She got a room for four shillings a week at the fifth house at which she applied in this street.  The door had been opened by a tall, thin, flat-chested girl, whose pasty face was plentifully peppered with pimples.  The only room to let was on the ground floor at the back of the house; it was meagre, poorly furnished, but clean.  Mavis paid a week’s rent in advance and was left to her own devices.  For all the presence of her baby and Jill, Mavis felt woefully alone.  She bought, and made a meal of bloater paste, bread, butter, and a bottle of stout, to feel the better for it.  She then telephoned to the station master at New Cross, to whom she gave the address to which he could forward her trunk.  On her return from the shop where she had telephoned, she went into a grocer’s, where, for twopence, she purchased a small packing case.  With this she contrived to make a cradle for her baby, by knocking out the projecting nails with a hammer borrowed from the pimply-faced woman at her lodging.  If the extemporised cradle lacked adornment, it was adorable by reason of the love and devotion with which she surrounded her little one.  Her box arrived in the course of the evening, when Mavis set about making the room look as homelike as possible.  This done, she made further inroads on her midday purchases of bread and bloater paste, washed, fed her baby, and said her prayers before undressing for the night.  At ten o’clock, mother and child were asleep.

Mavis had occupied her room for some days before she learned anything of the house in which she lodged.  It was kept by a Mr, Mrs, and Miss Gussle, who lived in the basement.  It was Miss Gussle who had opened the door to Mavis on the day she came.  Mrs Gussle was never seen.  Mavis heard from one source that she was always drunk; from another, that she was a teetotaller and spent her time at devotions; from a third, that she neither drank nor prayed, but passed the day in reading novelettes.  But it was Mr Gussle who appealed the most to Mavis’s sense of character.  He was a wisp of a bald-headed, elderly man, who was invariably dressed in a rusty black frockcoat suit, a not too clean dicky, and a made-up black bow tie, the ends of which were tucked beneath the flaps of a turned down paper collar.  He had no business or trade, but did the menial work of the house.  He made the beds, brought up the meals and water, laid the tables and emptied the slops; but, while thus engaged, he never made any remark, and when spoken to replied in monosyllables.  The ground floor front was let to a third-rate Hebraic music-hall artiste, who perfunctorily attended his place of business.  The second and third floors, and most of the top rooms, were let to good-looking young women, who were presumed to belong to the theatrical profession.  If they were correctly described, there was no gainsaying their devotion to their calling.  They would leave home well before the theatre doors were open to the public, with their faces made up all ready to go on