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flowers. “For the office,” he said, and marched through the shop towards the door marked “Private,” at the far end. All the women at the bench turned round to peer at the dewy pink petals just showing above the tissue paper.
    â€œRoses this week,” sniffed Mrs. Greening. “Must ’ave cost a packet.”
    â€œIt was tulips last time,” said Joe.
    Mrs. Greening gave Edna another friendly dig in the ribs.
    â€œAin’t you jealous, ducks?”
    â€œGood luck to her,” laughed Edna. “But I do wonder who her boy is.”
    Jim’s voice like a saw cutting a rough piece of wood grated through the whole shop:
    â€œMust be rich, must be crackers, must ’ave plenty of guts.”
    He peeled off the last batch of beach-balls and tossed them to Edna. Adroitly she stuck the valves in and slipped them over the air-nozzles, plugging each ball in turn as it was blown up. The sunlight coming through the open double-door fell on her as she held a whole bunch together, like giant grapes, and for a moment she ceased to belong to the dingy factory with its leprous coating of french chalk, she was a Bacchante strayed there, a vision of the vineyards glowing and shining, a beaker full of the warm South.
    It was a fault inseparable from Miss Foulkes’ colouring that when she blushed she went salmon-pink, arms, neck and face, and when the flush subsided it left her unnaturally white, with the freckles standing out against her pallor like specks of sand. She always blushed when the flowers arrived, and there was always an uncomfortable silence in the office afterwards.
    John Handiman busied himself ostentatiously with his letters. Miss Foulkes said to the messenger-boy: “Put themdown there,” and he laid the roses on the filing-cabinet next to the bowl of fading tulips which he had delivered last week. The week before it had been anemones, and the week before that hyacinths. Whoever the sender might be, he was a most faithful and persistent fellow, and John was profoundly puzzled, because however hard he tried he could not for the life of him imagine Enid Foulkes with a young man.
    But why not? he asked himself. She was only twenty-nine, her flaming hair was a challenge, she was not at all bad-looking, she was clever—and yet there was something which seemed to obviate the very possibility of courtship, it was a sort of angularity, he decided; her bare elbows lying on the desk were little sharp nobbles, and her shoulder-blades showed like knife-edges through her thin dress. Perhaps that was because she lived chiefly on nuts. But hers was not simply an angularity of physique, but of disposition. Her character was all sharp corners; there was no smooth side to it, no place for compromise, it would cut a man to pieces, thought John oddly, to match his mind to hers. Perhaps the unknown suitor had learned this lesson, and was trying out the softening effect of roses.
    â€œThe debit balance at the Bank,” said Miss Foulkes, white-faced now that her blush had faded, “is two hundred and seventy-three pounds eight and a penny; leaving two hundred and twenty-six pounds eleven and eleven pence to carry on with before we reach the limit of five hundred.” She ruled a neat red ink line at the bottom of the sheet of paper. Miss Foulkes’ accounts, even when they were only memoranda, were always decorated with red lines, singleones and double ones and in certain complex cases treble ones, and these lines were never smudged or crooked, but were as thin as hairs and as straight as ramrods. Somehow they seemed to express her personality; for Miss Foulkes was meticulous. She was so meticulous that when she found a halfpenny one day upon the office floor she put it into the Petty Cash and now, three years later, that tiresome halfpenny still appeared in the monthly totals, in the annual balance, and even in the audited accounts. John Handiman loathed the sight of