The Pride of Eve by Warwick Deeping

January and February passed, and Eve's capital dwindled steadily, with no very obvious prospect of her being able to replenish it. She sold three more small pictures, and had one or two dress designs accepted by a woman's journal, but these fragments of good fortune were more than counterbalanced by a piece of knavish luck. One wet day, just as it was getting dusk, she had her vanity-bag snatched from her. It contained five pounds that she had drawn from the bank about half an hour before. She never had another glimpse of the bag or of the thief. Her balance had been reduced now to sixteen pounds, and all that she had foreseen in her panic moods seemed likely to be fulfilled.

Her diet became a diet of milk and buns, tea, stale eggs, and bread and butter. She spent nothing on dress, and wore her shoes long after they should have gone to the cobbler. She planned to do most of her own washing at home, drying it in front of her sitting-room fire, and putting up with the moist, steamy smell and her landlady's contemptuous face. Mrs. Buss's affability was beginning to wear very thin, for it was a surface virtue at its best. Poverty does not always inspire that human pity that we read of in sentimental stories. Primitive peoples have a horror of sickness and death, and civilisation has developed in many of us a similar horror of tragic poverty. It is to be found both in people who have struggled, and in those who have never had to struggle, and Mrs. Buss belonged to the former class. To her, poverty was a sour smell that associated itself with early and bitter memories. It brought back old qualms of mean dread and envy. She had learnt to look on poverty as a pest, and anyone who was contaminated with it became a source of offence. She recognised all the symptoms in Eve's pathetic little economies, and straightway she began to wish her out of the house.