Growing older, she accepted the situation and passed to more absorbing problems of her own. She began to read. She read poetry. She read the poetry of Swinburne, and William Morris, and Maurice Hewlett. She even wrote a little herself, especially on summer evenings when the ceiling of her low room felt lower, and the air sifting through the ivy leaves oppressed her with a sense of futility that was both delightful and sad. On these evenings she would come down late for supper, expecting to hear her mother say: Kitty, you look pale. She looked, she felt pale. She felt that somehow she must learn to suffer, the vague, indiscriminate, undetermined suffering of which there was indication in the verses that she read and almost understood. She was ready. She was waiting. If only there were some clue. Finding none, she began to express her discontent. She crammed her head with Swinburnian similes and wove them, on hot, passionate evenings, into verses of her own. Perhaps she was creative. She borrowed a life of Christina Rossetti out of the public library to study symptoms.

Treated with irony by her father, she pouted at first, then slightly changed her tactics. Here, girl, he said, read these, you forget there’s a belly as well as a soul. So she struggled, yawning, through works on socialism and economics, finding no immediate significance in her father’s remark, but some pleasure in her martyrdom. And she was becoming, she suspected, an intellectual. She was superior. She walked down the shopping streets, and glanced sideways at the windows, at a reflection of herself with a play by Bernard Shaw beneath her arm. Altogether it made you feel free, emancipated, your foot firmer on the pavement, even if your voice faltered still talking to Mrs Illingford-Greene. And Saturday evenings with the S.A.L., which she joined as a matter of course, were an additional stimulus, if not the intended one.

If the Society for Art and Letters lived by intention rather than achievement, at least it was well patronized, a gathering of schoolmasters, older boys from the grammar school, and young bank clerks with Fabian ideals. They met in the houses of members, in parlours rarely used, in which an air of must and awkwardness prevailed for the first half-hour. The young men sat with their knees together, or their legs stuck out across the carpet. The girls arranged themselves, chin-on-hand, the earnest, muddy-skinned girls of the S.A.L. Existing nominally on conversation, coffee, and the exchanged book, it lasted in fact from the necessity for a group of people to unbend together in a room. The earnest conversation, the catchwords, the names, which Kitty Goose soon turned on as skilfully as any, all this was so much preliminary. But afterwards handing coffee, with the plates of biscuits, and the sponge fingers, standing in one of the long loose gowns that she had been wearing since she learnt to take an interest in herself, the young men gathered round her, the nervous schoolmasters, the awkward bank clerks, who jumped at the rattle of a spoon, who laughed before she finished a remark. And this was fun. Her laughter came in heady gusts. The moisture stood on the edges of her face, round her forehead, at the roots of her straying, reddish hair. She was a pretty girl. She had grace, a kind of self-critical dignity, and enough intelligence for strangers to credit her with more. But those who knew her disagreed over the capacity of this. When she grew older, when she had almost forgotten evenings in the front parlours with the S.A.L., the intellectual powers of Kitty Goose were always a subject for argument among those who called themselves her friends.