Joan was not to start her new work till the following Monday. She was to be typist—her first real post filled her with some degree of self-conscious pride—to the Editor of the Evening Herald. Rose had herself worked on the paper some years ago and was a friend of the Editor's.
"I want you to give a girl I know a chance, Mr. Strangman," she had pleaded; "she is clever and well-educated, but she needs experience. Take her, there is a good man, while your slack time is on, and she will be game for anything when you get busy again."
Mr. Strangman twisted long nervous fingers into strange positions.
"I don't know about this girl," he said; "we are never slack at the office."
It was a pet fallacy of his that he was the hardest-worked man in London. Rose smiled. "But her typing is quite good," she argued, "and you are such an easy dictator, I am sure she will get on all right."
She had been exceptionally pleased when Mr. Strangman reluctantly gave way. Joan would, she hoped, take kindly to newspaper work, and it might open up new roads to her.
Meanwhile Joan had been out on her own and taken a room for herself in a house standing in a quiet, withdrawn square in the neighbourhood of King's Road, Chelsea. To call it a room was to dignify it by a title to which it could lay no real claim. It was an attic, up the last rickety flight of stairs, with roofs that sloped down within two feet of the ground, and a diminutive window from which one could get but the barest glimpse of the skies. Still it had possibilities, its aspect was not so terribly common-place as had been that of the other rooms which Joan had seen that morning. The sloping roofs, the small pane of glass which looked out higher than the neighbouring chimney-tops, were in their way attractive. She would take it, she told a somewhat surprised landlady, and would pay—everything included—ten shillings a week for the noble apartment. The "everything included" swept in breakfast—"Such as a young lady like yourself would eat, Miss"—the woman told her, and attendance. Suppers and fires she would have to provide for herself, though Mrs. Carew was prepared to cook for her; lunch, of course, fell in office hours.
On Saturday, therefore, and having forestalled Miss Nigel's request by announcing that she was leaving for good, Joan moved her luggage over to her new home and took possession.
"I am going to like it better than I liked being at Shamrock House," she told Rose, who had come to assist in the moving. "It is more my own, I can do just as I like here."
Rose was craning her neck to see out of the window's limited compass. "Just as you like," she repeated, laughing as she spoke, "on twenty-five shillings a week and an attic. You are not ambitious, my child."