back for Sarah Gailey--because Sarah
Gailey was entirely dependent on her. She detested Sarah, despite
Sarah's sufferings, and yet by her conscience she was for ever bound to
her.

The future loomed appalling. Sarah's career was finished. She could not
be anything but a burden and a torment; her last years would probably be
dreadful, both for herself and for others. The prospects of the
boarding-house were not radiant. Hilda could direct the enterprise, but
not well. She could work, but she had not the art of making others work.
Already the place was slightly at sixes and sevens. And she loathed it.
She loathed the whole business of catering. Along the entire length of
the King's Road, the smells of basement kitchens ascended to the
pavement and offended the nose. And Hilda saw all Brighton as a colossal
and disgusting enlargement of the kitchen at No. 59. She saw the
background and the pits of Brighton--that which underlies and hides
behind, and is not seen. The grandeur of the King's Road was naught to
her. Her glance pierced it and it faded to a hallucination. Beyond it
she envisaged the years to come, the messy and endless struggle, the
necessary avarice and trickeries incidental to it,--and perhaps the
ultimate failure. She would never make money--she felt that! She was not
born to make money--especially by dodges and false politeness, out of
idle, empty-noddled boarders. She would lose it and lose it. And she
pictured what she would be in ten years: the hard-driven landlady, up to
every subterfuge,--with a child to feed and educate, and perhaps a
bedridden, querulous invalid to support. And there was no alternative to
the tableau.

She went by the Chichester, which towered with all its stories above her
head. Who would take it now? George Cannon would have made it pay. He
would have made anything pay. How?... She was definitely cut off from
the magnificence of the King's Road. The side street was her destiny;
the side street and shabbiness. And it was all George's fault--and hers!
The poverty, if it came, would be George's fault alone. For he had
squandered her money in a speculation. It astounded her that George, so
shrewd and well balanced, should have made an investment so foolish. She
did not realize that a passion for a business enterprise, as for a
woman, is capable of destroying the balance of any man. And George
Cannon had had both passions.

And then she saw Florrie Bagster, on the other side of the st