For the first two months,--due possibly to some default on her part in filling up and sending in the necessary but bewildering papers,--or it might be to the general muddle at Head-Quarters--she received no money at all. So she kept steadily on with her own work, and having only herself to keep, got along very nicely, meanwhile never ceasing to push her claims with all her powers, and few were better equipped in that way. And Mrs Dare was kept fully informed of everything with racy comments on all and sundry. Then at last, to Mrs. Skirrow’s great satisfaction, the matter was arranged, and by some extraordinary method of calculation, promoted without doubt by herself and argued with characteristic vehemence and possibly just a trifle of exaggeration here and there, her money began to come in. She received nearly ten pounds of arrears in a lump sum, and was to get twenty-three shillings a week. She had never had ten pounds all at once in her life before, nor an assured income of over a pound a week without needing to lift her hand. And, strange to say--yet not so very strange, seeing that she was Mrs Skirrow,--she did not lose her head and go on the ramp as some she knew had done. In the first place she bought herself a new dress and coat and hat, such as she had vainly imagined herself in, any time this ten years, and fancied herself exceedingly in them. The choosing and buying of that dress and coat and hat, the going from shop to shop and from window to window, comparing styles and prices, with the delicious knowledge that the money was in her pocket and she was in a position to pick and choose to her heart’s content, was in itself one of the greatest treats she had ever known, and she spread it over quite a considerable period. And when she turned up one night in her new rig-out, to explain to Mrs Dare that she would not be able to come to her next week as she was going to the seaside, Mrs Dare did not at first recognise her. When she did she complimented her on her taste and good sense in taking a holiday and hoped she would come back all the better for it. “I will that. You bet your life, mum! Fust reel holiday I’ve had for twenty years an’ I’m going to enjoy it. Seaside and decently dressed--that’s my idee of a reel holiday. It’s not some folk’s though. There’s me neighbour, Mrs Clemmens, now. She had no money for a while, same as meself. Then she got twenty pound all in one lump. She’s got a heap o’ boys at the war. And what did she do with it? She gathered all her old cronies--an’ a fine hot lot some of ’em are, I can tell you, mum!--and she took ’em all up to London, and fed ’em, and drank ’em, and music-halled ’em, till they was all blind and th’ hull lot of ’em was run in at last, and in the mornin’ she hadn’t enough left to pay the fines. A fair scandal, I calls it!”