The reason, then, why Lola had turned the whole force of her concentration upon entering the house in Dover Street as lady’s maid becomes clear. Here, suddenly, was her chance. Once in this house, in attendance upon Lady Feo, it would be possible for her not only to learn the manners and the language of the only women who were known to Fallaray, but eventually, with luck and strategy, to exercise her gift, as she called it, upon Fallaray himself. What did she care whether, as her aunt had said, she went down a peg in the social scale by becoming a lady’s maid? She would willingly become a crossing sweeper or a beggar girl. If it were true that Fallaray never went into the side of the house that was occupied by his wife, then she would eventually, when she felt that her apprenticeship had been served, slip into the other side. Like all women she had cunning and like very few courage. Opportunity comes to those who make it and she was ready and eager to undergo any humiliation to try herself, so to speak, on Fallaray. Ernest Treadwell loved her and would, she knew, die for her willingly. There was the hero stuff in him. Other boys, too numerous to mention, would go through fire and water for her kisses. Life was punctuated with turned heads, sudden flashes of eye and everyday attempts to win her favor. Once in that house in Dover Street—— VII Saturday came. Ernest Treadwell arrived early, his face shining with Windsor soap. He had bought a spring tie at Hope Brothers, the name and the season going well with his mood. It was a ghastly affair,—yellow with blobs of red. It was indeed much more suited to Mr. Prouty, the butcher. It illustrated something at which he frequently looked,—animal blood on a sawdust floor. But Ernest Treadwell was one of those men who could always be persuaded into wearing anything that was offered to him. He was a dreamer, the stuff that poets are made of, impractical, embarrassed. He went about with his young and incoherent brain seething with the tail end of big thoughts. If he had not been watched by a fond mother, he would probably have left the house with his trousers around his neck and his legs thrust through the sleeves of his coat. He walked up and down the street for half an hour with his cap on the back of his head and a tuft of hair sticking out in front of it,—an earnest, ungainly, intelligent, heroic person who might one day become a second Wells and write a Joan and Peter about the children of Joan and Peter.