already
no longer the girl you knew at Morningside Park. I am a young person
seeking employment and freedom and self-development, just as in quite
our first talk of all I said I wanted to be.

"I do hope you will see how things are, and not be offended with me or
frightfully shocked and distressed by what I have done.

"Very sincerely yours,

"ANN VERONICA STANLEY."

Part 6

In the afternoon she resumed her search for apartments. The intoxicating
sense of novelty had given place to a more business-like mood. She
drifted northward from the Strand, and came on some queer and dingy
quarters.

She had never imagined life was half so sinister as it looked to her in
the beginning of these investigations. She found herself again in the
presence of some element in life about which she had been trained not
to think, about which she was perhaps instinctively indisposed to think;
something which jarred, in spite of all her mental resistance, with
all her preconceptions of a clean and courageous girl walking out from
Morningside Park as one walks out of a cell into a free and spacious
world. One or two landladies refused her with an air of conscious virtue
that she found hard to explain. "We don't let to ladies," they said.

She drifted, via Theobald's Road, obliquely toward the region about
Titchfield Street. Such apartments as she saw were either scandalously
dirty or unaccountably dear, or both. And some were adorned with
engravings that struck her as being more vulgar and undesirable than
anything she had ever seen in her life. Ann Veronica loved beautiful
things, and the beauty of undraped loveliness not least among them; but
these were pictures that did but insist coarsely upon the roundness of
women's bodies. The windows of these rooms were obscured with draperies,
their floors a carpet patchwork; the china ornaments on their mantels
were of a class apart. After the first onset several of the women who
had apartments to let said she would not do for them, and in effect
dismissed her. This also struck her as odd.

About many of these houses hung a mysterious taint as of something
weakly and commonly and dustily evil; the women who negotiated the rooms
looked out through a friendly manner as though it was a mask, with hard,
defiant eyes. Then one old crone, short-sighted and shaky-handed, called
Ann Veronica "dearie," and made some remark, obscure and slangy, of
which the spirit rather than the words penetrate