I always expect to be in long before Cicely Harradine, the girl who shares the place with me. We first made friends in a ten-shillings-a-week bedroom at the Twentieth Century Club, when she was left much as I was, a waif without any friends that counted, and with just a tiny lump of capital. This she used up in paying her fees at the Slade School of Art, where she’d gone, in her innocence, with a view to taking up fashion-drawing. They all used to say at home that she’d “a gift” for sketching, and she’d heard—we’ve all heard!—that there are fortunes to be made out of fashion-plates. Only she hadn’t realized that for a girl of her sort, lovely and good-hearted and “gormless,” there’s only one way of getting a fortune; namely, by marrying it. And how _can_ you marry, as she often says plaintively, if you never even _see_ any “possible” men? All the people she seems to see nowadays—besides Slade students—are the gorgeous Jewesses who deal at the “studio” where Cicely’s one real “gift” (that of a tall, willowy figure) is now turned to advantage by showing off the evening-frocks and opera-wraps of Madame Chérisette, in Bond Street, in the show-rooms she can seldom leave until well after seven o’clock. So to-day I was astonished to find the second-hand, cretonne-covered couch in our sitting-room already occupied by what looked like a bundle of rugs, dishevelled red curls, and arnica bandages, whence proceeded the sound of dismal sobs. “Cicely!” I cried, alarmed. “You back already? Why, what’s happened?” “Oh, my dear, such an _awful_ catastrophe!” wailed the voice of Cicely, while the willowy figure twisted itself into sitting up against our cheap flock cushions. “What do you think? When I went out to lunch this morning I managed to slip on a bit of banana-skin that some perfect _pig_ had flung down at the crossing—No, Tots! it _wasn’t_ those shoes I will wear, so you needn’t say that!—and I twisted my ankle and cut my head on the kerb, and I had to be brought home in a taxi, and the doctor’s been, and he says I’m to keep my foot up for a fortnight, and what—what on earth’s to become of my job?” wept Cicely. “Chérisette won’t take me on again, for there’s a girl waiting _now_ for my place! A _niece_ of somebody’s! She’ll _snap_ it up! And _what_ am I to do? Hurp, hurp!” She could only sob, and I could only stroke her pretty, incompetent fingers.