They had a way of shining and looking golden when she was pleased or feeling fond of anyone. Her hair was golden brown and very thick. Justin Leigh once said that it was walnut-coloured. He explained kindly, and a little condescendingly, that he didn’t mean the colour of the nut but of the polished wood. Dorinda, who was ten years old at the time, went and stood for a long time in front of the walnut bureau in the drawing-room trying to make up her mind whether Justin meant that he liked her hair. She held her plait against the wood and gazed at it. The hair certainly had the same colours in it as the wood, and when it was well brushed it shone in very much the same way. After that she made a point of brushing it a great deal. But she didn’t like the plait, because all the other girls at school had short hair. So in a good-tempered but perfectly determined manner she took her Aunt Mary’s cutting-out scissors and removed it. She had smiled equably through the painful family scene which followed, secure in the fact that they couldn’t put it back. She had a bright rosy colour, two dimples, and a wide, generous mouth which was really quite red enough to do without lipstick.

For the rest, she was five-foot-five in her stocking feet, and she had the kind of figure which has agreeable curves without being fat.

The telephone buzzed and Justin Leigh said, “Hullo!” in the cultured and rather blasé manner in which it was his habit to address telephones.

“It’s me,” said Dorinda, throwing grammar to the winds.

“I.”

“No, me. Listen-I’ve got a job.”

“Oh? What is it?”

He sounded bored. But it was impossible for Dorinda to believe that anyone could really be bored when she herself was feeling all lit-up and excited. She began to pour everything out in a rush.

“It was an advertisement. One of the other girls showed it to me in the lunch-hour-I mean her lunch-hour, not mine. She’s in an office-”