ed where Annie Johns
was now, and what she was doing; wondered how she had faced her mother,
and what her father had said to her. All the rest of them had gone back
at once to their everyday life; Annie Johns alone was cut adrift. What
would happen to her? Would she perhaps be turned out of the house? ...
into the streets?--and Laura had a lively vision of the guilty
creature, in rags and tatters, slinking along walls and sleeping under
bridges, eternally moved on by a ruthless London policeman (her only
knowledge of extreme destitution being derived from the woeful tale of
"Little Jo").--And to think that the beginning of it all had been the
want of a trumpery tram-fare. How safe the other girls were! No wonder
they could allow themselves to feel shocked and outraged; none of THEM
knew what it was not to have threepence in your pocket. While she,
Laura ... Yes, and it must be this same incriminating acquaintance with
poverty that made her feel differently about Annie Johns and what she
had done. For her feelings HAD been different--there was no denying
that. Did she now think back over the half-hour spent in Number One,
and act honest Injun with herself, she had to admit that her
companions' indignant and horrified aversion to the crime had not been
hers, let alone their decent indifference towards the criminal. No, to
be candid, she had been deeply interested in the whole affair, had even
managed to extract an unseemly amount of entertainment from it. And
that, of course, should not have been. It was partly Mr. Strachey's
fault, for making it so dramatic; but none the less she genuinely
despised herself, for having such a queer inside.

"Pig--pig--pig!" she muttered under her breath, and wrinkled her nose
in a grimace.

The real reason of her pleasurable absorption was, she supposed, that
she had understood Annie Johns' motive better than anyone else. Well,
she had had no business to understand--that was the long and the short
of it: nice-minded girls found such a thing impossible, and turned
incuriously away. And her companions had been quick to recognise her
difference of attitude, or they would never have dared to accuse her of
sympathy with the thief, or to doubt her chorusing assertion with a
sneer. For them, the gap was not very wide between understanding and
doing likewise. And they were certainly right.--Oh! the last wish in
the world she had was to range herself on the side of the sinner; she
longed to see