having lived in it) and to present a
respectable appearance.

I was reluctant to undertake the new duty, for though the Jew was to pay
me a few shillings a week for it, I saw I could earn more in the time
with my needle. But when he laid his long, hairy forefinger on the side
of his nose and said with a significant smile:

"You vill be gradeful, and convenience your employer, mine child," I
agreed.

Thus it came to pass that not only during the Jewish festivals, but for
months after they were over, I carried a rather large black bag by tram
or rail to the district that lies at the back of Piccadilly and along
Oxford Street as far west as the Marble Arch.

I had to go whenever called upon and to wait as long as wanted, so that
in the height of the tailoring season I was out in the West End at all
irregular hours of night, and even returned to my lodgings on one or two
occasions in the raw sunshine of the early mornings.

The one terror of my West End journeys was that I might meet Sister
Mildred. I never did. In the multitude of faces which passed through the
streets, flashing and disappearing like waves under the moon at sea, I
never once caught a glimpse of a face I knew.

But what sights I saw for all that! What piercing, piteous proofs that
between the rich and the poor there is a great gulf fixed!

The splendid carriages driving in and out of the Park; the sumptuously
dressed ladies strolling through Bond Street; the fashionable church
paraders; the white plumes and diamond stars which sometimes gleamed
behind the glow of the electric broughams gliding down the Mall.

"I used to be a-toffed up like that onct," I heard an old woman who was
selling matches say as a lady in an ermine coat stepped out of a theatre
into an automobile and was wrapped round in a tiger-skin rug.

Sometimes it happened that, returning to the East End after the motor
'buses had ceased to ply, I had to slip through the silent Leicester
Square and the empty Strand to the Underground Railway on the
Embankment.

Then I would see the wretched men and women who were huddled together in
the darkness on the steps to the river (whose ever-flowing waters must
have witnessed so many generations of human wreckage), and, glancing up
at the big hotels and palatial mansions full of ladies newly returned
from theatres and restaurants in their satin slippers and silk
stockings, I would wonder how they could lie in their white beds at
night in room