she sat in the cab, however, and there flashed by her like beacons
the lights of the stalls in the Waterloo Road, the black and greasy
pavement sown with orange peel, she felt her heart beating furiously
with the excitement of home coming. She passed the Thames flowing
silently, swathed in its shroud of mist. Then the blackness of St
James's Park through which her cab crawled timidly as if it feared
things that might lurk unknown in the fogbound thickets.

It was still in a state of feverish dreaming that Victoria entered her
room at Curran's Private Hotel, otherwise known by a humble number in
Seymour Street. 'Curran's' is much in favour among Anglo-Indians, as it
is both central and cheap. It has everything that distinguishes the
English hotel which has grown from a boarding-house into a superior
establishment where you may stay at so much a day. The successful owner
had bought up one after the other three contiguous houses and had
connected them by means of a conservatory where there lived, among much
pampas grass, small ferns in pots shrouded in pea-green paper and sickly
plants to which no name could be attached as they mostly suggested
stewed lettuce. It was impossible to walk in a straight line from one
end of the coalition of buildings to the other without climbing and
descending steps every one of which proclaimed the fact that the leases
of the houses would soon fall in. From the three kitchens ascended three
smells of mutton. The three halls were strewn with bicycles, gun cases
in their last phase, sticks decrepit or dandified. The three hat racks,
all early Victorian in their lines, bore a motley cargo. Dusty bowlers
hustled it with heather coloured caps and top hats; one even bore a pith
helmet and a clerical atrocity.

Queer as Curran's is, it is comfortable enough. Victoria looked round
her room, tiny in length and breadth, high however with all the dignity
that befits an odd corner left over by the Victorian builder. It was
distinguished by its simplicity, for the walls bore nothing whatever
beyond a restrained papering of brownish roses. A small black and gold
bed, a wardrobe with a white handle, a washing stand with a marble top
took up all the space left by the large tin trunk which contained most
of Victoria's worldly goods. So this, thought Victoria, is the
beginning. She pulled aside the curtain. Before her lay Seymour Street,
where alone an eye of light shone faintly from the nearest lamp post.