roast beef and pudding, tea, and bread and butter. Then they would start
out once more towards the fields, sometimes towards Hampstead Heath, or
if it rained seek refuge in a museum or a picture gallery. When they
parted in the evening, Victoria kissed her affectionately. Betty would
then hold the elder woman in her arms, hungrily almost, and softly kiss
her again.

The only thing that parted these two at all was the mystery which Betty
guessed at. She knew that Victoria was not like the other girls; she
felt that there was behind her friend's present condition a past of
another kind, but when she tried to question Victoria, she found that
her friend froze up. And as she loved her this was a daily grief; she
looked at Victoria with a question in her eyes. But Victoria would not
yield to the temptation of confiding in her; she had adopted a new class
and was not going back on it.

Besides Betty there was no one in her life. None of the other girls
were able to meet her on congenial ground; Beauty had not got her
address; and, though she had his, she was too afraid of complicating her
life to write to him. She had sent her address to Edward as a matter of
form, but he had not written; apparently her desire for freedom had
convinced him that his sister was mad. None of the men at the P.R.R. had
made any decided advances to her. She could still catch every day a
glitter in the eye of some youth, but her maturity discouraged the boys,
and the older men were mostly too deeply sunk in their feeding and
smoking to attempt gallantry. Besides: Victoria was no longer the
cream-coloured flower of olden days; she was thinner; her hands too were
becoming coarse owing to her having to swab tables and floors; much
standing and the fetid air of the smoking-room were making her sallow.

Soon after Victoria entered into possession of her 'station' she knew
most of her customers, knew them, that is, as much as continual rushes
from table to counter, from floor to floor, permits. The casuals, mostly
young, left no impression; lacking money but craving variety these
youths would patronise every day a different P.R.R., for they hoped to
find in a novel arrangement of the counter, a new waitress, larger or
smaller quarters, the element of variety which the bill of fare
relentlessly denied them. The older men were more faithful if no more
grateful. One of them was a short thin man, looking about forty, who for
some hidden reason had aroused