despair at her own sensation of frustrate youth. She had lost love for her mother, had no pity to give in its place; and only awoke in these moments of dreadful exasperation to the sense that she was still dependent upon Mrs. Minto for her existence. During this tea-time, while her mother mutely ate bread and margarine, Sally was away in the clouds, dreaming of all that her windfall was to produce. It was to produce beauty, opportunity, happiness. So much for a pound to do! Sally was so impatient to call on Mrs. Perce that she could hardly eat anything or drink her tea.

"You are worritting and fidgetting, Sally," cried Mrs. Minto, peevishly. "Sit still, there's a good girl. I don't know what's come to my 'ead. It feels all funny inside, and if I put my hand there it's like I got a bruise. And yet I don't remember knockin' myself anywheres, and I can't understand it at all, because it's not as if I'd taken anything to disagree with me; and yet there it is, a nasty pain all inside my 'ead and a feeling as though I'd got a bruise on the outside. I was telling Mrs. ... oh, dear, what is her name?... Mrs. ... Roberson about it, and she said that's what her 'usband used to suffer from, and ... he took...."

Sally ignored the rest of the speech. Her mother rambled on; and Sally looked at the clock. She'd get to Hornsey Road about six. That would be time enough. There would be the Clancy kids playing in the doorway, so she would go straight upstairs to Mrs. Perce; and she would say....

Self-absorbed, both went mechanically on with the unappetising meal. Upstairs Toby walked once more into his own room; and then came running heavily down the stairs and past their door and then right down to the street. Sally's heart was in a flutter, and her eyes flew once again to the clock. It was so early for Toby to be going out. She would not see him, then. She would not see him, and all her excitement was gone like an exploded toy balloon. The heart was taken out of her enterprise. He was going out: he did not want her: he was finished with her. Sally could not repress the single sob that rose to her lips.

"... so I asked Mr. Flack if they'd ever kep' it, and he said no, they never had, and told me to try at Boots's, down by the Nag's Head...."

"Oh, mother," cried Sally, beside herself. "Do shut up about your head. It gives me the hump." Then, as she became aware of what she had said, she defensively proceeded. "Well, you keep on talking about it, and it doesn't do any good to talk about it. If you want to know, I'm ill myself. I've got a headache, and I've got the rats...."

"You got no call to speak to your mother that way," said Mrs. Minto. "If I'd a spoke to my mother like that, I should have got the strap. So mind that, Sally. It's not nice. I've noticed you getting very unmannerly and out of hand lately. Very rude. I don't know what to do with you, you're so rude. It's not right, and it worries me so that I can't think what I'm doing. I was talking about it the other day to Mrs. Roberson, and she says...."

"Yes, ma," said Sally, rising, and going to the door to take her hat down from the peg. "She seems to have got a lot to say. Doesn't seem to be much sense in what she says."

"Now, you're not to...." By this time Sally had one sleeve on and was feeling for the other. In a glance at her little peaked determined face, and obstinate mouth, Mrs. Minto's spirit suddenly failed. Where she had meant to be maternally peremptory she became querulous. "Wherever you going now?" she asked weakly. "Oh, you are a naughty wilful girl."

"Out," said Sally, bluntly. Unheeding the outcry that followed, she was out of the door and down the stairs before her mother could check her; and with a new ugly sense of revolt was on her way to see Mrs. Perce in a mood of reckless despair. Left alone, Mrs. Minto washed feebly up, and sighingly dried the cups and plates and rearranged them in the cupboard. Presently she sat in a limp curve over the fire, in a kind of stupor, dreaming of she knew not what. Every now and then she would give a jerk in anger at Sally's rudeness and recently uncontrollable highhandedness, which recurred to her attention whenever her thoughts touched reality. For the rest she sat motionless, until the coal-blocks subsided and the fire went black.