Millie was preening herself before the glass.
“Well, I’m sure you ’ave made yourselves look smart,” said their mother with a touch of pride. “They were good girls,” she reflected, “if there had been more than a bit of temper shown lately. But, then, who could have helped themselves? It had been a terrible time.”
The July sun was shining brilliantly as the two young women, presentable enough to attend morning service at the Church of St John the Evangelist, Kilburn, set out to exhibit their charms and to buy food in the dead city.
2
They crossed Putney Bridge and made their way towards Hammersmith.
The air was miraculously clear. The detail of the streets was so sharp and bright that it was as if they saw with wonderfully renewed and sensitive eyes. The phenomenon produced a sense of exhilaration. They were conscious of quickened emotion, of a sensation of physical well-being.
“Isn’t it clean?” said Blanche.
“H’m! Funny!” returned Millie. “Like those photographs of foreign places.”
Under their feet was an accumulation of sharp, dry dust, detritus of stone, asphalt and steel. In corners where the fugitive rubbish had found refuge from the driving wind, the dust had accumulated in flat mounds, broken by scraps of paper or the torn flag of some rain-soaked poster that gave an untidy air of human refuse. Across the open way of certain roads the dust lay in a waved pattern of nearly parallel lines, like the ridged sand of the foreshore.