c on the
little devil in her breast. Perhaps if she had seen tufts of
snowdrops--it was February--and yew-hedges and cottage windows, she
would have broken down. As it was, she just enjoyed it. She enjoyed
glimpsing in through uncurtained windows, into sordid rooms where
human beings moved as if sordidly unaware. She enjoyed the smell of
a toasted bloater, rather burnt. So common! so indescribably common!
And she detested bloaters, because of the hairy feel of the spines
in her mouth. But to smell them like this, to know that she was in
the region of "penny beef-steaks," gave her a perverse pleasure.

The cab stopped at a yellow house at the corner of a square where
some shabby bare trees were flecked with bits of blown paper, bits
of paper and refuse cluttered inside the round railings of each
tree. She went up some dirty-yellowish steps, and rang the
"Patients'" bell, because she knew she ought not to ring the
"Tradesmen's." A servant, not exactly dirty, but unattractive, let
her into a hall painted a dull drab, and floored with cocoa-matting,
otherwise bare. Then up bare stairs to a room where a stout, pale,
common woman with two warts on her face, was drinking tea. It was
three o'clock. This was the matron. The matron soon deposited her in
a bedroom, not very small, but bare and hard and dusty-seeming, and
there left her. Alvina sat down on her chair, looked at her box
opposite her, looked round the uninviting room, and smiled to
herself. Then she rose and went to the window: a very dirty window,
looking down into a sort of well of an area, with other wells
ranging along, and straight opposite like a reflection another solid
range of back-premises, with iron stair-ways and horrid little doors
and washing and little W. C.'s and people creeping up and down like
vermin. Alvina shivered a little, but still smiled. Then slowly she
began to take off her hat. She put it down on the drab-painted chest
of drawers.

Presently the servant came in with a tray, set it down, lit a naked
gas-jet, which roared faintly, and drew down a crackly dark-green
blind, which showed a tendency to fly back again alertly to the
ceiling.

"Thank you," said Alvina, and the girl departed.

Then Miss Houghton drank her black tea and ate her bread and
margarine.

Surely enough books have been written about heroines in similar
circumstances. There is no need to go into the details of Alvina's
six months in Islington.

The food was objectio