by myself and being famous. Well, I must get on with the story.
“Of course the relatives opposed everything I ever wanted to do. But dad stood by me. He let me go to the grammar school. Of course I got on. Learning was no trouble to me. And I won a host of prizes that first year. And of course I went home a little puffed up, and I thought at last they would be proud of me. But Bob had taught his sister Doris and me to smoke cigarettes. It’s funny now to think what that meant ten years ago. And the week after I got home mother poked about in my things, and found a packet of cigarettes and a love letter from some boy in one of my boxes. Well, I never poked about in anybody’s things. I know what I think about people who do. And when the people who did things like that to me came to talk to me of morality or behaviour they couldn’t impress me at all.”
She paused for a moment, clasping her hands round her knees.
“Well, this was the grand row. Dad was away on the yacht. Mother summoned the Elegancies. I knew something was up and I was fighting mad. You see, I was so sick of it. There’d been a row when they found I wasn’t in bed at ten one night and that I was sitting on the point wrapped up in a rug listening to a glorious gale. That was wrong. There’d been a row when I was discovered talking to the gardener in his room one night. They would have sacked him but for dad. That was wrong. There’d been a row when they found Byron’s poems under my pillow. That was wrong. There’d been rows when I wouldn’t go to stupid girls’ parties, when I wouldn’t go to the Elegancies for Christmas dinner (that was an awful one), when I wouldn’t go to boarding-school, when I stopped saying my prayers, and when I wouldn’t be con-
