not particularly good-looking, though he had a rather distinguished
hatchet face, with a good forehead. Suppose Herbert and Vernon and all
her other friends, were to give up being "nice" to her as soon as Connie
Bledlow appeared? Suppose she was going to be altogether cut out and put
in the background? Alice had a kind of uneasy foreboding that Herbert
Pryce would think a title "interesting."

Meanwhile Nora, having looked through an essay on "Piers Plowman," which
she was to take to her English Literature tutor on the following day,
went aimlessly upstairs and put her head into Connie's room. The old
house was panelled, and its guest-room, though small and shabby, had yet
absorbed from its oaken walls, and its outlook on the garden and St.
Cyprian's, a certain measure of the Oxford charm. The furniture was
extremely simple--a large hanging cupboard made by curtaining one of the
panelled recesses of the wall, a chest of drawers, a bed, a small
dressing-table and glass, a carpet that was the remains of one which had
originally covered the drawing-room for many years, an armchair, a
writing-table, and curtains which having once been blue had now been
dyed a serviceable though ugly dark red. In Nora's eyes it was all
comfortable and nice. She herself had insisted on having the carpet and
curtains redipped, so that they really looked almost new, and the one
mattress on the bed "made over"; she had brought up the armchair, and
she had gathered the cherry-blossoms, which stood on the mantelpiece
shining against the darkness of the walls. She had also hung above it a
photograph of Watts "Love and Death." Nora looked at the picture and the
flowers with a throb of pleasure. Alice never noticed such things.

And now what about the maid? Fancy bringing a maid! Nora's sentiments on
the subject were extremely scornful. However Connie had simply taken it
for granted, and she had been housed somehow. Nora climbed up an attic