who set me up
here,' she added; 'he was . . . he died suddenly' she went on more
cautiously.

'Oh!' Zoe's eyebrows shot up. 'That's what I call luck. But why do you
not have a flat? It is cheaper.'

'Yes, but more inconvenient,' said Lissa. 'Ah, Vic. I do envy you. You
don't know. We're always in trouble. We are moving every month.'

'But why?' asked Victoria. 'Why must you move?'

'Turn you out. Neighbours talk and then the landlord's conscience begins
to prick him,' grumbled Duckie from the sofa.

'Oh, I see,' said Victoria. 'But when they turn you out what do you do?'

'Go somewhere else, softy,' said Duckie.

'But then what good does it do?'

All the women laughed.

'Law, who cares?' said Duckie. 'I dunno.'

'It is perfectly simple,' began Zoe in her precise foreign English. 'You
see the landlord he will not let flats to ladies. When the police began
to watch it would cause him _des ennuis_. So he lets to a gentleman who
sublets the flats, you see? When the trouble begins, he doesn't know.'

'But what about the man who sublets?' asked the novice.

'Him? Oh, he's gone when it begins,' said Lissa. 'But they arrest the
hall porter.'

'Justice must have its way, I see,' said Victoria.

'What you call justice,' grumbled Duckie, 'I call it damned hard lines.'

For some minutes Victoria discussed the housing problem with the fat
jolly woman. Duckie was in a cheerful mood. One could hardly believe,
when one looked at her puffy pink face, that she had seen fifteen years
of trouble.

'Landladies,' she soliloquised, 'it's worse. You take my tip Vic, you
steer clear of them. You pay as much for a pigsty as a man pays for a
palace. If you do badly they chuck you out and stick to your traps and
what can you do? You don't call a policeman. If you do well, they raise
the rent, steal your clothes, charge you key money, and don't give 'em
any lip if you don't want a man set at you. Oh, Lor!'

Duckie went on, and as she spoke her bluntness caused Victoria to
visualise scene after scene, one more horrible than another: a tall
dingy house in Bloomsbury with unlit staircases leading up to black
landings suggestive of robbery and murder; bedrooms with blinded
windows, reeking with patchouli, with carpets soiled by a myriad ignoble
stains. The house Duckie pictured was like a warren in every corner of
which soft-handed, rosy-lipped harpies sucked men's life-blood; there
was drinking in it, and a piano played light air