Her Faithful Knight — page 49: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Story of London. 45 petting—I was so lonely, so wretchedly lonely, in those ugly, black, northerly towns. What could I do with myself all day in lodgings at ten shillings a week? The men of the company, all but Mr. Trevelyan, seemed to pass their time in going about in bands from one hotel bar to another. The married women made friends with their landladies, or called upon each other to talk about their lodgings, and their parts, and scandal—about me, I suppose, as | was the only young woman in the com- pany. But none of them came to see me, and you know, Dorothy, I cannot bear to go about by myself. In some of the rougher towns the people are almost ready to stone anybody who is in the least well dressed. There is nothing to see, nowhere to go, no one to speak to, noth- ing to do but sit on horsehair chairs in mean lodgings, staring at the cheap vases and wax flowers on the man- telpiece. Oh, Dolly, it isn’t as if I had had art to com- fort me. What art and what hope of getting on is there in going down every night before seven to a dirty, draughty theatre and painting one’s face and changing one’s dress just to go on and say, ‘Yes, papa,’ and “Here is Frank,’ and ‘Good gracious!’ and ‘Quite well, thank you,’ at intervals, three hours every night for days and weeks and months together? And then the coming home—that is the worst part of it! The rush home, frightened by the coarse remarks of shop boys hanging about the stage door. Home! What a word to use! A cloth laid, and a familiar, prying landlady, or else the cloth without the landlady. I know these details sound trivial and silly, but they mean so much in the end. Think how much in a life of that kind tenderness and sympathy and laughter and fun and brightness, and the companionship of some one who understands you, some one of education and in your own rank of life, with some- thing else to talk about besides lodging and parts would EOmMmiGcbdoo cS (S@)