The Hollow

Midge interrupted, speaking sharply and distinctly.

"The poleeth? The poleeth, you thay?" It was almost a scream. "You are mixed up with the poleeth?"

Setting her teeth. Midge continued to ex- ^loin «stranse how sordid that woman at the other end made the whole thing seem. A vulgar police case. What alchemy there was in human beings!

Edward opened the door and came in, then seeing that Midge was telephoning, he was about to go out. She stopped him.

"Do stay, Edward. Please. Oh, I want you to."

The presence of Edward in the room gave her strength-counteracted the poison.

She took her hand from where she had laid it over the receiver.

"What? Yes. I am sorry. Madam… But, after all, it is hardly my fault-"

The ugly raucous voice was screaming angrily:

"Who are thethe friendth ofyourth? What thort of people are they to have the poleeth there and a man shot. I've a good mind not to have you back at all! I can't have the tone of my ethtablishment lowered."

Midge made a few submissive noncommittal replies. She replaced the receiver at last, with a sigh of relief. She felt sick and shaken.

"It's the place I work," she explained. "I had to let them know that I wouldn't be back until Thursday because of the inquest and the-the police."

"I hope they were decent about it? What is it like, this dress shop of yours? Is the woman who runs it pleasant and sympathetic to work for?"

"I should hardly describe her as that!

She's a Whitechapel Jewess with dyed hair and a voice like a corncrake."

"But, my dear Midge-"

Edward's face of consternation almost made Midge laugh. He was so concerned.

"But, my dear child-you can't put up with that sort of thing. If you must have a job, you must take one where the surroundings are harmonious and where you like the people you are working with."

Midge looked at him for a moment without answering.

How explain, she thought, to a person like Edward? What did Edward know of the labour market, of jobs?

And suddenly a tide of bitterness rose in her. Lucy, Henry, Edward-yes, even Henrietta-they were all divided from her by an impassable gulf-the gulf that separates the leisured from the working.

They had no conception of the difficulties of getting a job, and, once you had got it, of keeping it! One might say, perhaps, that there was no need, actually, for her to earn her living. Lucy and Henry would gladly give her a home-they would with equal gladness have made her an allowance. Edward would also willingly have done the latter.

But something in Midge rebelled against the acceptance of ease offered her by her well-to-do relations. To come on rare occasions and sink into the well-ordered luxury of Lucy's life was delightful. She could revel in that. But some sturdy independence of spirit held her back from accepting that life as a gift. The same feeling had prevented her from starting a business on her own with money borrowed from relations and friends.

She had seen too much of that.

She would borrow no money-use no influence.

She had found a job for herself at four pounds a week and if she had actually been given the job because Madame Alfrege hoped that Midge would bring her "smart" friends to buy, Madame Alfrege was disappointed.

Midge sternly discouraged any such notion on the part of her friends.

She had no particular illusions about working. She disliked the shop, she disliked Madame Alfrege 3 she disliked the eternal subservience to ill-tempered and impolite customers, but she doubted very much whether she could obtain any other job which she would like better, since she had none of the necessary qualifications.

Edward's assumption that a wide range of choice was open to her was simply unbearably irritating this morning. What right had Edward to live in a world so divorced from reality?

They were Angkatells, all of them! And she-was only half an Angkatelll And sometimes, like this morning, she did not feel like an Angkatell at all! She was all her father's daughter.

She thought of her father with the usual pang of love and compunction, a greyhaired, middle-aged man with a tired face.

A man who had struggled for years, running a small family business that was bound, for all his care and efforts, to go slowly down the hill. It was not incapacity on his part-it was the march of progress.

Strangely enough, it was not to her brilliant Angkatell mother but to her quiet tired father that Midge's devotion had always been given. Each time, when she came back, from those visits to Ainswick, which were the wild delight other life, she would answer the faint deprecating question in her father's tired f"^ ^\r fliniyinff her arms round his neck and saying, "I'm glad to be home-I'm glad to be home."