“What’ll you drink?” the Boy said.

She didn’t know the name of a drink. In Nelson Place from which she had emerged like a mole into the daylight of Snow’s restaurant and the Palace Pier, she had never known a boy with enough money to offer her a drink. She would have said ‘beer’, but she had had no opportunity of discovering whether she liked beer. A twopenny ice from an Everest tricycle was the whole extent of her knowledge of luxury. She goggled hopelessly at the Boy. He asked her sharply: “What d’you like? I don’t know what you like.”

“An ice,” she said with disappointment, but she couldn’t keep him waiting.

“What kind of an ice?”

“Just an ordinary ice,” she said. Everest hadn’t in all the slum years offered her a choice.

“Vanilla?” the waiter said. She nodded; she supposed that that was what she had always had, and so it proved; only a size larger; otherwise she might just  as well have been sucking it between wafers by a tricycle.

“You’re a soft sort of kid,” the Boy said. “How old are you?”

“I’m seventeen,” she said defiantly; there was a law which said a man couldn’t go with you before you were seventeen.

“I’m seventeen too,” the Boy said, and the eyes which had never been young stared with grey contempt into the eyes which had only just begun to learn a thing or two. He said, “Do you dance?” and she replied humbly: “I haven’t danced much.”

“It don’t matter,” the Boy said, “I’m not one for dancing.” He eyed the slow movement of the two-backed beasts: pleasure, he thought, they call it pleasure: he was shaken by a sense of loneliness, an awful lack of understanding.