ballads off their chests,
while the Enemy, who had kept up an intermittent rifle-practice at the
wing, left off--presumably to listen. "After being used to the Reel
Thing," W. Keyse said, "it was enough to make you up and blub!"

That was the first disillusion. Others followed. The aunt who had
inhabited one of the ginger-brick almshouses over aginst 'Ighgyte Cemetery
was dead when they took her a whole pound of tea and three-quarters of
best cooked ham, and the delicacies had to be given to the old woman next
door, with whom the deceased had always had words. You couldn't 'ave
expected the old gal to last much longer, but still it was a blow.

Lobster had long ago given 'Melia the go-by, they learned, in return for
the ham and the tea; and they got her address and hunted her up in a
back-street behind the Queen's Crescent, and W. Keyse failed to recognise
his charmer of old in a red-nosed, frowsy slattern, married to a sweated
German in the baking-trade and mother of two of the dirtiest kids you
ever----! And Mrs. Keyse, to whom her William had expatiated upon the
subject of his family, maintained a portentous dumbness, punctuated with
ringing sniffs, during the visit, and was sarcastic on the bus, and
tearfully penitent when they got back to the Waterloo Road lodging that
was cheap at the weekly rent, she said, if you were paying for dirt and
live-stock.

You couldn't spend your time enjoying yourself for ever, she added a
little later on, as their small joint purse of savings dwindled and that
pale ghost that men call Want began to hover about their hired bolster. W.
Keyse had thought of soliciting a re-engagement at the fried-fish shop in
the High Street, Camden Town, but it had been swept away in favour of an
establishment where they mended your boots while you waited. So he sought
elsewhere. The War had drained away so many men, one would have thought
employment could be had by any chap who took the trouble to walk about and
look for it. But the soles of W. Keyse's boots were worn to their last
thickness of brown paper, and all his clothes and Emigration Jane's, with
the exception of the things him and her had on, had been pawned before it
occurred to the man that that kind of walking ended in the Workhouse. The
woman had known it from the very beginning. The valorous deeds of W. Keyse
stood him in no good stead. London was stiff with liars who boasted of
having been through the Siege, and their lies were more or