"Oh, they aren't poor in that sense, auntie; they are just single women, old acquaintances of mine—schoolfellows indeed—who have to work for their living. I want to see them again, and find out how they get on, whether they have found their place in life, and are happy."
Aunt Jane was not wholly satisfied; but Claudia was not in her teens, nor was she a stranger to London. So the scheme was passed, and all the more readily because Claudia explained that she did not mean to make her calls at random.
Her first voyage was to the flat in which Babette Irving and her friend lived. It was in Bloomsbury, and not in a pile of new buildings. In old-fashioned phraseology, Miss Irving and her friend would have been said to have taken "unfurnished apartments," into which they had moved their own possessions. It was a dull house in a dull side street.
Babette said that Lord Macaulay in his younger days was a familiar figure in their region, since Zachary Macaulay had lived in a house hard by. That was interesting, but did not compensate for the dinginess of the surroundings.
Babette herself looked older.
"Worry, my dear, worry," was the only explanation she offered of the fact. It seemed ample.
Her room was not decked out with all the prettiness Claudia, with a remembrance of other days, had looked for. Babette seemed to make the floor her waste-paper basket; and there was a shocking contempt for appearance in the way books and papers littered chairs and tables. Nor did Babette talk with enthusiasm of her work.
"Enjoy it?" she said, in answer to a question. "I sometimes wish I might never see pen, ink, and paper again. That is why I am overdone. But I am ashamed to say it; for I magnify my office as a working woman, and am thankful to be independent."
"But I thought literary people had such a pleasure in their gift," said Claudia.
"Very likely—those eminent persons who tell the interviewers they never write more than five hundred words a day. But I am only a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, so to speak."