Victoria looked at her again. This was a curious outlook. The poor troglodyte had translated the glory of the sun into cubic feet of gas.
'Yes, I suppose it is hard,' she said reflectively.
'To be sure, mum,' mused Miss Briggs. 'Sometimes you can't let at all. I've watched through the area railings, mum, many a long day in August, wondering if the legs I can see was coming 'ere. They don't mostly, mum.'
'Then why do you go on?' asked Victoria hardening suddenly.
'What am I to do, mum? I just gets my board and lodging out of it, mum. Keeps one respectable; always been respectable, mum. That ain't so easy in London, mum. Ah, when I was a young girl, might have been different, mum; you should have seen me 'air. Curls like anything, mum, when I puts it in papers. 'Ad a bit of a figure too, mum.'
Victoria looked with sympathy at the hard thin face, the ragged hair. Yes, she was respectable enough, poor Miss Briggs! Women have a hard life. No wonder they too are hard. You cannot afford to be earthenware among the brass pots.
'What will you do when you can't run the house any more?' she asked more gently.
'Miss Briggs,' came a man's voice from the stairs.
'Coming, sir,' yelled Miss Briggs in the penetrating tone that calling from cellar to attic teaches.
'Where are my boots?' said the voice on the stairs.
'I'll get 'em for you, sir,' cried Miss Briggs shuffling to the door on her worn slippers.
Life is a hard thing, thought Victoria again. Another woman for the scrap heap. Fourteen hours work a day, nightmares of unlet rooms, boots to black and coals to carry, dirt, loneliness, harsh words and at the end 'I dunno.' Is that to be my fate? she wondered.
However her blood soon raced again; she was an actress, she was going abroad, she was going to see the world, to enslave it, to have adventures, live. It was good. All that day Victoria trod on air. She no longer felt her loneliness. The sun was out and aglow, bringing in its premature exuberance joyful moisture to her temples. She, with the world, was young. In a fit of extravagance she lunched at a half crown table d'hôte in Oxford Street, where pink shades softly diffuse the light on shining glass and silver. The coffee was almost regal, so strong, so full of sap. The light of triumph was in her eyes, making men turn back, sometimes follow and look into her face, half appealing, half insolent. But Victoria was unconscious of them, for the world was at her feet. She was the axis of the earth. It was in such a frame of mind that, the next day, she climbed the steps of Soho Place, careless of the view into the underground kitchen, of the two dogs who under the archway fought, growling, fouling the air with the scents of their hides, over a piece of offal. She ran up the stairs lightly. The door was still ajar.