“Oh,” said Elsie indifferently, stretching herself. III For a little while after Norman Roberts had gone away, Elsie was bored. She received a letter from him, reproaching her for not having been downstairs on the morning of his departure, and giving her an address in Liverpool. He begged her to write to him, and the letter ended with half a dozen pen-and-ink crosses. “_That’s for you, Elsie._” Elsie, who hated writing, collected with some difficulty a pen, ink, and a coloured picture postcard of the Houses of Parliament. “Thanks for yours ever so much,” she wrote. “I expect you’re having a fine old time in Liverpool. All here send kind remembrances.” Then, because she could not think what else to put, she filled in the remaining space on the card with two large crosses. “From your’s sincerely, Elsie.” Roberts, after an interval, wrote once more, and this letter Elsie did not answer at all. She was out nearly every evening, walking, or lounging round the nearest public park, with Irene Tidmarsh, Johnnie and Arthur Osborne, and Stanley Begg. Arthur Osborne was nominally Irene’s “friend,” but he, as well as Johnnie and Stanley, always wanted to walk with Elsie, or to sit next her at the cinema, and their preference elated her, although the eldest of the three, Arthur, was only twenty, and not one of them was earning more than from fifteen to twenty shillings a week. At last Irene and Elsie quarrelled about Arthur, and Irene, furious, went to Mrs. Palmer. “It’s no more than my duty, Mrs. Palmer,” she virtuously declared, “to let you know the way Elsie goes on. The fellows may laugh and all that, but they don’t like it, not really. I know my boy doesn’t, for one.” Mrs. Palmer, on different grounds, was quite as angry as Irene. She worked herself up, rehearsing to Geraldine all that Irene had said, and a great deal that she alleged herself to have replied, and she summoned her two unmarried sisters, Aunt Ada and Aunt Gertie Cookson, to No. 15. “What I want,” she explained, “is to give the gurl a _fright_. I’m not going to have her making herself cheap with young rag-tag-and-bobtail like those Osborne boys. Why, a pretty gurl like Elsie could get married, as easily as not, to a fellow with money. Nice enough people come to this house, I’m sure. It’s on account of the gurls, simply, that I’ve always been so particular about references and all. I’m sure many’s the time I could have had the house full but for not liking the looks of one or two that were ready to pay anything for a front bedroom. But I’ve always said to myself, ‘No,’ I’ve said, ‘a mother’s first duty is to her children,’ I’ve said, especially being in the position of father and mother both, as you might say.” “I’m sure you’ve always been a wonderful mother, Edie,” said Aunt Ada. “Well,” Mrs. Palmer conceded, mollified.