12 “Dear Mr. Greville,” she wrote in a clear bold hand.... He won’t expect me to have that kind of handwriting, like his own, but stronger. He’ll admire it on the page and then hear a man’s voice, Pater’s voice talking behind it and not like it. Me. He’d be a little afraid of it. She felt her hard self standing there as she wrote, and shifted her feet a little, raising one heel from the ground, trying to feminise her attitude; but her hat was hard against her forehead, her clothes would not flow.... “Just imagine that I am in town--I could have helped you with your shopping if I had known I was coming....” The first page was half filled. She glanced at her neighbours, a woman on one side and a man on the other, both bending over telegram forms in a careless preoccupied way--wealthy, with expensive clothes with West End lines.... Regent Street was Salviati’s. It was Liberty’s and a music shop and the shop with the chickens. But most of all it was Salviati’s. She feared the officials behind the long grating could see by the expression of her shoulders that she was a scrubby person who was breaking the rules by using one of the little compartments with its generosity of ink and pen and blotting paper, for letter writing. Someone was standing impatiently just behind her, waiting for her place. “Telle est la vie,” she concluded with a flourish, “yours sincerely,” and addressed the envelope in almost illegible scrawls. Guiltily she bought a stamp and dropped the letter with a darkening sense of guilt into the box. It fell with a little muffled plop that resounded through her as she hurried away towards Brook Street. She walked quickly, to make everything surrounding her move more quickly. London revelled and clamoured softly all round her; she strode her swiftest heightening its clamorous joy. The West End people, their clothes, their carriages and hansoms, their clean bright spring-filled houses, their restaurants and the theatres waiting for them this evening, their easy way with each other, the mysterious something behind their faces, was hers. She, too, now had a mysterious secret face--a West End life of her own.... CHAPTER VII 1 The next morning there was a letter from Bob containing a page of description of his dull afternoon at his club within half a mile of her. “Let me know, my dear girl,” it went on, “whenever you escape from your gaolers, and do not suffer the thought of old Bob’s making himself responsible for all the telegrams you may send to cloud your joyous young independence.”