oy." The mention of her son stiffened
the woman into a fleeting dignity.

"I suppose he's about twelve?" Michael asked. Her age had puzzled him.

"Well, thirteen really. Of course, you see, I'm a little older than what
I look." As she looked about forty-five, Michael thought that the
converse was more probable.

"He's not living with you?"

"Oh, no, certainly not. Why, I wouldn't have him here for anything--not
ever. Oh, no, he's at school with the Jesuits. He's to go in the Civil
Service. I lived with his father for many years--in fact, from the time
I was sixteen. His father was a Frenchman. A silk-merchant he was. He's
been dead about six years now."

"I suppose he left money to provide for the boy."

"Oh no! No, he left nothing. Well, you see, silk merchants weren't what
they used to be, when he died; and before that his business was always
falling off bit by bit. No, the Jesuits took him. Of course I'm a
Catholic myself."

As she made her profession of faith, he saw hanging from the knob of the
bed a rosary. With whatever repulsion, with whatever curiosity he had
entered, Michael now sat here on the pale blue chest in perfect humility
of spirit.

"I suppose you don't care for this life?" he asked after a short
silence.

"Well, no, I do not. It's not at all what I should call a refined way of
living, and often it's really very unpleasant."

Somehow their relation had entirely changed, and Michael found himself
discussing her career as if he were talking to an old maid about her
health.

"For one thing," she continued, "the police are very rough with one, and
if anyone doesn't behave just as they'd like for them to behave, they
make it very awkward. They really take it out of anyone. That isn't
right, is it? It's really not as it should be, I don't think."

Michael thought of the police in Leicester Square.

"It's damnable!" he growled. "And I suppose you have to put up with a
good deal from some of the men?"

"Undoubtedly," she said, shaking her head, and becoming every moment
more and more like a spinster who kept a stationer's shop in a
provincial town. "Undoubtedly. Well, for one thing, I'm at anyone's
mercy in here. Of course, if I called out, I might be heard and I might
not. Really, if it wasn't for the woman who keeps the house being always
so anxious for her rent, I might be murdered any time and stay in here
for days without anyone knowing about it. Last Wednesday--or was it
Thursday?--ti