the four walls of the office room, with the shaking
vibrations of the engines under her feet and the musty, curious smell of
papers in the making and pile upon pile of papers that had been made all
round her.

She arrived at 9.30 and left about 6 p.m., and by then she was too
numbed--for the working of a typewriter is monotonous work--to do
anything save walk with the hurrying crowds as far as Charing Cross and
take a bus from there to Montague Square. But since work filled her days
she had less time for discontent or depression. Sometimes she would be
tempted to wander off the direct route on her way home and she would
walk up to Piccadilly and past the region of brightly-lighted shops,
watching the faces in the crowd round her, envying those who met friends
and stopped to talk to them, following with rather wistful eyes the
couples who passed, hand clasped in hand; but generally speaking she was
too tired in the evenings to do anything save go straight home, eat a
hasty supper and tumble into bed.

Of Rose she saw, as the other had prophesied, very little. Joan realized
that friendship, if their brief companionship could have been called
such, counted for very little in Rose's life. The girl seemed entirely
to ignore her once she was from constant sight, and since Joan could not
herself call at Shamrock House and Rose habitually forgot to pay her
promised visits, the friendship, such as it had been, faded away into
the past.

The other inhabitants of 6, Montague Square, she saw very rarely.
Occasionally she would encounter Miss Drummond, the downstairs tenant,
paying off her taxi at the door--a tall, handsome girl, rather overblown
in her beauty, who invariably stared at Joan with haughty defiance and
stalked into her own room, calling loudly for Mrs. Carew. Once Joan had
stumbled over the retired military gentleman from the second floor,
sound asleep, in a very undignified position, half way up her own little
stairs. The incident had brought with it a shudder of fear, and from
that day onwards Joan was always careful to lock her door at night.

Miss Fanny Bellairs, the erring damsel on the second floor back, kept
such strange hours that she was never visible; but Mrs. Carew had a
large stock of not very savoury anecdotes about her which she would
recount to Joan during the process of laying supper. As not even an
earthquake would have stopped Mrs. Carew's desire to impart information,
Joan gave up the attempt to