hes,
and scurry off to a ham and beef warehouse she had discovered in a
turning off Oxford Street, where she would get her supper. The shop was
kept by a man named Siggers. He was an affected little man, who wore
his hair long; he minced about his shop and sliced his ham and beef
with elaborate wavings of his carving knife and fork. Mavis proving a
regular customer, he let her eat her supper in the shop, providing her
with knife, fork, tablecloth, and mustard. Although married and
henpecked, he affected to admire Mavis; while she ate her humble meal,
he would forlornly look in her direction, sigh, and wearily support his
shaggy head with his forefinger; but she could not help noticing that,
when afflicted with this mood, he would often glance at himself in a
large looking glass which faced him as he sat. His demonstrations of
regard never became more pronounced. It was as much as Mavis could do
to stop herself from laughing outright when she paid him, it being a
signal mark of his confidence that he did not exact payment from her
"on delivery of goods in order to prevent regrettable mistakes," as
printed cards, conspicuously placed in the shop, informed customers--or
clients, as Mr Siggers preferred to call them.

One night, Mavis, by the merest chance, made a discovery that gladdened
her heart: she lighted upon Soho. She had read and loved her Fielding
and Smollett when at Brandenburg College; the sight of the stately old
houses at once awoke memories of Tom Jones, Parson Adams, Roderick
Random, and Lady Bellaston, She did not immediately remember that those
walls had sheltered the originals of these creations; when she realised
this fact she got from the nearest lending library her old favourites
and carefully re-read them. She, also, remembered her dear father
telling her that an ancestor of his, who had lived in Soho, had been
killed in the thirties of the eighteenth century when fighting a famous
duel; this, and the sorry dignity of the Soho houses, was enough to
stir her imagination. Night after night, she would elude the men who
mostly followed her and walk along the less frequented of the sombre
streets. These she would people with the reckless beaux, the headstrong
ladies of that bygone time; she would imagine the fierce loves, the
daring play, the burning jealousies of which the dark old rooms, of
which she sometimes caught a glimpse, could tell if they had a mind.
Sometimes she would close her eyes, when the