ematerialised as his voice rose and fell.

'The wife don't know I'm out on the tiles, ha! ha! She's in Streatham,
looking after the smalls. . . . Oh, no, none of your common or garden
brass fenders. . . .'

Victoria pulled herself together. This was what she could not bear.
Brutality, the obscene even, were preferable to this dreary trickling of
the inane masquerading as wit. Yet she smiled at him.

'You're saucy,' she said. 'You're my fancy to-night.'

A shadow passed over the man's face. Then again he was rattling along.

'Talk of inventions? What'd you think of mine: indiarubber books to read
in your bath? ha! ha! . . .'

But these are only the moths that flutter round the lamp, too far off to
burn their wings. They love to breathe perfume, to touch soft hands,
gaze at bright eyes and golden hair; then they flutter away, and the
hand that would stay their flight cannot rob them even of a few specks
of golden dust. In a few minutes Victoria sat philosophically before
her empty glass while Fascination Fledgeby was by the side of a rival,
being 'an awful dog,' for the benefit of his fellow clerks on the
morrow. She was in the mood when it did not matter whether she was
unlucky or not. There were quite two women present for every man this
hot August night. At the next table sat a woman known as 'Duckie,' fair,
very fat and rosy; she was the vision bursting from a white dress which
Victoria had seen the first night. On the first night she had embodied
for Victoria--so large, so fat, so coarsely animal was she--the very
essence of her trade; now she knew her better she found that Duckie was
a good sort, careless, generous, perfectly incapable of doing anybody an
ill turn. She was _bonne fille_ even, so unmercenary as sometimes to
accede good humouredly to the pleadings of an impecunious youth. Her one
failing was a fondness for 'a wet.' She was drinking her third whisky
and soda; if she was invited to supper she would add to that at least
half a bottle of champagne, follow that up by a couple of liqueurs and a
peg just before going to bed. She carried her liquor well; she merely
grew a little vague.

'Hot,' remarked Duckie.

'Rather,' said Victoria. 'I'm going soon, can't stick it.'

'Good for you. I've got to stay. Always harder for grandmas like me when
the fifth form boy's at the seaside.' Duckie laughed, without cynicism
though; she had the reasoning powers of a cow.

Victoria laughed too. A foreign-looking