R. Browning.

Following Rose's suggestion, and because for the time being there really seemed nothing for her to do, unless she could show herself a little better trained, Joan joined the County Council Night Schools in the neighbourhood. She would go there five evenings in the week; three for shorthand and two for typing. Her fellow scholars were drawn from all ages and all ranks—clerks, office boys, and grey-headed men; girls with their hair still in pig-tails, and elderly women with patient, strained faces, who would sit at their desks plodding through the intricacies of shorthand and paying very little attention to what went on all round them.

The boy and girl section of the community indulged in a little rough and tumble love-making. Even long office hours and the deadly monotony of standing behind desk or counter all day could not quite do away with the riotous spirit of youth. They giggled and chattered among themselves, and passed surreptitious notes from one form to the other when Mr. Phillips was not looking.

Mr. Phillips, the shorthand master, was a red-faced, extremely irascible little man. He came to these classes from some other school in the city where he had been teaching all day, and naturally, by the time evening arrived, his none too placid temper had been stretched to breaking-point. He was extremely impatient with any non-comprehension of his complicated method of instruction; and he would pass from row to row, after his dictation had been finished, snatching away the papers from his paralysed pupils and tearing them into fragments had the exercise been badly done.

Joan noticed the man who sat next her on the first and every night. He was quite the worst person she had ever seen at learning anything. He was not by any means young, grey already showed in the hair above his ears, and his forehead wrinkled with innumerable lines. He had, she thought, the most pathetic eyes, large and honest, but quite irredeemably stupid.

"I can't make head or tale of it," he confessed to her on the second night. "And Mr. Phillips gets so annoyed with me, it only muddles me more."

"Why do you bother to learn?" she asked. It seemed rather strange that a man of his age should have to struggle with so elementary a subject.

"I have worked in an office for the last ten years," he explained. "The new boss has suddenly decided that shorthand is necessary. I don't know," he spoke rather vaguely, his eyes wandering round the room, "but it is just possible he might ask me to go if I did not master it. I have been there so long I hardly like to have to look for another place."

"It seems such a shame," Joan told Rose afterwards, "that these people can never get a place where they feel really safe. They live always expecting to be turned off at a moment's notice, or to have somebody put in on top of them. Everybody seems to be fighting against everybody else; doesn't anyone ever stop to help?"

The older girl laughed. "Why, yes," she said. "The world, or at least the people in it, are not so bad as all that. Only life is a case of push and struggle, and it is only natural that people should want to get the best they can for their money. Also it wouldn't be fair if the ones who worked best were not preferred to the others."

Mr. Simpson, Joan's perplexed friend of the shorthand class, was certainly one of the stupidest people she had ever met, yet she was terribly sorry for him. He was the butt of the class, which did not add to the hilarity of his position, because of the torrent of abuse which he always drew from Mr. Phillips at some stage in the evening.

"Now," Mr. Phillips would call out, starting the lesson by a blackboard demonstration, "silence and attention, please."

He would draw a series of strokes and dashes on the blackboard, calling out their various meanings, and the class would set itself to copy them. The lesson would proceed for some time in silence, save for Mr. Phillips' voice, but presently the bewilderment caused by so many new outlines would terrify Mr. Simpson and he would lean forward to interrupt, stammering, as he always did when nervous.

"Why is 'M' made like that?" he would say. "Wouldn't it be much better if it were made the other way?"

"Why, why?" Mr. Phillips would thunder. "If you would just learn what you are taught, sir, and not try to think, it would be a great deal pleasanter for the rest of us."

Mr. Simpson would get a little red under the onslaught, but his eyes always retained their patient, perplexed expression. He seemed impervious to the impression he created in the back row. "Laughing-stock of the whole class," Mr. Phillips called him in a moment of extreme irritation, and the expression caught on.

"I am so silly," he said to Joan. "I really am not surprised that they think me funny."

She was the one person who was ever nice to him or who did attempt to explain things to him. Sometimes they would get there a little early and she would go over his exercises with him. He might be thick-skinned to the want of tolerance which the rest of the class meted out to him; he was undoubtedly grateful to Joan for the kindness she showed him.

