However, he must have been ashamed of himself, for two days later he sub-let his part of the floor in one of the rooms at the Warren to an Irish family. If he was not ashamed, he was frightened.
Yet, curiously enough, that cowardly brute moulded my future.
The influx of the Irish family into the Warren drove me out of it. It made me feel the absolute necessity for a wider sphere.
On leaving home I took an indeterminate position in a Bayswater boarding-house. At any rate, my wages and food were determined, but my hours of work were not.
A boarding-house is a congeries of people who have come down. The proprietoress never dreamed that she would have to earn her own living like that—though she gets everything to a knife-edge certainty in the first week. Then in the drawing-room you have military people who have thundered, been saluted, been respected—and superseded. And nobody can make worse clothes look better. The cook explains why she’s not in Grosvenor Square, and the elderly Swiss waiter says that he has been in places where pace was not everytink. If you’re out looking for depression, try a boarding-house.
I stayed there a week and then said I was going. The lady said she knew the law and I couldn’t. So I said I would stay, and was sorry that the state of my nerves would mean a good deal in breakages.
I left at the end of the week.