ome
comfortably and judge people like me who want to be strong and free.
But what's the good of talking about freedom to you.--

Your affectionate sister,

VICTORIA'.

She addressed the envelope and ran out hatless to post it at the pillar
box in Edgware Road. As she crossed the road homewards a horse bus
rumbled by. It carried an enormous advertisement of the new musical
comedy _The Teapot Girl_. 'A fine comedy indeed,' she thought, suddenly
a little weary.

As she entered her room, where a small oil lamp diffused a sphere of
graduated light, she was seized as by the throat by the oppression of
the silent summer night. The wind had fallen; not even a whirl of dust
stirred in the air. Alone and far away a piano organ in a square droned
and clanked Italian melody. She thought of Edward and of her letter.
Perhaps she had been too sharp. Once upon a time she would not have
written like that: she was getting common.

Victoria sat down on a little chair, her hands clasped together in her
lap, her eyes looking out at the blank wall opposite. This, nine
o'clock, was the fatal hour when the ghosts of her dead past paced like
caged beasts up and down in her small room, and the wraith of the day's
work rattled its chains. There had been earlier times when, in the first
flush of independence, she had sat down to gloat over what was almost
success, her liberty, her living earned by her own efforts. The rosiness
of freedom then wrapped around the dinge with wreaths of fancy, wreaths
that curled incessantly into harmonious shapes. But Victoria had soon
plumbed the depths of speculation and found that the fire of imagination
needs shadowy fuel for its shadowy combustion. Day by day her brain had
become less lissome. Then, instead of thinking for the joy of thought,
she had read some fourpenny-halfpenny novel, a paper even, picked up in
the Tube. Her mind was waking up, visualising, realising, and in its
troublous surgings made for something to cling to to steady itself. But
months rolled on and on, inharmonious in their sameness, unrelieved by
anything from the monotony of work and sleep. Certain facts meant
certain things and recurred eternally with their unchanging meaning; the
knock that awoke her, a knock so individual and habitual that her sleepy
brain was conscious on Sundays that she need not respond; the smell of
food which began to assail her faintly as she entered the 'Rosebud,'
then grew to pungency an