things to Miss Wilson between the sets. Her brother had alread; told her about this sensational fact of the rope, and it showed that he must be thinking a good deal about her if he could be so detached from himself while privately suffering agonies. She thought he meant something, but she wasn't sure, and what would Lucia do? He was the younger son of a baronet, but the elder brother was unmarried, and he really had the most delightful eyes. Also, he made smashes at the net which were extraordinary considering the rope. Or did he make it more slack for tennis-parties? Archie thought not.
But Archie and Tommy and Dicky and Harry had interested Lucia very little. She had no use for them, and she cared not at all for what was useless. At the same time, she kept everything, so to speak, until its uselessness was proved. It was possible, by means of the girls with whom she played duets and talked French and planted salvias, that something might come her way. But their brothers were perfectly futile; the only thing that might come her way, via them, was marriage with them, and for that she had no mind. The younger son of an impecunious baronet—she looked him up in Debrett—was the best of the bunch, but it really could not even be called a bunch. As far as she was concerned it was a concourse of fortuitous atoms. But from her point of view, though she neglected, or rather never thought of neglecting, the brothers, she made friends with the sisters. With an acuteness that did her credit, or at any rate did justifiable discredit to the world, she saw that the lower rungs of the ladder by which a climber means to mount are made of the sex of the climber.
Up to a certain age, girls will help the climbing girl in a way that young men cannot unless among them is contained the young man she wishes to marry. And throughout the length and breadth of Brixham she had till to-day seen no young man whom she ever so faintly contemplated in this light. She felt certain that if she was to make herself, to emerge, she must first make friends with the girls round her. She might, perhaps, "climb out" on them. Now who could "climb out" anywhere on the shoulders of the younger son of a baronet, or on Claude Wilson's shoulders, who hoped some time to be a partner in a solicitor's office, or on the shoulders of Harry Majendie, who, if all went well, and since he had interest, might be an archdeacon before he died?
But the climber cannot have too many friends of her own sex. Something may happen to them; they may emerge into a bigger
