'It's good money,' said Anthea, 'and it's my own.'

'I daresay,' said the lady, 'but it's not the kind of money that's
fashionable now, and we don't care about taking it.'

'I believe they think we've stolen it,' said Anthea, rejoining the
others in the street; 'if we had gloves they wouldn't think we were
so dishonest. It's my hands being so dirty fills their minds with
doubts.'

So they chose a humble shop, and the girls bought cotton gloves,
the kind at sixpence three-farthings, but when they offered a
guinea the woman looked at it through her spectacles and said she
had no change; so the gloves had to be paid for out of Cyril's
two-and-sevenpence that he meant to buy rabbits with, and so had
the green imitation crocodile-skin purse at ninepence-halfpenny
which had been bought at the same time. They tried several more
shops, the kinds where you buy toys and scent, and silk
handkerchiefs and books, and fancy boxes of stationery, and
photographs of objects of interest in the vicinity. But nobody
cared to change a guinea that day in Rochester, and as they went
from shop to shop they got dirtier and dirtier, and their hair got
more and more untidy, and Jane slipped and fell down on a part of
the road where a water-cart had just gone by. Also they got very
hungry, but they found no one would give them anything to eat for
their guineas. After trying two pastrycooks in vain, they became
so hungry, perhaps from the smell of the cake in the shops, as
Cyril suggested, that they formed a plan of campaign in whispers
and carried it out in desperation. They marched into a third
pastrycook's - Beale his name was - and before the people behind