“I have never lived in a town. I should feel cramped, prisoned, stifled for air.”
“But think how you would feel when the day came to return to Pastimes! Wouldn’t that first hour in the garden be glorious enough to repay you for all the exile?”
Bridget’s wheedling voice broke in on my argument:—
“Miss Evelyn, dear, I’ve been thinking—wouldn’t it be a duty-like, to be having a bit of sun? Seems like we could wrestle along a bit better if we faced the right way!”
Poor dear! Above all the drawbacks, it was the darkness of the interiors of those small flats which most perplexed the good countrywoman: the passages lighted only through the ground glass panels of bedroom doors; the windows shadowed by walls of other buildings, which towered up at but a few yards’ distance; the kitchens staring blankly into a “well,” ornamented with the suggestive spirals of a fire-escape.
“If we could maybe face somewhere where there was a bit of green!” pleaded the eloquent Irish voice. “Sure the leddies and gentlemen you are meaning to help—you’ll be more likely to find them in the place you’d choose yourself, if you were settling in earnest?” Bridget rolled an eye at blocks E, F, and G of a colossal pile of buildings which stretched their inky length over the two blocks of a narrow thoroughfare. “Cast your eye over them window curtains!” said she scathingly. “Ye can tell what’s inside without troubling to look. A dirty, idle set that will sponge on you, and laugh behind your back!”
I looked, and shuddered, and was thankfully convinced. In my efforts not to aim too high, my standard had fallen impossibly low, and Bridget’s keen common sense had been right in prophesying that I was more likely to find a congenial type of people in a neighbourhood which appealed to my own taste.
No sooner said than done! I escorted Bridget to a restaurant, and fed her and myself with lots of good hot food, and then straightway hired a taxi, and drove back to the agents to demand addresses of flats a little further afield, which should have at least a modicum of light and air.
It appeared that I had demanded the thing above all others for which tens of thousands of other women were already clamouring!
“Everybody wants a cheap flat in an open and airy situation. For one that is to let we have a hundred applicants. Of course, if you are prepared to pay a long price—”