'He wanted a line to-night,' said Bridget—'I can't hear of any lodgings. And the boarding-houses are all getting frightfully expensive—because food's going up so.'
'Not a boarding-house!' murmured Nelly. A shiver of repulsion ran through her. She was thinking of a boarding-house in one of the Bloomsbury streets where she and Bridget had once stayed before her marriage—the long tables full of strange faces—the drawing-room crowded with middle-aged women, who stared so.
'Well, I can write to him to-night then, and say we'll go to-morrow? We certainly can't stay here. The charges are abominable. If we go to their flat, for a few days, we can look round us and find something cheap.'
'Where is it?' said Nelly faintly.
'In St. James' Square.'
The address conveyed very little to Nelly. She knew hardly anything of London. Two visits—one to some cousins in West Kensington, another to a friend at Hampstead—together with the fortnight three years ago in the Bloomsbury boarding-house, when Bridget had had some grand scheme with a publisher which never came off, and Nelly had mostly stayed indoors with bad toothache:—her acquaintance with the great city had gone no further. Of its fashionable quarters both she and Bridget were entirely ignorant, though Bridget would not have admitted it.
Bridget got her writing-case out of her trunk and began to write to Sir William. Nelly watched her. At last she said slowly, as though she were becoming a little more conscious of the world around her:—
'It's awfully kind of them. But we needn't stay long.'
'Oh no, we needn't stay long.'
Bridget wrote the letter, and disappeared to post it. Nelly was left alone in darkness. The air about her seemed to be ringing with the words of her letter.