All the men and girls in the packed tea-shop had work behind them and work in front of them. They knew where they were; they had a function on the earth. She, Lilian, had nothing, save a couple of weeks’ wages and perhaps a hundred pounds in the Post Office Savings Bank. Resentment against her father flickered up anew from its ashes in her heart. How could she occupy herself after lunch? Unthinkable for her to go to her lodging until the customary hour, unless she could pretend to be ill; and if she feigned illness the well-disposed slavey would be after her and would see through the trick at once, and it would be all over the house that something had happened to Miss Share. The afternoon was an enormous trackless expanse which had to be somehow traversed by a weary and terribly discouraged wayfarer. Her father had been in the habit of conducting his family on ceremonial visits to the public art galleries. She went to the Wallace Collection, and saw how millionaires lived in the ’seventies, and how the unchaste and lovely ladies were dressed for whom entire populations were sacrificed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thence to a cinema near the Marble Arch, and saw how virtue infallibly wins after all. When, after travelling countless leagues of time and ennui, she reached home she received a note from Mr. Pladda inviting her to the Hammersmith Palais de Danse for the following night. Mr. Pladda was the star lodger in the house--a man of forty-five, legally separated from his wife but of impeccable respectability and decorum. His illusion was that he could dance rather well. Mr. Pladda was evidently coming on. The next morning, which was very fine, Lilian spent in Hyde Park, marshalling her resources. Beyond her trifling capital she had none. Especially she had no real friends. She had unwisely cut loose from her parents’ acquaintances, and she could not run after them now that she was in misfortune. Her former colleagues? Out of the question! Gertie might prove a friend, but Gertie must begin; Lilian could not begin. Lord Mackworth? Silly idea! She still thought of Lord Mackworth romantically. He was an unattainable hero at about the same level as before in her mind, for while his debts had lowered him his advertised dissoluteness had mysteriously raised him. (Yet in these hours and days Mr. Pladda himself was not more absolutely respectable and decorous, in mind and demeanour, than Lilian.) She went to two cinemas in the afternoon, and, safe in the darkness of the second one, cried silently. But with Mr. Pladda at the Palais de Danse she was admirably cheerful, and Mr. Pladda was exceedingly proud of his companion, who added refined manners to startling beauty. She delicately praised his dancing, whereupon he ordered lemon squashes and tomato sandwiches. At the little table she told him calmly that she was leaving her present situation and taking another.