Day followed on day and Catherine grew. As she walked by the sides of brick walls her eye ran along the lines of mortar tapering into the distance. Even she noticed how she kept rising brick by brick until the mortar-line that her eye followed was somewhere between four and five feet high. She left off her very childish habits, such as walking on the cracks of the pavements.... She ceased to ask absurd unanswerable questions about trams and buses; she stopped lamenting if she failed to secure a window-seat in the train. But she was still a child. She still sang out after old father Jopson. She discovered that the second line of the hymn was not “Nighties drawing nigh,” as she had naturally supposed, but “Night is drawing nigh.” The discovery was a disappointment. She began to read. She read _Alice in Wonderland_ and _The Walrus and the Carpenter_. She even began to write. At Albany House she wrote in large copybook style: “Honesty is the best policy.” Once also she wrote on the back of a birthday card: “Dear Auntie Ethel, Many Happy Returns of the Day, from Your Affectionate Niece, Catherine.” ... And on the wooden fence at the end of the road she wrote in chalk: “Freddy McKellar is a Soppy Fool.” She began to do naughty things. She played in the game of “last across”; she hung on to the backs of passing motor-lorries. She danced in the streets to the tune of itinerant barrel-organs. Something may here be said of her appearance. She had hair of a rich and fiery red, and eyes of a fierce compound of brown and green. In the summer-time her face was freckles all over. She was not good-looking, and few people would have called her even pretty. But she was known everywhere in the vicinity of Kitchener Road as “Cathie Weston, that red-haired girl.” § 6 In the Co-operative Stores the shopman kept her waiting out of her turn. He had seen her sticking “transfers” on his shop-window and he did not like her. The Bockley and Upton Rising Friendly Co-operative and Industrial Society was an imposing institution with patent bacon-slicers and profuse calendar-distributing habits. Behind the polished mahogany counter the shopman fluttered about, all sleek and dapper, and in front stood Catherine, tired and impatient. There was a large co-operative almanac on the wall, and this she used to peruse diligently, supplementing therefrom the meagre knowledge of English history given her at Albany House. The almanac introduced a sort of miscellaneous historical calendar--for example: September 22nd. Battle of Zutphen, 1586. September 23rd. Massacres in Paris, 1789. Then in great staring red letters: September 24th. Opening of the Head Office of the Bockley and Upton Rising Friendly Co-operative and Industrial Society by Lord Fitzroy, 1903. With absolutely no sense of historical perspective at all, Catherine was quite prepared to believe that the last of these was the most prominent because it was also the most important.