and walked away
quickly towards the west. She was lonely suddenly, horribly so. One by
one, all the links of her worldly chain had snapped. Burton, the sensual
brute, was gone; Stein was perhaps sitting still numb and silent in the
darkened shop; Gertie, flippant and sharp, had sailed forth on life's
ocean, there to be tossed like a cork and like a cork to swim; now
Lottie was gone, cool and confident, to dangers underrated and unknown.
She stood alone.

As she reached Westminster Bridge a strange sense of familiarity
overwhelmed her. A well-known figure was there and it was horribly
symbolical. It was the old vagrant of bygone days, sitting propped up
against the parapet, clad in his filthy rags. From his short clay pipe,
at long intervals, he puffed wreaths of smoke into the blue air.

CHAPTER XIX

THE russet of October had turned into the bleak darkness of December.
The threat of winter was in the air; it hissed and sizzled in the bare
branches as they bent in the cold wind, shaking quivering drops of water
broadcast as if sowing the seeds of pain. Victoria stopped for a moment
on the threshold of the house in Star Street, looked up and down the
road. It was black and sodden with wet; the pavement was greasy and
glistening, flecked with cabbage stalks and orange peel. Then she looked
across at the small shop where, though it was Sunday, a tailor sat
cross-legged almost on a level with the street, painfully collecting
with weary eyes the avaricious light. His back was bowed with habit;
that and his bandy legs told of his life and revealed his being. In the
street, when he had time to walk there, boys mocked his shuffling gate,
thus paying popular tribute to the marks of honest toil.

Victoria stepped down to the pavement. A dragging sensation made her
look at her right boot. The sole was parting from the upper, stitch by
stitch. With something that was hardly a sigh Victoria put her foot down
again and slowly walked away. She turned into Edgware Road, followed it
northwards for a while, then doubled sharply back into Praed Street
where she lingered awhile before an old curiosity shop. She looked
between two prints into the shop where, in the darkness, she could see
nothing. Yet she looked at nothingness for quite a long while. Then,
listlessly, she followed the street, turned back through a square and
stopped before a tiny chapel almost at the end of Star Street. The deity
that follows with passionless eye