One evening on his way to class he plucked up courage to purchase a small buttonhole for her, and blushed a very warm red when Joan took his offering with a smile and pinned it into her coat.

"How nice of you," she said. "I love violets, and these smell so sweet."

"They are not half sweet enough for you," he managed to say, stuttering furiously.

Joan had a moment's uneasiness. Surely the wretched little man was not going to fall in love with her? She glanced sideways at him during the class and what she saw reassured her. His clothes, his dirty hands, his whole appearance, put him in a different world to herself. However kind she might be to him, he surely could not fail to recognize that it was only the same kindness which would prompt her to cross the road to give a penny to a beggar?

Unfortunately Mr. Simpson belonged to a class which is very slow to recognize any difference in rank save that of wealth. He was a humble little man before Joan, but that was because he was by nature humble, and also because he was in love. He thought her very wonderful and beautiful beyond his range of words, but he imagined her as coming from much the same kind of home as his own, and she seemed to exist in the same strata of life.

A night or two after the flower episode he fixed adoring eyes on her and asked if he might be allowed to see her home.

"Well, it is rather out of your way," Joan remonstrated, she had so often seen him trudge off in the opposite direction.

"That is of no consequence," he replied, with his usual stutter.

The streets were dark, quiet, and deserted. Now and then as they hurried along, for Joan walked as fast as she could to ward off conversation, they passed a solitary policeman doing his beat, and dim, scarce seen lovers emerged out of the shadows holding each other's hands.

"Will you not take my arm?" Mr. Simpson ventured presently. He was slightly out of breath in his effort to keep up with her.

"No, thank you," Joan answered. The whole occurrence was too ridiculous, yet for once in her life her sense of humour was failing her. "And I wish you would not bother to come any further, it is quite unnecessary."

Her tone was more than chilly. Mr. Simpson, however remained undaunted. His slow and ponderous mind had settled on a certain course; it would need more than a little chilliness to turn it from its purpose.

"I was going to ask you," he went on, "whether you would do me the honour of coming to the theatre one evening? If you have a mind that turns that way sometimes."

"No, thank you," answered Joan once more. "I never go to theatres, and I shouldn't go with you in any case," she added desperately, as a final resource.

"I meant no offence," the man answered, humble as ever. "I should always act straight by a girl, and for you——"

"Oh, don't, please don't," Joan interrupted. She stopped in her walk and faced round on him. "Can't you see how impossible it would be for me——" she broke off abruptly, rather ashamed of her outburst. "I am going to be a snob in a minute, if I am not careful," she finished to herself.

"I know I am not amusing, or anything," the man went on; "but you have always seemed so kind and considerate. If I have offended in any way, I am more than sorry."

Joan felt that he was frowning as he always frowned in hopeless perplexity over his shorthand.

"I am not offended," she tried to explain more gently. "Only, please do not ask me to go out with you again, or offer to walk home with me. Here we are anyway, this is where I live." She turned at the bottom of Shamrock House steps and held out her hand to him. "Good-night," she said.

Simpson did not take her hand, instead he stared up at her; she could see how shiny and red his face was under the lamp.

"You are not angry with me?" he stuttered.

"Why, no, of course not," Joan prevaricated. Then she ran up the steps and let herself into the hall without looking back at him.

For two or three days she attempted to ignore the man's presence in class next her, and Simpson himself in no way intruded. He had taken her snubbing like a man; from the height of his dreams he had fallen into an apathetic despair; the only effect it had on him was to make him stupider than ever at his work. Then one evening, with a face working rather painfully, he told her that he did not intend to come any more.

"I am going to another centre," he said, gathering his books together and not looking at her.

"Has Mr. Phillips been too much for you?" she asked, wilfully ignoring the deeper meaning behind his words.

"No," he answered, "it is not that. It may seem quite absurd," he went on laboriously, "but I want to ask you to let me have your note-book. I have got a new one to give you in its place." He produced a packet from his pocket and held it out to her.

Later on, when she thought over the thing, she smiled. A note-book seemed so singularly unromantic, but at the time she felt nearer tears. The look in his eyes haunted her for many days. She had been the one glimpse of romance in his dreary existence, and she had had to kill the dream so ruthlessly.