The Shadow of the Past by Ethel Mills

Matheson made Mrs Upton's acquaintance on the following Sunday. He called at the boarding house and had tea in the shabby general sitting-room, and allowed himself to be drawn out by Brenda's mother, who was plainly bent on learning all she could concerning him before and since his intimacy with her daughter.

He succeeded on the whole in impressing her favourably, despite a natural prejudice she entertained against the unconventional manner in which the acquaintance had begun, and a further disapproval of the nightly excursions which Brenda made under his escort, a custom which allied itself with her present occupation but was not the custom of her class. Without a home, a girl was so handicapped. She felt their social downfall more bitterly on her daughter's account than ever she had felt it on her own.