The need for economy was being gradually borne in upon her, as her small stock of money diminished and there came nothing to replace it. Presently she exerted herself to find a registry office, where she gave her name and address, and was contemptuously and suspiciously eyed by an old lady with dyed red hair who sat at a writing-table, and asked her a fee of half-a-crown for entering her name in a ledger.
"No diplomas and no certificate won't take you far in teaching now-a-days," she said unpleasantly. "Languages?"
"French quite well and a little Italian. Enough to give conversation lessons," Alex faltered.
"No demand for 'em whatever. I'll let you know, but don't expect anything to turn up, especially at this time of year, with every one out of town."
But by a miraculous stroke of fortune something did turn up. The woman from the registry office sent Alex a laconic postcard, giving her the address of "a lady singer in Camden Town" who was willing to pay two shillings an hour in return for sufficient instruction in Italian to enable her to sing Italian songs.
Elated, Alex looked out the conversation manual of her convent days, and at three o'clock set out to find the address in Camden Town.
She discovered it with difficulty, and arrived late. The appointed hour had been half-past three.
Shown into a small sitting-room, crowded with furniture and plastered with signed photographs, she sank, breathless and heated, into a chair, and waited.
The lady singer, when she came, was irate at the delay. Her manner frightened Alex, who acquiesced in bewildered humiliation to a stipulation that only half-fees must be charged for the curtailed hour. She gave her lesson badly, imparting information with a hesitation that even to her own ears sounded as though she were uncertain of her facts. However, her pupil ungraciously drew out a shilling from a small chain-purse and gave it to Alex when she left, and she bade her come again in three days' time.
The lessons went on for three weeks. They tired Alex strangely, but she felt glad that she could earn money, however little; and although the shillings went almost at once in small necessities which she had somehow never foreseen, it was not until the middle of September that she began once more to reach the end of her resources.