The opportunity presented itself. She obtained, at a salary of three pounds a week, the coveted secretaryship. Never mind to whom she became secretary; he is now a renowned author; and Louie was with him for just a fortnight. At the end of that time he offered to double her salary. Louie's answer was to walk immediately out of his house. She had now no job at all. The story of the pinch shall be passed over lightly. The boy did not feel it; it was she who tightened her belt. Promising herself that it was for the last time, she borrowed of Buck, and then removed to Edith Grove, taking two small rooms in the same house as Myrtle Morris, the model. But Myrtle had gone for the Christmas season into pantomime, and as Louie was out all day, and asleep when Myrtle returned at night, she saw little of her. She would have gone into pantomime too, but she was too late, and still hoped for something better. Of necessity Céleste remained with her; Céleste kept the place going with her needle. This was at the beginning of 1898. February found her again in a cash-desk, this time at Slater's. The desk had a mirrored panel in the front of it that extended from the narrow counter to the floor, and at first Louie wondered why clerks and shop-assistants put down their money, stood back from the desk, and grinned. Then one day, when somebody else was inside the box, she noticed the illusion. The head and shoulders of the girl in the cage appeared to be continued downwards by the trousers of a man. As she could not afford to throw up her job, she continued to bear the grins disdainfully. After her day's work she acquired from Céleste the art of crochet. Her mats and table-centres and borders for teacloths went in with Céleste's own work. Her improved French enabled her to pass, in April, from the cash-desk at Slater's to one at a foreign restaurant in Soho. She still lived in Edith Grove. For several weeks that summer she was again at Earls Court, but with the reopening of the theatres she obtained a place in the ladies' cloakroom at His Majesty's. One night she helped Miss Elwell, the daughter of Sir James Elwell of the Treasury, off with her cloak. She was unrecognised. She wondered how B. Minor was getting on. She was still at His Majesty's at Christmas 1898; but the New Year saw her at still another place--a Ladies' Turkish Baths, in St. James's. Buck, angry and disapproving of the whole course of her life, liked this least of all; massage somehow brought it home to him. But there was a worse shock still in store for Buck. In the spring of '99 Louie became an artist's model.