ercial progress.

Within a week the P.R.R. decided to start once more in the City.
Victoria, by her own request, was transferred to Moorgate Street. She
did not like the neighbourhood of Oxford Circus; it was unfamiliar
without being stimulating. She objected too to serving women. If she
must serve at all she preferred serving men. She did not worship men;
indeed the impression they had left on her was rather unpleasant. The
subalterns at the mess were dull, Mr Parker a stick, Bobby was Bobby,
Burton a cur, Stein a lout, Beauty, well perhaps Beauty was a little
better and Cairns worthy of a kind thought; but all the others, boys and
half men with their futile talk, their slang cribbed from the music
halls, their affectations, their loud ties, were nothing but the ballast
on which the world has founded its permanent way. Yet a mysterious sex
instinct made Victoria prefer even them to the young ladies who
frequented Princes Street. It is better to be made love to insolently
than to be ordered about.

The Moorgate P.R.R. was one of the curious crosses between the ice cream
shop and the chop house where thirty bob a week snatches a sixpenny
lunch. It was full of magnificent indifference. You could bang your
twopence for a small coffee, or luxuriate in steak and kidney pie,
boiled (_i.e._ potatoes), stewed prunes and cream, and be served with
the difference of interest that the recording angel may make between No.
1,000,000 and 1,000,001. You were seldom looked at, and, if looked at,
forgotten. It was as blatant as the 'Rosebud' had been discreet. Painted
pale blue, it flaunted a plate glass window full of cakes, packets of
tea, pounds of chocolate, jars of sweets; some imitation chops garnished
with imitation parsley, and a chafing dish full of stage eggs and bacon
held out the promise of strong meats. Enormous urns, polished like
silver, could be seen from the outside emitting clouds of steam; under
the chafing dish too came up vaporous jets.

Inside, the P.R.R. recalled the wilderness and the animation of a bank.
To the blue and red tesselated floor were fastened many marble-topped
tables squeezed so close together that when a customer rose to leave he
created an eddy among his disturbed fellows. The floor was swamped with
chairs which, during the lunch hour, dismally grated on the tiled floor.
It was clean; for, after every burst of feeding, the appointed scavenger
swept the fallen crusts, fragments of pudding, cigaret