It was about this time that admiring boys, and her friends at school, began to say she ought to go into pictures. Sheila took her time to think this out. She read film papers too carefully to have any illusion about the film road being an easy one, and she detested hard work. On the other hand, with her face, it did seem likely she would succeed; and if she did succeed there was the mink, the cars, the houses and the servants, and eventually she would pick and choose until she found a rich husband to keep her in the way to which, by then, she was accustomed. Sheila, at about fifteen and a half, definitely decided on a film career. Maggie’s unexpected stubbornness about having her trained as a secretary was a blow, but only a small stumbling-block; the training and six months in an office, what was that in a star’s life? The war coming when it did seemed to Sheila deliberately planned to upset her life. She could not at first believe that it had trapped her in her office. She could not believe that she was not to follow the path that she saw so clearly. She cried, she sulked, she made herself quite ill, but Maggie was adamant, she could not take up a film career when the country was at war. She would have defied Maggie, but the film industry itself seemed to be agreeing with her. Studios, her film papers told her, were making little or nothing, everybody was waiting, saying, “What happens next?” When the bombing of London started she had no courage for it; she was glad of any excuse to get out, and still more, of an excuse to leave the office. She was planning some place near, or at least within bussing distance of a film studio, when the morning came on which Janet mislaid her two pounds. Seeing Richard Trent was Sheila’s childhood dream come true. He was good-looking, he was a partner in the firm, he was the answer to the Prince and Cinderella story, and then and there Sheila decided to get him. The films could wait, perhaps they would come later, in the meantime he was exactly what she wanted and every sacrifice she thought worthwhile in pursuit of him. That she could sit patiently in Worsingfold month after month waiting for the leave of a man that she did not know, incomprehensible to anyone else, seemed common sense to her. He would turn up eventually, and when he did she would be waiting, and then, after a little hard work, there would be her wedding.