'You're getting on,' said Betty with a smile. 'You'll be Mrs Farwell one of these days, I suppose.'
'Don't be ridiculous, Betty,' snapped Victoria, 'why, I'd have to wash him.'
'You might as well wash a husband as a dish,' said Betty smoothly. 'Anyhow, the other girls are talking.'
'Let them talk,' said Victoria rather savagely, 'so long as they don't talk to me.'
Betty took her hand gently.
'Sorry, Vic dear,' she said. 'You're not angry with me, are you?'
'No, of course not, you silly,' said Victoria laughing. 'There run away, or that old gent at the end'll take a fit.'
Farwell did not engage her in conversation for a few days, nor did she make any advances to him. She read through No. 5 John Street within three evenings; it held her with a horrible fascination. Her first plunge into realistic literature left her shocked as by a cold bath. In the early days, at Lympton, she had subsisted mainly on Charlotte Young and Rhoda Broughton. In India, the mess having a subscription at Mudie's, she had had good opportunities of reading; but, for no particular reason, except perhaps that she was newly married and busy with regimental nothings, she had ceased to read anything beyond the Sketch and the Sporting and Dramatic. Thus she had never heard of the 'common people' except as persons born to minister to the needs of the rich. She had never felt any interest in them, for they spoke a language that was not hers. No. 5 John Street, coming to her a long time after the old happy days, when she herself was struggling in the mire, was a horrible revelation; it showed her herself, and herself not as 'Tilda towering over fate but as Nancy withering in the indiarubber works for the benefit of the Ridler system.
She read feverishly by the light of a candle. At times she was repelled by the vulgarity of Low Covey, by the grossness which seemed to revel in poverty and dirt. But when she cast her eyes round her own bare walls, looked at her sheetless bed, a shiver ran over her.
'These are my people,' she said aloud. The candle, clamouring for the snuffers, guttered, sank low, nearly went out.