resettled the baby in her arms, and walked
sorrowfully up the road, followed by the sympathetic glance of the
plain-clothes detective.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

PIMLICO

Mavis found a resting-place for her tired body in the unattractive
district of Pimlico, which is the last halting-place of so many of
London's young women before the road to perdition is irretrievably
taken. Mavis had purposed going to Hammersmith, but the fates which
decide these matters had other views. On the tedious underground
journey from New Cross, she felt so unwell that she got out at Victoria
to seek refuge in the ladies' cloak room. The woman in charge, who was
old, wizened, and despondent, gave Mavis some water and held her baby
the while she lamented her misfortunes: these were embodied in the fact
that "yesterday there had only been three 'washies' and one torn
dress"; also, that "in the whole of the last month there had been but
three 'faints' and six ladies the worse for drink." Acting on the
cloak-room attendant's advice, Mavis sought harbourage in one of the
seemingly countless houses which, in Pimlico, are devoted to the
letting of rooms. But Mavis was burdened with a baby; moreover, she
could pay so little that no one wished to accommodate her. Directly she
stated her simple wants, together with the sum that she could afford to
pay, she was, in most cases, bundled into the street with scant
consideration for her feelings. After two hours' fruitless search, she
found refuge in a tiny milk-shop in a turning off the Vauxhall Bridge
Road, where she bought herself a scone and a glass of milk; she also
took advantage of the shop's seclusion to give her baby much-needed
nourishment. Ultimately, she got a room in a straight street, flanked
by stucco-faced high houses, which ran out of Lupus Street. Halverton
Street has an atmosphere of its own; it suggests shabby vice, unclean
living, as if its inhabitants' lives were mysterious, furtive
deviations from the normal. Mavis, for all her weariness, was not
insensible to the suggestions that Halverton Street offered; but it was
a hot July day; she had not properly recovered from her confinement;
she felt that if she did not soon sit down she would drop in the
street. She got a room for four shillings a week at the fifth house at
which she applied in this street. The door had been opened by a tall,
thin, flat-chested girl, whose pasty face was plentifully peppered with
pimples. The only ro