It was true. She was twenty-one, and she had a thousand pounds left her by her grandfather. She could snap her fingers at them all if she chose. She did not literally snap her fingers; she was gentle and regretful, she said she did not wish to cut herself adrift from her family, and saw no reason why they should cut themselves adrift from her. She would not bring their name into disrepute. She would trade under another name; she would cease to be Alice Jennings, she would become Lydia Protheroe. Secretly she was elated to escape from a name of whose homeliness she had always been ashamed, but this she was careful not to betray to her family; to her family she made the announcement with an air of sacrifice. Since they were humiliated by her, and by the trade she had chosen, she would go away; she would conceal her identity in a distant town. No; she shook her smooth head in answer to their protestations; what she had declared she would carry out; they should never say they had cause to blush whenever they opened a theatre programme. “Wigs by Jennings.” That should not offend their eyes. “Wigs by Protheroe,” and they could sit snugly in their stalls, being Jennings, looking Jennings; connected with the stage in any way? oh dear, no! Let them only think kindly of her in her lonely and distant—yes, distant—struggles. No doubt Miss Protheroe would find it hard at first, unfriended and unsupported; but armed with her thousand pounds she would survive the first reverses; and adversity was good for the character. Indeed, as she talked, always gentle and regretful, but perfectly obdurate, she felt her character stiffening under the test of this first adversity. The Presbyterian that was in her, as it was in all her relatives, welcomed in its austere and cheerless fashion this trial that made a demand upon her endurance. She enjoyed the self-satisfaction of the martyr. And yet, secretly, all the while, a little voice gibed at her “Hypocrite!” She knew her hypocrisy because, in spite of her affectation of martyrdom, she was rejoicing in her new isolation. She knew that she would embark on her adventure with a greater gusto since she was not to embark on it with the approval of her family. It was all very well for her to appeal to their sympathy with poor Miss Protheroe, unfriended and unsupported; the phrase sounded well, but the truth was that she wanted neither their friendship nor their support. “I want to get away from all this,” she cried suddenly and despairingly. She wanted independence; she wanted the fight. She would have been defrauded of both, by the lap of a comfortable middle-class family spread out behind her to receive her if she fell. Backed up by her family, she would have felt herself backed up by the whole of the English middle-class, cushioned, solid in the consciousness of its homogeneity and resources, an enormous family of Jennings, swarming in every town and with its place of assembly in every