Down the long flight of tumbledown wooden stairs and out past the Adelphi stage-door into the Strand. What was the time? Half-past one. Mrs. Kino was taking Letizia to the circus. Not worth while to go home. She would find a tea-shop for lunch. A damp bun and a glass of London milk. A greasy marble table, and opposite a hungry-eyed clerk reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire while he eked out his bun and glass of milk. The waitress, who had nine warts on her fingers, flung down the skimpy bills with equal disdain for both these customers. Outside, the roar of the Strand on the iron-bound air. Inside, the rattle of plates and the harsh giggles of the waitresses. Outside, the grey frozen sky. Inside, leathery poached eggs and somebody arguing in a corner of the shop that he had ordered coffee.
“That is coffee,” said the waitress, tossing her head.
“Is it? Well, I must have meant tea.”
After lunch a walk along the Embankment to get warm. Gulls screaming and quarrelling for the crusts that were being flung to them. Wretched men and women freezing on the benches. Plane-trees hung with their little black balls that stirred not in this immotionable and icy air. Back to Maiden Lane, and up the tumbledown wooden stairs once more. Another endless wait in the cold anteroom.
“Ah, good afternoon, Miss O’Finn. I’m sorry, but Mr. Howard Smythe has filled up the vacancies in his cast. But if you look in again next week, perhaps I shall have something that will suit you.”
“Anything will suit me,” Nancy sighed.
“Ah, but you won’t suit everything,” the agent laughed. “You’re so tall, you know. The real tragedy queen, eh? And managers do not want tragedy queens these days.”
“Och, damn it, don’t try to be funny,” Nancy burst out. “You know I’m not a tragedy queen.”
“Sorry, I was only making a little joke.”
“Well, after a month of agents in this weather one loses one’s sense of humour,” Nancy replied.