ary sky with a sort of
arrested decay. They smell of cabbage and are much prowled over by
vagrom cats. At night they are empty and dark, and a stillness broods
on them, broken only by the cracked tingle of an occasional piano
playing one of the easier hymns, a form of music to which the dwellers
in the dingy houses are greatly addicted. By day they achieve a
certain animation through the intermittent appearance of women in
aprons, who shake rugs out of the front doors or, emerging from areas,
go down to the public-house on the corner with jugs to fetch the
supper-beer. In almost every ground-floor window there is a card
announcing that furnished lodgings may be had within. You will find
these streets by the score if you leave the main thoroughfares and
take a short cut on your way to Euston, to Paddington, or to Waterloo.
But the dingiest and deadliest and most depressing lie round about
Victoria. And Daubeny Street, Pimlico, is one of the worst of them
all.

On the afternoon following the events recorded, a girl was dressing in
the ground-floor room of Number Nine, Daubeny Street. A tray bearing
the remains of a late breakfast stood on the rickety table beside a
bowl of wax flowers. From beneath the table peered the green cover of
a copy of _Variety_. A grey parrot in a cage by the window cracked
seed and looked out into the room with a satirical eye. He had seen
all this so many times before--Nelly Bryant arraying herself in her
smartest clothes to go out and besiege agents in their offices off the
Strand. It happened every day. In an hour or two she would come back
as usual, say "Oh, Gee!" in a tired sort of voice, and then Bill the
parrot's day proper would begin. He was a bird who liked the sound of
his own voice, and he never got the chance of a really sustained
conversation till Nelly returned in the evening.

"Who cares?" said Bill, and cracked another seed.

If rooms are an indication of the characters of their occupants, Nelly
Bryant came well out of the test of her surroundings. Nothing can make
a London furnished room much less horrible than it intends to be, but
Nelly had done her best. The furniture, what there was of it, was of
that lodging-house kind which resembles nothing else in the world. But
a few little touches here and there, a few instinctively tasteful
alterations in the general scheme of things, had given the room almost
a cosy air. Later on, with the gas lit, it would achieve something
app