"I propose, as it is the regulation thing to do, to chuck our 'day' until next autumn." "Julia!" Maudie was so taken back that she was surprised into giving her sister her full name, the diminutive thereof not seeming to express sufficiently what was in her mind. "You may say 'Julia,' but my head is screwed on the right way. I suppose I shall never get mother and the dad to move away from Ye Dene." "From the Park?" "Yes. We have got too much of the Park about us. It's all Park. Dad is very well off, mother has money of her own--why shouldn't we go and live in Kensington? We could shunt all these Park people, excepting just the best--those we have been the most intimate with--and get into a real good set. What's the use of having a well-off father and a very distinguished mother if we hide our light under a bushel in such a place as this?" "The people that live here are just as good as we are." "Well, perhaps they are, and perhaps they're not, Maudie," Julia retorted sharply. "If we satisfy them, I'm quite sure they don't satisfy me. I don't believe myself in sitting on the bottom rung of the ladder when you can easily and comfortably climb up to the top." "But shall we ever get to the top?" "No, never; that means strawberry leaves. But there are a dozen reasons for getting out of Ye Dene. In the first place, the dad has to get up at an ungodly hour in the morning so as to get to his office at the usual time. Mother spends half her life in the train, and you know neither of them are as young as they were. I went up to town with mother yesterday, and I'm sure it was pitiful to see her dragging herself up those steep station stairs. She ought to be able to get into a cab and go to her meetings, a woman of her substance." "Perhaps. But we shall never get a house like this--never, never, Ju. We shall have to do without our own sitting-room, or else have a little box somewhere at the back of the house, looking into a yard. We shall have to have clean curtains every fortnight like the Brookeses. We shall have to sleep up on the third or fourth story--and it will all be horrid, horrid, horrid!" "Not at all. My dear, there are plenty of houses quite as good as this in Kensington." "They'll be three times the rent." "Not a bit of it, not the least bit of it. Look at that house where the Ponsonby-Piggots live; garden--charming garden, tea-house at the end, greenhouse, shrubs, lawn, three lovely sitting-rooms on the entrance floor, and only two stories above. We don't want a castle with eight or nine bedrooms--what should we do with them? _Why, the Ponsonby-Piggots keep fowls!_" "Oh, well, I suppose you'll have your own way. You had better talk to mother about it."