On Saturday mornings there was a children’s matinée, and that was nothing but pandemonium let loose. Screams, hooting, cheers, whistlings, yells and cries of all kinds.... On Saturday evenings the audience was select, save in the front seats near the piano. In the pale glare of the film all faces were white and tense. The flutter of the cinematograph went on, hour after hour. The piano tinkled feebly through the haze of cigarette smoke. Here and there the beam of an electric torch pierced the gloom like a searchlight. The sudden lighting of a match was like a pause of semi-consciousness in the middle of a dream.... And at eleven, when bedroom lights were blinking in all the residential roads of Upton Rising, Catherine passed out into the cool night air. Her fingers were tired; sometimes her head was aching. To pass along the Ridgeway now did not always mean thinking of things that had happened there.... § 2 For three months she played the piano at the Upton Rising Royal Cinema; then she applied for and was appointed to a similar position at the Victoria Theatre, Bockley. The salary was better and the hours were not so arduous.... And yet she was becoming strangely restless and dissatisfied. All through her life she had had a craving for incident, for excitements, for things to happen to her. The feeling that she was doing something almost epically magnificent in living on her own whilst not yet out of her teens gave her an enthusiasm which made bearable the dull monotony of life in Gifford Road. It was this enthusiasm which enabled her joyously to do domestic things such as making her bed every morning, darning stockings, cleaning boots, etc., things that normally she loathed. For the first few months of her independence everything was transfigured by the drama of her position. The thought would occur to her constantly in trams and omnibuses when she noticed someone looking at her: “How little you know of me by looking at me! You cannot see into my mind and know how firm and inflexible I am. You don’t know what a big thing I am doing.” Reaction came. It interested Catherine to picture various meetings with her father and to invent conversations between them in which she should be unquestionably the winner. The ideal dialogue, she had decided after much reflection, would be: HER FATHER (_stopping her in the street_). Catherine! SHE (_haughtily_). I beg your pardon! HER FATHER (_tearfully_). Oh, don’t be so cruel, Cathie--why don’t you come back? SHE. I am not aware that I am being cruel. HER FATHER. You are being horribly cruel (_passionately_). Oh, Cathie, Cathie, come back! I give in about your going out to work, I give in about anything you like, only do come back, do, do come! SHE (_coldly_). Please don’t make a scene.... I am perfectly comfortable where I am and have no desire to make any alteration in my arrangements.