But--watch Ursula as she claims a privacy even so fleeting as an empty train compartment. Already, as the door slams on her before the platform has been well left behind, the rushing haven is intimately hers. She leans eagerly forward, hands clasped between her knees, and enjoys it--a slim girl in a rather pathetically skimpy navy-blue coat and skirt, which always associates itself with the Ursula type of flapper, a dull, fair rope of hair falling over one shoulder, staid lips, pale as apple-blossom, curved in a slight smile of triumph, brows level above her softly thoughtful eyes.... Ursula!... She is not showy, but she may claim loveliness later on. There is a delicate artistry in the cut of her head and chin and neck, and in the brave square moulding of her eyelids. Ursula.... Not a musical name! She would have liked to be called Naomi or Rosalind or Pamela.... Aunt Lavvy’s cough and rustle on the other side of the locked door--and: “I shall have to give up my room to her,” thought Ursula, “so that she shan’t tell old Fennimore tonight.” And she knew that the necessity had been stammering up in her ever since, the evening before, Hal had looked at her across the dinner-table. That was why she had slept uneasily; and why she had squatted so long motionless, and fiercely loving her solitude, in front of her first fire--her last fire. People can only be bribed by something you are sure they want. And, except Ursula, nobody at the Laburnums could imagine, in this crisis, anything that Aunt Lavvy desperately wanted. Aunt Lavvy wanted the little room next to her bedroom, for a sitting-room. She wanted to be able to say she had a suite--two rooms adjoining. She had wanted this with tranquil obduracy for several years now. And Ursula, aware of it, had taunted the locked door between, with elvish dances and curtsyings. At first the idea of bribing Aunt Lavvy with the room had occurred quite simply as an eleventh hour expedient to save Hal. But directly afterwards, Ursula saw her deed spring out in brilliantly illuminated letters, like the advertisements in Piccadilly Circus by night, as a Sacrifice. And a Sacrifice, of course--if it be big enough--would make all the difference of colour and wind and enchantment to the days following it--days that would be as though they were of running liquid gold. Ursula was tremendously excited by the prospect of Sacrifice. She had always dreamt how it would touch life with miraculous fingers, touch and transform it. Life that was hitherto all right, but only just all right, and not even vigorously wrong, humdrum and patchy and drab and lacking in power, a picture in muddy paint! Ursula held out her longing arms towards glamour.... Sacrifice! And, after it had happened, everything different! So the child made up her mind, gambling for splendour. But it meant giving up the room. Giving up--room.