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been in quite a lot of Palais since I started. Bournemouth was lovely—I was a silly to come away from there. But there was a gentleman.…” She stared absently across the floor, then roused herself and turned to me. “Sometimes one gets mixedup in a place,” she said quietly, “and then it’s time to move on.”
    I nodded. “How do you like Leeds?”
    She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t think I’ll be here very much longer. I want to get down to the south again, with the summer coming on. Tell me, have you ever been to Torquay?”
    “I know it pretty well,” I said. “It’s not far from where I work.”
    She turned to me: “Is it lovely?” And then, without waiting for my answer, she went on: “I’d love to go to Torquay. I’ve never been, but everybody says it’s lovely there. One of the girls here went there for her holiday last year with a gentleman, and she said it was lovely. It’s all on hills, isn’t it, looking out over the sea, with a harbour and boats and things?”
    “That’s it,” I said. “The shops are all along by the harbour.”
    She sighed. “I’d love to get into a Palais there. It must be lovely to live in a place like that. But they don’t get many vacancies in those places. The girls down there, they know when they’re well off.”
    We danced again, and came back to the table.
    “Been to many shows?” she asked.
    I tried to remember when I had last been to the theatre. “Not many lately,” I replied. “I expect you go to lots. Or can’t you get away from here?”
    She blew a long cloud of smoke. “It’s not very easy. You see, if you get a boy that wants to take you out he has to book you out for the session, and that costs twenty-five bob on top on what he spends outside. It’s only the old ones that can do that, and I don’t like going out with them. They get so silly. But I do love a show, better than anything. I expect you don’t care for them much?”
    I had had a long drive that day, and a good dinner. I was leaving Leeds on the next day, and it was unlikely that I should ever see this girl again. Sometimes it’s a luxury to speak the truth. “I like a theatre,” I said. “I like to go and have a really good dinner somewhere, and go on to a theatre, and then
go
and dance for an hour or so before bed. But you want to have somebody to go with; it’s not much fun doing that alone.”
    She nodded. “Haven’t you got any girl friends to go with?”
    I knocked the ash off my cigarette. “No,” I said. “They don’t seem to come my way much.” I looked at her and grinned. “That’s why I have to come and pay sixpence.”
    She nodded, without laughing. “You’re too particular,” she said shrewdly. “There’s ever so many like you come and dance with us—you’d be surprised. There’s some that just don’t want to do anything but sit and talk for a bit. It’s like as if they don’t seem able to fancy the girl friends they can get, and can’t get the ones they fancy, and so they come here. It’s funny, isn’t it? My brother now, he’s just the same as you.”
    I was watching an unpleasant youth dancing with an anæmic girl, an extraordinarily graceful pair. “What does he do?” I asked absently.
    Evidently she was very proud of him. “He’s in the motor transport business. He’s got a lorry of his own. I hadn’t seen him for over three years, and I didn’t know where he was or anything, but he turned up here on Friday last week, and booked me out all Saturday, and we had a lovely time. They told him at home that I was here. He’s doing awfully well, down somewhere in the south. He takes carpet-sweepers and things that come from abroad from the boats and drives them to the factory, or something. It’s all-night work.”
    She paused. “He’s just the same as you—never seems to fancy the sort of girl that he can pick up.” She bent a hostile eye upon the single ladies sitting at their tables all alone. “And there’s some