This was what helped me to that stiffness of spine, that Suffragette-like defiance of eye, and that unnatural clearness of diction which I felt myself assuming at one o’clock in the dressing-room as I announced, “I think it is at the Savoy that I am lunching with Mr. Waters to-day.” For I flung it down like a gauntlet. It was Miss Robinson who accepted the challenge with a particularly icy “Gracious!” The two others stared hard; while Miss Robinson, clearing her throat, fixed her shrewd eyes on me and plucked up courage to add what Smithie and Miss Holt were probably thinking. “Miss Trant! D’you mind me asking you if you’re going out with Mr. Waters because you like it, or because you can’t say ‘No’?” “Who would say ‘No’”—I fenced flippantly—“to a Savoy lunch?” “Some girls might,” murmured Miss Smith. Miss Robinson, answering not my words, but my tone, said, “Of course it’s none of my business—except that while you’re here you are supposed to be one of us. And I can’t say——” “Can’t say what?” I demanded, meeting her shrewd eyes squarely with my defiant ones. She flushed a little, and I was glad. But she stuck to her guns. “I can’t say that it looks any too well! A man in his position, and a girl in yours! Under those circumstances——” “You know nothing,” I said, deliberately and coldly, “about the circumstances.” Still more deliberately I tossed a glance into the inevitably soap-splashed mirror at the set of my hat. Then, without another word, I turned out of the open door and walked to the lift, humming a tune just loud enough for them all to hear. This time I didn’t trouble to glance up from the entrance, where my employer joined me, to the landing window. The girls would not be watching me off this time. * * * * * “Savoy!” The taxi-driver touched his peaked cap with a quite unusual suggestion of deference. I suppose he had found Savoy luncheon-escorts were generous tippers. I wondered if he had ever before driven a couple in quite these “circumstances.” Miss Robinson’s sincerely-meant reproof, “_It doesn’t look any too well! A girl in your position. A man in his!_” echoed in my ears louder than the whirring of the wheels and the noise of the traffic. It rankled poisonously throughout the drive, throughout the whole luncheon. We lunched outside, which Mr. Waters said laconically would be “more amusing for me than inside.” Personally I felt that nothing would ever amuse me less than this duty-lunch with its hateful obbligato-accompaniment of what those other girls were thinking, what they were saying. Oh, it’s all very well to quote that French axiom—