Often perhaps a passionate resentment burned in her heart concerning
the heavy handicaps under which a woman achieves work equal to a man's;
but she had no time to lend herself to any open protest, and toiled on,
silently fighting her individual daily battle the better encouraged by
those brave women taking all the opprobrium of the warfare upon their
own shoulders, for the sake of working womanhood as a whole.

Only, of late a fresh burden had been added in the fear that Dudley was
growing to care for her sister Doris.

It was not that she grudged Doris the happiness, nor the prospect of a
home in which she and Dudley might together take care of Basil; but she
saw ahead the tragedy of the awakening, when Dudley learnt of the
shallow, selfish little heart behind Doris's charming exterior.

That he, of all people, should be drawn to such an one was only the
contradiction seen on all sides in life. Because he had that
old-fashioned distrust of the independent, self-reliant woman, he must
needs go to the opposite extreme, and let himself be drawn to one
capable of little else in the world but ornamentation. Doris, she
knew, was fitted only to be a rich man's plaything. Dudley, she felt
instinctively, would start off by expecting of her things she had never
had to give, and in his dismay and disappointment might wreck both
their lives.

Yet she felt powerless to take any step that might save them from each
other, knowing full well that Doris, bored with her life at the flat,
had decided that even life with Dudley would be better. And even as
Ethel hastened westwards, instead of towards home, Doris with infinite