te ends and
banana skins into a large bin. This bin was periodically emptied and
the contents sent to the East End, whether to be destroyed or to be used
for philanthropic purposes is not known.

The girls were trained to quick service here. Victoria found no
difficulty in acquiring the P.R.R. swing, for she had not to memorise
the variety of dishes which the more fastidious Rosebudders demanded.
Her mental load seldom went beyond small teas, a coffee or two, half a
veal and ham pie, sandwiches and porridge. There was no considering the
bill of fare. It stood on every table, immutable as a constitution and
as dull. At the P.R.R., a man absorbed a maximum of stodgy food, paid
his minimum of cash and vanished into an office to pour out the
resultant energy for thirty bob a week. As there were no tips Victoria
soon learned that courtesy was wasted, so wasted none.

The P.R.R. did not treat its girls badly--in this sense, that it treated
them no worse than its rivals did theirs; it practised commercial
morality. Victoria received eight shillings a week, to which good
Samaritans added an average of fourteen pence, dropped anonymously into
the unobtrusive box near the cash desk. At the 'Rosebud' tips averaged
fourteen shillings a week, but then they were given publicly.

Besides her wages she was given all her meals, on a scale suited to
girls who waited on Mr Thirty Bob a Week. Her breakfast was tea, bread
and margarine; her dinner, cold pudding or pie, according to the
unpopularity of the dishes among the customers, washed down once more
with tea and sometimes followed by stewed fruit if the quantity that
remained made it clear that some would be left over. The day ended with
supper, tea, bread and cheese--a variety of Cheddar which the company
bought by the ton on account of its peculiar capacity for swelling and
producing a very tolerable substitute for repletion.

As Victoria was now paid less than half her former wages she was
expected to work longer hours. The P. R. R. demanded faithful service
from half-past eight in the morning to nine in the evening, except on
one day when freedom was earned at six. Victoria was driven to
generalise a little about this; it struck her as peculiar that an
increase of work should synchronise with a decrease of pay, but the
early steps in any education always fill the pupil with wonderment.

Yet she did not repine, for she remembered too well the black days of
the old year when the