here
collect innumerable guineas.

Victoria had followed the convulsion with passionate interest. For a
week the restaurant slump had been the fashion. The manager of every
surviving cafe in London had given it as his deliberate opinion that
trade would be all the better for it. The financial papers published
grave warnings as to the dangers of the restaurant business, to which
the Stock Exchange promptly responded by marking up the prices of the
survivors' shares. The Socialist papers had eloquently pleaded for
government assistance for the two thousand odd displaced girls; a
Cabinet Minister had marred his parliamentary reputation by endeavouring
to satisfy one wing of his party that the tearoom at South Kensington
Museum was not a Socialistic venture and the other wing that it was an
institution leading up to State ownership of the trade. A girl
discharged from the 'Lethe' had earned five guineas by writing a
thousand words in a hated but largely read daily paper. The interest had
been kept up by the rescue of a P.R. girl who had jumped off Waterloo
Bridge. Another P.R. girl, fired by example, had been more successful
in the Lea. This valuable advertisement enabled the Relief Fund to
distribute five shillings a head to many young persons who had been
waitresses at some time or another; there were rumours of a knighthood
for its energetic promoter.

It was in the midst of this welter that Victoria had found herself cast,
with her newly acquired experience a drug in the market, and all the
world inclined to look upon her as a kind of adventuress. Her employer's
failure was in a sense her failure, and she was handy to blame. For
three weeks she had doggedly continued her search for work, applying
first of all in the smart tea-rooms of the West, and every day she
became more accustomed to being turned away. Her soul hardened to
rebuffs as that of a beggar who learns to bear stoically the denial of
alms. After vainly trying the best Victoria had tried the worst, but
everywhere the story was the same. Every small restaurant keeper was
drawing his horns in, feverishly casting up trial balances; some of them
in their panic had damaged their credit by trying to arrange with their
banks for overdrafts they would never need. The slump was such that they
did not believe that the public would continue to eat and drink; they
retrenched employees instead of trying to carve success out of other
men's disasters.

Victoria, her te