Amongst those girls, then, whose desire in life it is to marry, conforming in all ways to the authority of convention, chastity has been taught from the cradle—­taught as a means to an end.  It is mostly, if not altogether, in the lower middle classes that you will find chastity to be an end in itself.  The destructive philosophy of education has not swept out the gentler virtues from them.  As yet they have not come under the keen edge of its influence.  For their chastity, then, they are interesting; whereas the manufactured virtue of the upper middle class is like the hothouse strawberry—­forced in May—­a tempting fruit to lay upon a dish, but tasteless, as is wool, between the teeth.

It is this virtue—­this real quality, breeding self-respect—­that you will find in the mind of Sally Bishop.  Here is no strategy of movement, no well-considered campaign.  She quickens her steps, and her heart thumps within her, because that virtue, which is her priceless possession, is in danger of being assailed.  In the very soul of her is the desire to escape.  There are thousands of women whom education has nursed who set the pace as well, whenever a man starts in pursuit; but the course of their flight leads straight to the altar and they run neither too fast, nor too slow, lest by any chance the hunter should weary of the chase.  But here you have none of this.  The woman is obeying instincts that Nature gave her with her soul.  Sally Bishop is pure—­the chaste woman.  Where men most look for her, she is hard to find.

This journey from King Street to Piccadilly Circus was performed every evening.  In Piccadilly she found the ’bus that took her to Hammersmith.  It was a pleasurable little journey; she looked forward to it.  It amused her to dally on the way, stopping to look in the shop windows.  The bright lights lifted her spirits.  After a time she had become acquainted with the prints that hung in the print-seller’s windows in Garrick Street; they always stayed there long enough to grow familiar.  There was also a jeweller’s shop in Coventry Street; it sold second-hand silver—­old Sheffield-plated candle-sticks, cream ewers and sugar bowls; George III. silver tea-services, and quaint-shaped wine strainers—­they stood there in the window in profusion.  In themselves, for the daintiness of their design, or the value of their antiquity, they did not interest her.  She liked the look of them glittering there; they conveyed a sense of the embarrassment of riches which touched her ideas of romance.  It was the tray of old-fashioned ornaments, brooches in the design of flimsy baskets of flowers, each flower represented by a different coloured stone—­old signet rings, old seals, quaint little figures of men and beasts in silver, sometimes in gold; these were the things that caught her fancy; she pored over them, choosing, every time she passed, some fresh trinket that she would like to possess.