ive buildings rise, towards
the east where a cathedral thrusts into the sky a tower that
suspiciously recalls waterworks. She drank in the cold air with a gusto
that can be understood by none save those who have learned to live in
the floating moisture of the plains. She felt young and, in the
sunshine, with her cheeks gaining colour as the wind whipped them, she
looked in her long black coat and broad brimmed straw hat, like a
quakeress in love.

As she walked down towards the Achilles statue the early morning
panorama of London unfolded itself before her un-understanding eyes.
Girls hurried by with their satchels towards the typewriting rooms of
the west; they stole a look at Victoria's face but quickly turned away
from her clothes. Now and then spruce young clerks walking to the Tube
slackened their pace to look twice into her grey eyes; one or two looked
back, not so much in the hope of an adventure, for time could not be
snatched for Venus herself on the way to the office, as to see whether
they could carry away with them the flattery of having been noticed.

In a sense that first day in London was for Victoria a day of
revelations. Having despatched a telegram to her brother to announce her
arrival she felt that the day was hers. Ted had not troubled to meet her
either at Southampton or Waterloo: it was not likely that he had
followed the sightings of her ship. The next day being a Saturday,
however, he would probably come up from the Bedfordshire school where he
proffered Latin to an ungrateful generation.

Victoria's excursions to London had been so few that she had but the
faintest idea of where she was to go. Knowing, however, that one cannot
lose oneself in London, she walked aimlessly towards the east. It was a
voyage of discovery. Piccadilly, bathed in the pale sun, revealed itself
as a land where luxury flows like rivers of milk. Victoria, being a true
woman, could not pass a shop. Thus her progress was slow, so slow that
when she found herself between the lions of Trafalgar Square she began
to realise that she wanted her lunch.

The problem of food is cruel for all women who desire more than a bun.
They risk either inattention or over attention, and if they follow other
women, they almost invariably discover the cheap and bad. Victoria
hesitated for a moment on the steps of an oyster shop, as nervous in the
presence of her first plunge into freedom as a novice at the side door
of a pawnbroker. A man p