Mrs. Palmer hoisted herself out of her chair, from which she had been reading the headlines of an illustrated daily paper, commenting on them half aloud with: “Fancy!... Whatever is the world coming to, is what I say....” “That’ll be the Williamses, and about time too. You’ll have to give me a hand upstairs with the boxes afterwards, Elsie, but I’ll give ’em supper first.” She went out into the hall, and Elsie heard the sounds of arrival, and her mother’s voice saying: “Good evening, you’ve brought us some wet weather, I’m afraid.... You mustn’t mind me joking, Mrs. Williams, it’s my way.... Liberty Hall, you’ll find this....” Elsie ran to the back kitchen, donned the pilot-cloth coat and the tam-o’-shanter, and slipped out through the side door into the wet drizzle of a cold autumn evening. “Ooh!” She turned up the collar of the coat, and pushed her gloveless hands deep into her pockets as she hurried along the pavement. It shone wet and dark, giving blurred reflections of the lamps overhead. Every now and then a tram jerked and clanged its way along the broad suburban road. Only a few shops were lit along the road. Most of the buildings on either side were houses that displayed a brass sign-plate on the door, or a card with “Apartments” in one of the windows. Right at the end of the street, a blur of bluish light streamed out from the Palatial Picture House. “I thought you weren’t coming,” said young Roberts, reproachfully. “It’s long after eight.” He wore a light overcoat and he, also, had turned up his collar as a protection against the rain. “I had to help mother, of course. And if you want to know, I ought to be there now.” She laughed up at him provocatively. “Come on in,” he said, pulling her hand through his arm. II This was Elsie’s real life. Although quite incapable of formulating the thought to herself, she already knew instinctively that only in her relations with some man could she find self-expression. In the course of the past two years she had gradually discovered that she possessed a power over men that other girls either did not possess at all, or in a very much lesser degree. From the exercise of unconscious magnetism, she had by imperceptible degrees passed to a breathless, intermittent exploitation of her own attractiveness.