Norah's meditations were suddenly interrupted by the entrance of her sister Dorothy, a dark, pleasant, practical girl of sixteen, who was already so much interested in household affairs that Norah feared her indifference to dress was due to something more than immaturity, was indeed the outcome of an ineradicable propensity toward dowdiness. "I wish you wouldn't burst into rooms like that," she protested, crossly. But Dorothy only hummed round the room in search of what she was looking for, and paid no more attention to her elder sister than a bee would have done. "And if you've got to come up-stairs to our room when you're in the middle of cooking," Norah went on, "you might at least wipe your hands and your arms first. You're covering everything with flour," she grumbled. "That's better than covering it with powder," retorted Dorothy. "What a silly remark!" "Is it, my dear? Sorry the cap fits so well." Norah turned away from this obtrusive sister in disdain, asking herself for perhaps the thousandth time what purpose in life she was possibly intended to serve. Apart from the fact that she was dark and distinctly not even good-looking, there seemed no excuse for Dorothy's existence, and Norah made up her mind that she would not bother any more about trying to make her dress with good taste; it simply was not worth while. "Eureka!" cried Dorothy, triumphantly waving an egg-beater. "What a disgusting thing to leave in a bedroom!" Norah exclaimed. Her sister courtesied exasperatingly in the doorway for answer, and before Norah could say another word was charging down the stairs three at a time in a series of diminishing thuds. Norah turned back, with a shudder for her sister's savagery, to the contemplation of her own hair. In a revulsion against the indecency of family life she resolved firmly that, whatever the fuss, she would be engaged to Wilfred Curlew immediately, and that Wilfred himself must at all costs quickly accumulate enough money to enable her to marry him and escape from this den of sisters and brothers and parents. "If father had only one child, or perhaps two, he might be entitled to interference with our private lives; but when he's got nine, he must expect us to look after ourselves. It's bad enough now when Cecil, Agnes, Edna, and Vincent are all at school and out of the way, at any rate for some of the time, but what will it be like in a few years?" Norah shrank from the prospect of that overpopulated future for which the temporary emptiness of Lonsdale Road was no consolation, and, removing the mirror from the window-sill, she sat down at her dressing-table and devoted herself to the adjustment of the arcuated pad of mock hair that was an indispensable adjunct to the pompadour style then in vogue.