"May I come in a minute?" he asked in a purely business tone. There was
no hint in that tone of the fact that once she had accorded him a
supper-dance.

"Please do," said Ruth.

An agreeable flouncing swish of linen skirts as she turned to precede
him down the passage! But he ignored it. That is to say, he easily
steeled himself against it.

She led him to the large room which served as her dancing academy--the
bare-boarded place in which, a year and a half before, she had taught
his clumsy limbs the principles of grace and rhythm. She occupied the
back part of a building of which the front part was an empty shop. The
shop had been tenanted by her father, one of whose frequent bankruptcies
had happened there; after which his stock of the latest novelties in
inexpensive furniture had been seized by rapacious creditors, and Mr
Earp had migrated to Birmingham, where he was courting the Official
Receiver anew. Ruth had remained solitary and unprotected, with a
considerable amount of household goods which had been her mother's.
(Like all professional bankrupts, Mr Earp had invariably had belongings
which, as he could prove to his creditors, did not belong to him.)
Public opinion had justified Ruth in her enterprise of staying in
Bursley on her own responsibility and renting part of the building, in
order not to lose her "connection" as a dancing-mistress. Public opinion
said that "there would have been no sense in her going dangling after
her wastrel of a father."

"Quite a long time since we saw anything of each other," observed Ruth