She was pleased at that, but she struggled for a more serious recognition of her capabilities, too. “It’s not only pocket-money. I can really get a living from my writing, though I’m always at home with my mother. But I could be independent to-morrow if I liked.” “Oh, come now!” The words might have expressed remonstrance, incredulity, astonishment. “The advance royalty--that’s the money the publishers give me in advance--on my last book was two hundred pounds,” she said calmly. She had never gone away to work, never had to pay for her food or for a roof over her head, never tried her strength or the strength of her resources in the struggle for livelihood amongst unsupported women. Two hundred pounds for her year’s work was a large sum, with no calls upon it. Willoughby repeated after her: “Two hundred pounds! I say! You don’t expect me to believe you get that just for writing a story?” “Yes.” She was uncertain of the reason for his disbelief, and even whether he really did disbelieve her. “But was it a serious book, or just a novel?” He really sounded perplexed. “Oh, ‘just a novel’!” she said bitterly. “Good Lord! How many do you write in a year?” “That last one took me over a year. My first one I worked at, on and off, for five years.” “I suppose it doesn’t matter to you, taking your time, but it would be quite worth scribbling them off one after the other, if you can get money like that without working for it, so to speak,” said Hal Willoughby. He fingered his thick, fair moustache, and Adela looked up at him furtively in the moonlight. He was very big and good-looking; and when she danced with him, and met his full, bold gaze, Adela could almost forget about such conversations between them as the present one. Besides, he had not always talked like this. Once he had pretended not to know what colour her eyes were, and once he had told her about his life in India. She wished intensely that the conversation now would shift to some such topic. The moonlight and the heavy scent of the syringa seemed to mock her. “And what are your books about?” said Willoughby laboriously. “Love, I suppose?” He broke into a roar of laughter. “Does the heroine fall fainting into the hero’s arms in the last chapter, eh? That’s the style, isn’t it?” Adela stood up, trembling. “I think I want to go in now, please. The--the dance must be finished now.” He stood up also. “But I say! What’s the matter? You’re not ratty, are you?” He pulled unceremoniously at the prim velvet ribbons that hung from her waist. “Sit down again. Don’t you know I’m going away to-morrow? You might be a little bit nice to me, I do think.” “I didn’t know you wanted me to be,” she said swiftly. He laughed, and pulled her on to the bench again. Adela’s mother, with whom she always lived, had told her very often that men never really respected a woman who let them “take liberties.” Adela, never before put to the test, recklessly determined to disregard the parental axiom.