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forth down the dusty little street in West Kensington to make her way to the unknown London of the City and publishers’ offices for her first business interview. She had been horribly frightened, no doubt, though not until this minute had she known it—so armed had she been with Clive and Winchester and Oxford—and looking back, really understanding at last that girl of twenty-five years ago, she saw her as incredibly ignorant of herself and of life. Until then she had only seen life from the deck of a ship, her father’s gallant craft, with its stout engine throbbing beneath one, its pennons flying above. But now her father was dead, and she was to know what it was to swim in the open sea alone, and the first intimation of the contrast had come to her from the manner of the editors who received her. Until then, in her relations with men, she had met with implicit homage, with deference or assiduity, and had taken them for granted as a woman’s due. It was revealed to her, now, in the cool jocose eye, the note of familiarity that greeted her, that to the employing male a woman in search of work was in a very different category from a woman secure and independent. The editor was kind and had agreed to take her series of articles on the French countryside; but her cheek had oddly