Norah had just succeeded in achieving what was hitherto her most successful effort with the pompadour when she heard somebody whistling for her from the pavement; going to the window, she saw that it was her friend, Lily Haden, whom she had known and hated at school two years ago, but whom now, by one of those unaccountably abrupt changes of feminine predilection, she liked very much. The new intimacy had only lately been begotten out of a chance rencounter, and perhaps it would never have been born if Roland, her eldest brother, had not condemned Lily from the altitude of his twenty-year-old priggishness and found in Dorothy a supporter of his point of view. That the brother and sister on either side of her should be hostile to a friend of hers was enough to make Norah fond of Lily, who belonged to a type of ethereal blonde that she hoped did not compete too successfully with herself. Occasionally, at the beginning of the new friendship, Norah was assailed by doubts about this, which intensified her prejudice against blue eyes, not to mention excessive slimness and immoderate length of neck. However, though Lily was not really at all interesting, it was impossible to deny that she was something more than pretty, and when, after a few carefully observed walks, Norah discovered that the percentage of people who looked twice at herself exceeded the percentage of those who looked twice at Lily, she was almost inclined to admit that Lily was beautiful. Quite sincerely, therefore, she was able to call down that she was awfully glad to see her friend; quite honestly, too, she was able to admire her standing there on the sunny pavement below. The fine autumn weather had allowed the young women of West Kensington to prolong their summery charms with brightly tinted dresses, and in all the dull decades of their existence the houses of Lonsdale Road, even in their first lilac-scented May, had perhaps never beheld a truer picture of spring than this autumnal picture now before them of that tall, slim girl in her linen dress of powder-blue swaying gently as a fountain is swayed by the wind, and above her, framed by dingy bricks that intensified the brilliance of the subject, that other girl in a kimono tea-rose hued from many washings, herself like a tea-rose of exquisite color and form. Yet Mrs. Caffyn, when she hurried into Norah's room, could deduce no more from this rebirth of spring in autumn than a cause for the critical stares of neighbors, and begged her either to invite her friend indoors or to come away from the window. "I wanted to ask Lily to lunch," said Norah, fretfully. Mrs. Caffyn was in despair at the notion. "You have plenty of time to talk to her. It's not yet twelve o'clock," she urged, "and with the children coming home from school and having to be got off again it _is_ so difficult to manage with extra people at meals." "Everything seems difficult to manage in this house."