Elsie deliberated. She was not usually communicative about her own affairs, but the notice of her employer had gratified her vanity, and she very much desired to boast of it to someone. Irene, at least, would be safe, and she sometimes offered shrewd pieces of advice that were not the outcome of experience, of which, by comparison with Elsie herself, she had little, but of a natural acumen. Elsie, when the gas had been turned out, and the two girls were lying in Irene’s bed, after extracting giggling oaths of secrecy, recounted to Irene the whole story of her adventure with Mr. Williams. She represented herself as still entirely undecided as to the sincerity of his assurance that their relationship was to be purely friendly. “Rats!” was Irene’s unvarnished comment. “It isn’t very likely the old fool would have told you to get silk nighties and things unless he meant to see them himself. But I wouldn’t do it, Elsie. It’s too risky.” “Why, who’s to find out? It isn’t as if his wife was alive,” said Elsie, with a recollection of the household in Mortimer Crescent. “I don’t mean that at all. But it’s a beastly risk for you. He’s your boss, after all. Suppose he gives you the sack, once this week-end business is over? Men are like that--they get sick of a girl directly they’ve had their fun, and then they don’t want to be for ever reminded of it.” “It’s quite as likely he’d be for ever pestering me to go with him again,” Elsie declared, not at all desirous of supposing that her attractions could be provocative of such speedy satiety. “And even if he did sack me, there are plenty of other jobs going.” “You young fool! Don’t you see what I mean? Suppose he landed you with a baby?” “Oh!” Elsie was startled. Like a great many other girls of her class and upbringing, although she possessed a wide and garbled knowledge of sex, she was singularly unable to trace the links between cause and effect. “A baby,” in this connection, was to her nothing but an isolated catastrophe, that she had never particularly connected with the physical relations between a man and a girl. “It couldn’t, Ireen.” “Why not? Of course it could happen. A girl I know got caught, only luckily she had some sense, and went to one of these doctors that can stop it for you----” “Can they?” “Some can,” said the well-informed Irene. “But mind you, it’s an expensive business, and a jolly dangerous one. Why, the doctor can be had up for doing it, I believe. So don’t you go and get yourself into any mess of that sort, now.” “I should think not,” murmured Elsie. “How old did you say this fellow, this Williams, was?” “I don’t know. About forty or forty-five, or something like that. He was years older than his wife, and she wasn’t a chicken.” “And she’s dead, is she?” “Of course she is. I told you all about that ages ago.” “I know. Look here, Elsie, I’ve an idea. Why don’t you marry this fellow?” “Ireen Tidmarsh, are you dotty or what?”