“You’ll come, won’t you, old thing?”

“Of course she’ll come. We couldn’t go to the pictures without her. Six o’clock at the corner, all of you!”

“I can’t manage it before half-past,” and Biddy Devine hesitated. “I really ought not to come at all. It’s the third time this week, Doris. Poor old Mary won’t like it.”

“Oh, but she can’t stop you! You must have some fun, like everybody else. We simply couldn’t go without you. Be a sport, Biddy, and dodge her somehow!”

“It must be rotten to have an old creature like that always fussing when you want to do any little thing,” said another of the girls, who were standing in a bunch at the door of a big commercial training college in the heart of London. “I’m sure, after such a beastly all-day grind as we’ve had, we’re due a little fun at night! I consider shorthand positively wicked!”

“It is the limit,” Biddy agreed, swinging her case and looking irresolute. “But Mary might say three times of the pictures in one week was the limit, too. And I’m going out to-morrow night as well. It leaves her all alone, you see. It’s not as if we were a proper family.”