town-hall, inimical to the exotic, mistrustful of the new, tenacious of the conventions that were as cement to its masonry; a class sagacious and shrewd, nicely knowing safety from danger, and knowing, above all, its own mind, since nothing was ever admitted to that mind to which it could not immediately affix a label. This was the class to whose protection Alice Jennings had the birthright now rejected by Lydia Protheroe. She marvelled how she could have endured it for so many years. She made a gesture as she finally rejected it; the hands that had been clasping the elbows were unloosed, and the right hand tossed up in a gesture definitely histrionic, as one who tosses a feather to the wind. Her family had almost groaned when they saw it, for they recognized it as a defiance, a symbol and an enemy. She stood there, in their midst, a slim revolutionary, not visibly tremulous, and although her hair still lay in those sleek bands plastered down on her forehead, they felt that the moment was near at hand when they would cease to be sleek and would become rumpled; even curly; even puffed out; and that the snuff-coloured bombazine of her gown would become metamorphosed into some gaudy intolerable fustian. They looked at her as though they were looking their last. They uttered a preliminary caution; she smiled. Seeing her smile, they ceased the expostulations which had been wrung from them in their first dismay; they gathered themselves up in dignity and sorrow; they said that since nothing would turn her from this reckless, this unbecoming, this ... in short, this idea, and that since she was of age, as she had not scrupled to remind them, she must, they supposed, be allowed to follow her own course. But let her not expect to return to them when the consequences of her folly were heavy upon her. Let her not (it was her father who enunciated this figure of speech, shaking his finger solemnly at her), let her not hope to exchange for the glare of the lamplight the oil-lamp of the warm parlour of home. Once an outcast she should remain an outcast for ever. She had a sudden attack of panic as these impressive words boomed upon her ears. She saw herself alone in a deserted theatre, the holland covers over the stalls, the lights turned out, and the great pit of the stage yawning at her in front of the gaunt skeleton of the scenery; and simultaneously she saw the circle of her family—who were, after all, familiar, even if not particularly enlivening—seated at their snug evening tasks in the glow of that oil-lamp of which her father had reminded her. She came near to weakening; she knew that if she held out her hands to them, even now, they would receive her again into their bosom—but how they would cackle over her! they would pat her kindly; they would talk of her having come to her senses, of being once more their little Alice; and this her pride would not endure. She discovered that she could tolerate patronage even