erious and
magnetic attraction for men."

"Those palmists will say anything," he said. "It's just the other way
round really."

"Perhaps," I said. "I know I have an unlimited capacity for love--and
nobody seems to want it."

"Ah," he said, "it's a pity to be overstocked with a perishable article.
It means parting with it at a loss."

What could I say to a brute like that? And I had nobody there to protect
me.

"I wish," I said, "that you'd look if I've a fly in my eye."

"If you had, you'd know," he answered. "The fly sees to that."

Some minutes elapsed before I asked him to tie my shoe-lace.

He looked down and said that it was not undone.

I simply turned round and left him, I was not going to stay there to be
insulted.

However, he must have been ashamed of himself, for two days later he
sub-let his part of the floor in one of the rooms at the Warren to an
Irish family. If he was not ashamed, he was frightened.

Yet, curiously enough, that cowardly brute moulded my future.

The influx of the Irish family into the Warren drove me out of it. It
made me feel the absolute necessity for a wider sphere.

On leaving home I took an indeterminate position in a Bayswater
boarding-house. At any rate, my wages and food were determined, but my
hours of work were not.

A boarding-house is a congeries of people who have come down. The
proprietoress never dreamed that she would have to earn her own living
like that--though she gets everything to a knife-edge certainty in the
first week. Then in the drawing-room you have military people who have
thundered, been saluted, been respected--and superseded. And nobody can
make worse clothes look better. The cook explains why she's not in
Grosvenor Square, and the elderly Swiss waiter says that he has been in
places where pace was not everytink. If you're out looking for
depression, try a boarding-house.

I stayed there a week and then said I was going. The lady said she knew
the law and I couldn't. So I said I would stay, and was sorry that the
state of my nerves would mean a good deal in breakages.

I left at the end of the week.

THIRD EXTRACT

GLADSTONE--MR. LLOYD GEORGE--INMEMORISON--DR. BENGER HORLICK.

After this I had a long succession of different situations. It is
possible for a girl to learn the work of any branch of domestic
service in a week, if she wishes to do it, with the exception of the
work of a cook or a personal maid. But then, it is qu