She found herself in a large, low room, the walls of which were built with glazed brick. Upon the left, the further wall receded as it approached the ceiling, to admit, in daytime, the light that straggled from the thick glass let into the pavement, on which the footsteps of the passers-by were ceaselessly heard. The room was filled by a long table covered by a scanty cloth, at which several pasty-faced, unwholesome-looking young women were eating bread and cheese, the while they talked in whispers or read from journals, books, or novelettes. At the head of the table sat a dark, elderly little woman, who seemed to be all nose and fuzzy hair: this person was not eating. Several of the girls looked with weary curiosity at Mavis, while they mentally totted up the price she had paid for her clothes; when they reached their respective totals, they resumed their meal.
"Miss Keeth?" said the dark little woman at the head of the table, who spoke with a lisp.
"Yes," replied Mavis.
"If you want thupper, you'll find a theat."
"Thank you."
Mavis sank wearily in the first empty chair. "Dawes'" had already got on her nerves. She was sick at heart with all she had gone through; from the depths of her being she resented being considered on an equality with the two young women she had met and those she saw about her. She closed her eyes as she tried to take herself, for a brief moment, from her surroundings. She was recalled to the present by a plate, on which was a hunk of bread and a piece of cheese, being thrust beneath her nose. She was hungry when she came downstairs; now, appetite had left her. Her gorge rose at the pasty-faced girls, the brick-walled cellar, the unwholesome air, and the beady-eyed little woman seated at the head of the table. She thought it better, if only for her health's sake, to try and swallow something. She put a piece of cheese in her mouth. Mavis, by now, was an authority on cheap cheese; she knew all the varieties of flavour to be found in the lesser-priced cheeses. Ordinarily, she had been enabled to make them palatable with the help of vinegar, mustard, or even with an onion; but tonight none of these resources were at hand with which to make appetising the soapy compound on her plate. Miss Striem, the dark little woman at the head of the table, noted her disinclination to tackle the cheese.
"You can have anything exthra if you care to pay for it," she remarked.
"What have you?" asked Mavis.
"Ham, bloater, or chicken pathte, and an exthellent brand of thardines."
"I'll try the ham paste," said Mavis.