d reek at midday, blended with tobacco, then
slowly ebbed almost into nothingness: the dying day that was grateful to
her eyes when she left to go home, when things looked kindly round her.

When Victoria realised all of a sudden her loneliness in her island in
Star Street, something like the fear of the hunted had driven her out
into the streets. She was afraid to be alone, for not even books could
save her from her thoughts, those hounds in full cry. In such moods she
had walked the streets quickly, looking at nothing, maintaining her pace
over hills. Now and then she had suddenly landed on a slum, caught sight
of, all beery and bloody, through the chink of a black lane. But she
shunned the flares, the wet pavement, the orange peel that squelched
beneath her boots, afraid of the sight of too vigorous life.
Unconsciously she had sought the drug of weariness, and the cunning bred
of her dipsomania told her that the living were poor companions for her
soul. And, when at times a man had followed her, his eye arrested by
the lines of her face lit up by a gas lamp, he had soon tired of her
quick walk and turned away towards weaker vessels.

But even weariness, when abused, loses its power as a sedative. The
body, at once hardened and satiated, demands more every day as it craves
for increasing doses of morphia, for more food, more drink, more kisses,
more, ever more. Thus Victoria had reached her last stage when, sitting
alone in her room, she once more faced the emptiness where the ghosts of
her dead past paced like caged beasts and the wraith of the day's work
rattled its chains.

From this, now a state of mental instead of physical exhaustion, she was
seldom roused; and it needed an Edward come to judgment to stir her
sleepy brain into quick passion. Again and again the events of the day
would chase round and round maddeningly with every one of their little
details sharp as crystals. Victoria could almost mechanically repeat
some conversations, all trifling, similar, confined to half a dozen
topics; she could feel, too, but casually as an odalisque, the hot wave
of desire which surrounded her all day, evidenced by eyes that
glittered, fastened on her hands as she served, on her face, the curve
of her neck, her breast, her hips; eyes that devoured and divested her
of her meretricious livery. And, worse perhaps than that big primitive
surge which left her cold but unangered, the futility of others who
bandied with her th