even Joe was beginning to show his admiring surprise.

"You're making a fine little job of it," she heard him say to Amy one
night.

She caught other remarks and glances from strangers, men and women. And
Ethel now began to feel the whole vast bustling ardent town centred on
what in her high-school club, as they read Bernard Shaw, they had quite
frankly and solemnly spoken of as "Sex." All the work and the business,
the scheming and planning and rush for money, were focussed on this.
And for this she was attracting those swift admiring glances. What she
would be, what she wanted to be, what she now ardently longed to become,
grew clearer to her day by day. For the picture was there before her
eyes. Each day it grew more familiar, as at home in Amy's room she
watched her beautiful sister, a stranger no longer to her now, seated at
her dressing table good-humouredly chatting, and meanwhile revealing by
numberless deft little things she was doing the secrets of clothes and
of figure, and of cheeks and lips and eyes, with subtle hints behind it
all of the ancient magic art of Pan. She felt Amy ceaselessly bringing
her out. This gave her thrills of excitement. And looking at her
sister she asked:

"Shall I ever be like that?"

And they kept talking, talking. And through it all the same feeling was
there, the sense of this driving force of the town.

With the sturdy independence which was so deep a part of her, Ethel
strove to hold up her end of these intent conversations and show that
she had views of her own. She was no old-fashioned country girl, but