She arrived home that evening a deplorable sight, for she had been tripped up and rolled in the dust and had cried so much that her face was streaked, and her mother—sympathetic for once, although she did not fail to remind her that “sticks and stones break your bones, but calling names hurts nobody”—set to work upon the short frock and lengthened it sufficiently to reach to the calves of her legs. After which, if she stooped a little when any one looked directly at her, it passed muster.

There was one girl named Ethel Parker who at this time made Laura’s life a misery to her. She professed friendship and would call for her every morning. “So nice of Ethel,” Laura’s mother said. Then, as soon as they were out of sight of the windows, she would either betray her to the gang—once by telling them Laura was wearing a red flannel petticoat—or force her to follow her through thorn hedges and over ploughed fields for some supposed short cut, or pull her hair, or wrench her arms, “to try her strength,” as she told her.

At the age of ten she was as tall and much stronger than most girls of fourteen. “Our young Et’s as strong as a young bullifant,” her father would say proudly. She was a fair-haired girl with a round, plump face and greenish eyes, the shape and almost the colour of a gooseberry. She had for cold weather a scarlet cloak, a survival of a fashion of some years before, and in this she must have looked a magnificent specimen of country childhood.

One of her pleasures was to make Laura gaze steadily at her. “Now, see if you can stare me out,” she would say, and Laura would gaze slavishly into those hard, green eyes until her own fell before them. The penalty for flinching was a pinch.

As they grew older she used less physical violence, though she would still handle Laura pretty roughly under the pretence of play. She was what they called there “an early-ripe” and, as she grew up, Laura’s mother did not like her so much and told Laura to have as little to do with her as possible, adding, ‘But don’t offend her, mind. You can’t afford to offend anybody in a place like this.’ Then Ethel went away to a place in service and, a year or two later, Laura also left home and did not expect to see Ethel again.