ON the afternoon of the fifteenth of April, Catherine sat with her hat and coat as yet unremoved in the front sitting-room of No. 5, Cubitt Lane. She had taken a drastic step, and had only just begun to realize its full significance. Her lips, tense in a manner suggestive of troubled perplexity, began to droop slowly into an attitude of poignant depression. Accustomed as she was to lofty and spacious rooms, this front sitting-room seemed ridiculously small and box-like. The wallpaper was a heavy chocolate brown with a periodic design which from a distance of a few feet looked like a succession of fat caterpillars. A heavy carved overmantel over the fireplace and a sideboard with a mirror on the opposite wall multiplied the room indefinitely into one long vista of caterpillars. Catherine sat disconsolately at a small wicker table by the window. The outlook was disappointing. On the opposite side of the road, children were converging from all directions into the entrance to the Infants’ Department of the Cubitt Lane Council School. It was that season of the year devoted to the trundling of iron hoops, and the concrete pavements on both sides of the road rang with them. Catherine had chosen No. 5, Cubitt Lane because it combined the cheapness of some of the lower-class districts with the respectability of a class several degrees higher than that to which it belonged. Cubitt Lane was a very long road leading from the slums of Bockley to the edge of the Forest, and that portion of it nearest the Forest was in the parish of Upton Rising, and comparatively plutocratic. Only near its junction with Duke Street and round about the Council Schools was it anything but an eminently high-class residential road. It was curious that, now that fame and affluence had left her, Catherine clung to “respectability” as something that she could not bear to part with. In the old days she had scorned it, regarded it as fit only for dull, prosaic and middle-aged people: now she saw it as the only social superiority she could afford. The days of her youth and irresponsibility were gone. She was a woman--no, more than that, she was a “lady.” And she must insist upon recognition of that quality in her with constant reiteration. She must live in a “respectable neighbourhood” in “respectable lodgings.” And, until such time as her arm allowed her to regain her fame and reputation as a pianist, she must find some kind of “respectable work.”