it's stealing,' Victoria gasped.

'It is. But there it is, you see.'

'But it's not my fault, Miss; if you had a pay box at the top of the
stairs, I don't say. . . .'

'Oh, we can't do that,' said the manageress icily, 'they would cost a
lot to build and extra staff and we must keep down expenses, you know.
Competition is very keen in this trade.'

Victoria felt stunned. The incident was as full of revelations as
Lizzie's practices at the desk. The girls cheated the customers, the
customers the girls. And the P.R.R. sitting olympian on its pillar of
cloud, exacted from all its dividends. The P.R.R. suddenly loomed up
before Victoria's eyes as a big swollen monster in whose veins ran China
tea. And from its nostrils poured forth torrents of coffee-scented
steam. It grew and grew, and fed men and women, every now and then
extending a talon and seizing a few young girls with sore legs, a rival
cafe or two. Then it vanished. Victoria was looking at one of the large
plated urns.

'All right,' she said sullenly, 'I'll pay.'

As it was her day off, at six o'clock Victoria went up to the change
room, saying good-night to Betty, telling her she was going out to get
some fresh air. She thought it would do her good, so rode on a bus to
the Green Park. Round her, in Piccadilly, a tide of rich life seemed to
rise redolent with scent, soft tobacco, moist furs, all those odours
that herald and follow wealth. A savagery was upon her as she passed
along the club windows, now full of young men telling tales that made
their teeth shine in the night, of old men, red, pink, brown, healthy in
colour and in security, reading, sleeping, eking out life.

The picture was familiar; for it was the picture she had so often seen
when, as a girl, she came up to town from Lympton for a week to shop in
Oxford Street and see, from the upper boxes, the three or four plays
recommended by _Hearth and Home_. Piccadilly had been her Mecca. It had
represented mysterious delights, restaurants, little teashops,
jewellers, makers of cunning cases for everything. She had never been
well-off enough to shop there, but had gazed into its windows and bought
the nearest imitations in Oxford Street. Then the clubs had been, if
not familiar, at any rate friendly. She had once with her mother called
at the In and Out to ask for a general. He was dead now, and so was
Piccadilly.

Victoria remembered without joy: a sign of total flatness, for the mind
that does n