had to admit she was tired with the long hours and the unusual weather. She had worked till after ten every night. She had as yet seen nothing of the town. Her only exalted moments had been those when timber vessels had gone by. And it was wonderful to look through the clear upper half of the office window across the dusty road, past a fringe of rushes, and to see stealing into the smoke cloud on the river a phantom ship slipping from nowhere into nowhere, like the fabrication of a dream. She thought of one that had gone by that morning, a black brig etched in for a few unforgettable minutes in a world of vagueness before it faded out.
She was glad she had come. It was good to have a real job, to feel that she was independent, that at last she had got clear away from the relatives and their set, and that a new world was before her.
She worked on till after half-past six. She saw she would have to come back after dinner and probably the next morning. But then there was the afternoon when she would walk with Bob to the coast. The thought of the open sea lifted her spirits. She closed her books, locked the front door behind her, and turned towards the hotel. It was half-past seven when she reached the dining-room.
It seemed to her to be unusually full of men. Then she remembered that it was Saturday night, pay night, half holiday night for the bushes and the mills, and she was prepared for it to be noisy till late. That dining-room at the end of a hot day would have wrecked the nerves of a sensitive person who had not a sense of humour. Colossal designs had been an obsession with the decorator employed by Mac to do the house up in style. The wall paper was heavily embossed with gigantic dark brown chrysanthemums which stood out in a manner that made it
