Through the fog came the warning noise of a lorry picking its way. It
was cold, cold, all this, and lonely like an island.

Her meditations were disturbed by the maid who brought her hot water.

'My name is Carlotta,' said the girl complacently depositing the can
upon the marble topped washstand.

'Yes?' said Victoria. 'You are a foreigner?'

'Yes. I am Italian. It is foggy,' replied the girl.

Victoria sighed. It was kind of the girl to make her feel at home, to
smile at her with those flashing teeth so well set in her ugly little
brown face. She went to the washstand and cried out in horror at her
dirt and fog begrimed face, rimmed at the eyes, furrowed on the left by
the course of that tear shed at Waterloo.

'Tell them downstairs I shan't be ready for half an hour,' she said;
'it'll take me about a week to get quite clean, I should say.'

Carlotta bared her white teeth again and withdrew gently as a cat, while
Victoria courageously drenched her face and neck. The scents of England,
already conjured up by the fog and the mutton, rose at her still more
vividly from the warm water which inevitably exhales the traditional
perfume of hot painted can.

Her dinner was a small affair but delightful. It was good to eat and
drink once more things to which she had been accustomed for the first
twenty years of her life. Her depression had vanished; she was merely
hungry, and, like the healthy young animal she was, longing for a rare
cut of roast beef, accompanied by the good old English potatoes boiled
down to the consistency of flour and the flavour of nothing. Her
companions were so normal that she could not help wondering, when her
first hunger was sated and she was confronted with the apple tart of her
fathers, whether she was not in the unchanging old board residence in
Fulham where her mother had stayed with her whenever she came up to
town, excited and conscious of being on the spree.

Two spinsters of no age discussed the fog. Both were immaculate and sat
rigidly in correct attitudes facing their plates. Both talked quickly
and continuously in soft but high tones. They passed one another the
salt with the courtesy of abbes taking pinches of snuff. A young man
from the Midlands explained to the owner of the clerical hat that under
certain circumstances his food would cost him more. Near by a heavy man
solemnly and steadily ate, wiping at times from his beard drops of gravy
and of sauce, whilst his faded wife nib