"I've learned a lot from the Ponsonby-Piggots," Julia went on. "They don't just trust to tea and cakes and cigarettes, and a song or two, to make them somebody. Each of those three plain girls--and _that's_ rather paying them a compliment--has got some special line of her own. Gwenny is engaged to the ugliest man in London, and she makes a parade of having his presentment everywhere--statuettes, photographs, pastels, miniatures, everything you can think of--to bring the man into prominence. And he hasn't got twopence; and though he's a gentleman, they probably won't be able to marry for the next ten years. Theo collects Napoleon relics. Didn't you notice that the end of their sitting-room is devoted to Napoleon?" "Yes, I did, but I didn't know why," said Maudie in rather a wondering tone. "Well, that's why. And Stella, the little one with the curley red hair, she collects half-a-dozen things--postcards, autographs, souvenir teaspoons, and old lustre ware. These girls only have an allowance of forty pounds a year for their dresses--each, I mean," she added hurriedly. "And if they want more they make it." "But how?" "Oh, in various ways. Gwenny, I believe, is secretary to a big doctor up in town. She only has to attend from ten till five, and she gets a rousing good salary, and she's putting it all away towards house furnishing. Then Theo, she does a bit of journalism, and Stella, well, she's the most original of all. She's a regular little Jew." "How do you mean--regular little Jew?" "Oh, she's always chopping and changing among her collections. She made a hundred and twenty pounds last year in selling things at a thoroughly good profit that she had picked up for nothing. If her mother would let her, she'd go into a flat with Theo and open a regular business. But Mrs. Ponsonby-Piggot says that the girls have plenty of money for their needs, and always will have." "Well, if so, why should they? You wouldn't like to open a shop?" "I'd do anything rather than stick in the mud," said Julia, "anything in the wide world." "Stick in the mud!" echoed Maudie. "And this is all that has come of mother's higher education!" "Well, mother higher-educated herself. She made a huge mistake, and nobody knows it better than mother. She is up in all sorts of learned and abstruse subjects that she has never been able to turn to account in any shape or form, and the ordinary things that women ought to know she is perfectly ignorant of. Fancy setting mother to make a pie!" "Fancy setting _you_ to make a pie," retorted Maudie. "Oh, well, I've been thinking it wouldn't be half a bad idea if we were to enter at the Park Polytechnic and take a course of dressmaking, another of millinery, another of cooking, and, for the matter of that, we might take a fourth at housekeeping." "How should we get it all in?"