"They are not OUR kind," she said with her stately, rather thin grey-haired head in the air. "And though we may have come down in the world, we are still Lovelaces, as we were in the old days when your dear grandfather had Lovelace Court. Even if we do seem to have dropped out of OUR world, we need not associate with any other. Better _no_ society than the wrong society." So, since "our" world takes no further notice of us, we have no society at all. I can't _tell_ you how frightfully, increasingly, indescribably dull and lonely it all is! I simply long for somebody fresh of my own age to talk to. And I see so many of them about here! "It's like starving in the midst of plenty," I said to myself this evening as I was watering the pinks in the side borders. The girls at No. 46, to the right of our garden, were shrieking with laughter together on their lawn over some family joke or other--I listened enviously to their merriment. I wondered which of them was getting teased, and whether it was the one with my own name, Beatrice--I know some of them by name as well as I know them by sight, the pretty, good-humoured-looking girls who live in this road, the cheery young men! And yet, in all these years, I've never been allowed to have a neighbour or an acquaintance. I've never exchanged a single---- "Good evening!" said a pleasant, man's voice into the midst of my reverie. Startled, I glanced up. The voice came over the palings between our garden and that of No. 44. Through the green trellis that my aunt had had set up over the palings ("so that we should be more private") I beheld a gleam of white flannel-clad shoulders and of smooth, fair hair. It was the young man who's lately come to live next door. I've always thought he looked rather nice, and rather as if he would like to say good morning or something whenever I've met him going by. I suppose I ought not to have noticed even that? And, of course, according to my upbringing, I ought certainly not to have noticed him now. I ought to have fixed a silent, Medusa-like glare upon the trellis. I ought then to have taken my battered little green watering-can to fill it for the fourteenth time at the scullery-tap. Then I ought to have begun watering the Shirley poppies on the other side of the garden. But how often the way one's been brought up contradicts what one feels like doing! And alas! How very often the second factor wins the day! It won the evening, that time. I said: "Good evening." And I thought that would be the end of it, but no. The frank and boyish voice (quite as nice a voice as my soldier-brother Reggie's, far away in India!) took up quite quickly and eagerly: "Er--I say, isn't it rather a long job watering the garden that way?" It was, of course. But we couldn't afford a hose. Why, they cost about thirty shillings.