l once when abiding by the law; she had shared her toil
and her slender meed of thanks. Now she was a buccaneer, outside the
social code, and as such earned the right to command. So much did
Victoria dominate that she thought she would refrain from the exercise
of a bourgeois prerogative: the girl should wear her ring, even though
custom forbade it, load herself with trinkets if she chose, for as a
worker and a respecter of social laws surely she might well be treated
as the sacrificial ox.

The horse trotted down Baker Street, then through Wigmore Street.
Daylight was already waning; here and there houses were breaking into
light between the shops, some of which had remembered it was Christmas
eve and decked themselves out in holly. At the corner near the Bechstein
Hall the cab came to a stop behind the long line of carriages waiting
for the end of a concert. Victoria had time to see the old crossing
sweeper, with a smile on his face and mistletoe in his battered
billy-cock. The festivities would no doubt yield him his annual kind
word from the world. She passed the carriages, all empty still. The
cushions were rich, she could see. Here and there she could see a fur
coat or a book on the seat; in one of them sat an elderly maid, watching
the carriage clock under the electric light, meanwhile nursing a
chocolate pom who growled as Victoria passed.

'Slaves all of them,' thought Victoria. 'A slave the good elderly maid,
thankful for the crumbs that fall from the pom's table. Slaves too, the
fat coachman, the slim footman despite their handsome English faces, lit
up by a gas lamp. The raw material of fashion.'

The cab turned into the greater blaze of Oxford Circus, past the Princes
Street P.R.R. There was a great show of Christmas cakes there. From the
cab Victoria, craning out, could see a young and pretty girl behind the
counter busily packing frosted biscuits. Victoria felt warmed by the
sight; she was not malicious, but the contrast told her of her
emancipation from the thrall of eight bob a week. Through Regent Street,
all congested with traffic, little figures laden with parcels darting
like frightened ants under the horse's nose, then into the immensity of
Whitehall, the cab stopped at the Stores in Victoria Street.

Victoria had but recently joined. A store ticket and a telephone are the
next best thing to respectability and the same thing as regards comfort.
They go far to establish one's social position. Vic