ain't easy to make
ends meet. What with the rent and them Borough Council rates. There
ain't no end to it, mum. I lives in the basement, mum, and that means
gas all the afternoon, mum.'

Victoria looked at her again. This was a curious outlook. The poor
troglodyte had translated the glory of the sun into cubic feet of gas.

'Yes, I suppose it is hard,' she said reflectively.

'To be sure, mum,' mused Miss Briggs. 'Sometimes you can't let at all.
I've watched through the area railings, mum, many a long day in August,
wondering if the legs I can see was coming 'ere. They don't mostly,
mum.'

'Then why do you go on?' asked Victoria hardening suddenly.

'What am I to do, mum? I just gets my board and lodging out of it, mum.
Keeps one respectable; always been respectable, mum. That ain't so easy
in London, mum. Ah, when I was a young girl, might have been different,
mum; you should have seen me 'air. Curls like anything, mum, when I puts
it in papers. 'Ad a bit of a figure too, mum.'

'Deary me!'

Victoria looked with sympathy at the hard thin face, the ragged hair.
Yes, she was respectable enough, poor Miss Briggs! Women have a hard
life. No wonder they too are hard. You cannot afford to be earthenware
among the brass pots.

'What will you do when you can't run the house any more?' she asked more
gently.

'Do, mum? I dunno.'

Yet another philosophy.

'Miss Briggs,' came a man's voice from the stairs.

'Coming, sir,' yelled Miss Briggs in the penetrating tone that calling
from cellar to attic teaches.

'Where are my boots?' said the voice on the stairs.

'I'll get 'em for you, sir,' cried Miss Briggs shuffling to the door on
her worn slippers.

Life is a hard thing, thought Victoria again. Another woman for the
scrap heap. Fourteen hours work a day, nightmares of unlet rooms, boots
to black and coals to carry, dirt, loneliness, harsh words and at the
end 'I dunno.' Is that to be my fate? she wondered.

However her blood soon raced again; she was an actress, she was going
abroad, she was going to see the world, to enslave it, to have
adventures, live. It was good. All that day Victoria trod on air. She no
longer felt her loneliness. The sun was out and aglow, bringing in its
premature exuberance joyful moisture to her temples. She, with the
world, was young. In a fit of extravagance she lunched at a half crown
table d'hote in Oxford Street, where pink shades softly diffuse the
light on shining glass and