Excerpt from Cathy Rossiter

Her small house in Colebrook Street, off Cavendish Square, was well known, and her engagements, apart from hospital work, were almost more than she could deal with.

She had her scorns, feeling she had earned a right to be scornful, and some over-indulgence in this respect had pulled down the corners of her flexible mouth. Yet, behind all this, the real Monica craved for another life, which in cluded love and rapture. Women came to her in shoals, but men, unless her own colleagues, were rare in her life; when they did appear, the hidden Monica peered out, and the Monica that she believed herself to be had to invent fictions to account for the fact that she always preferred them before her own sex.

She was standing by her writing-table talking to her greatest friend, Cathy Rossiter, and Cathy was grumbling at the excessive angularity of the chair in which she was sitting.

Why they were friends was one of those strange, psycho logical puzzles which no one understands, and can only be explained through the fact that they had been schoolfellows.

Cathy had everything. Monica frequently dwelt on the sub ject with a hint of rancour in her heart. Everything she wore suited her, and her easy grace was a poem. Sir Neville Rossiter, her father, had left her well provided for, and she had the type of beauty which proclaims itself to the whole world. She was not neat, she was careless to untidiness, and yet she commanded the full joy of the most critical observer. Her hair was wavy and brown, and her eyes wide and very blue. Her beauty of feature was even less than her beauty of expression and the frankness of her smile. Cathy touched the human being in every one, and there was a dash and gallantry in her bearing which called for an immediate response. No one could grudge her her good fortune in life, because she herself was so generous. In fact, the whole of Cathy was just her lavishness. She held out her arms to the world, smiled at it, and asked to be a friend, for she was entirely herself. Monica counted everything. She knew what she spent on stamps; she knew what she had at the bank, and she knew to a halfpenny how much small change there was in the voluminous bag which she carried when she went out. With Cathy, everything was otherwise; she hadn't the least idea what her yearly expendi ture amounted to, and never troubled about it; she said she had holes in all her pockets, mental and material, and Monica suspected that her gloves and stockings were prob ably in the same condition.

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