Wilhelmina in London by Barry Pain — Read

My principal feeling on leaving Mr. Gould's house was one of extreme weariness. The emotions wear one out more than work does. I had been living idly and even luxuriously, but I was more tired than I used to be in the days when I lived with my father and during some financial or domestic crisis the whole of the housework fell to my lot. I had Mr. Gould's five-pound notes in my pocket, and I drove to a good hotel. I stopped there for three days, and I think I spent most of my time in bed and asleep. Then I said to myself, "Wilhelmina, this will not do. You are spending too much, and you are earning nothing, and you are not even looking about you." So I left my good hotel and went to a cheap boarding-house. And on the second night that I was there a young Hindoo proposed marriage to me. Also the cooking was very bad. So I left.

While I was there I had calculated that I had enough money to furnish a very small flat and to live for very nearly a year. I found my flat in a Brompton back street. It was not one of the mansions with lifts and liveried porters and electric light and lots of white paint. It was a little thirty-pound house which had been ingeniously converted into three flats. One was in the basement, and you entered it down the area steps, and paid seven shillings a week when you got there. The ground-floor flat was eight shillings, and the upstairs flat seven-and-six. I went in for luxury and eight shillings. I had a separate entrance, and when I shut my front door I was alone in my own little world. The world contained a sitting-room, bedroom and kitchen, and was extremely dirty and horrible until I set to work on it. I need not say that I spent more money than I had intended on cleaning, furnishing and decorating. Everybody does that. As an economy and a punishment I did everything for myself. The flat above me was occupied by a horse-keeper from one of the 'bus-yards and his wife. The wife did a little intermittent cheap dressmaking. They both drank, used improper language, and occasionally flung paraffin lamps at one another. The flat below had been occupied by an old man who lived alone, and had got tired of it and died. I met his dead body coming up those area steps as I moved in. After that the flat remained untenanted. Every Saturday a knowing-looking young man with a pencil behind his ear, and an account book and a black bag, called for the eight shillings. And as long as you paid that, nobody cared who you were, or what you did, or why you did it. I rather liked that.