d to her understanding.

For a time she looked at no more apartments, and walked through
gaunt and ill-cleaned streets, through the sordid under side of life,
perplexed and troubled, ashamed of her previous obtuseness.

She had something of the feeling a Hindoo must experience who has been
into surroundings or touched something that offends his caste. She
passed people in the streets and regarded them with a quickening
apprehension, once or twice came girls dressed in slatternly finery,
going toward Regent Street from out these places. It did not occur to
her that they at least had found a way of earning a living, and had that
much economic superiority to herself. It did not occur to her that save
for some accidents of education and character they had souls like her
own.

For a time Ann Veronica went on her way gauging the quality of sordid
streets. At last, a little way to the northward of Euston Road, the
moral cloud seemed to lift, the moral atmosphere to change; clean blinds
appeared in the windows, clean doorsteps before the doors, a different
appeal in the neatly placed cards bearing the word

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| APARTMENTS |
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in the clear bright windows. At last in a street near the Hampstead Road
she hit upon a room that had an exceptional quality of space and order,
and a tall woman with a kindly face to show it. "You're a student,
perhaps?" said the tall woman. "At the Tredgold Women's College," said
Ann Veronica. She felt it would save explanations if she did not state
she had left her home and was looking for employment. The room was
papered with green, large-patterned paper that was at worst a trifle
dingy, and the arm-chair and the seats of the other chairs were covered
with the unusual brightness of a large-patterned chintz, which also
supplied the window-curtain. There was a round table covered, not with
the usual "tapestry" cover, but with a plain green cloth that went
passably with the wall-paper. In the recess beside the fireplace
were some open bookshelves. The carpet was a quiet drugget and not
excessively worn, and the bed in the corner was covered by a white
quilt. There were neither texts nor rubbish on the walls, but only a
stirring version of Belshazzar's feast, a steel engraving in the early
Victorian manner that had some satisfactory blacks. And the woman who
showed this room was tall, with an understanding eye and the qui