Victoria took no notice of the penitent landlady and opened the Telegraph. She absorbed the fact that Consols had gone up an eighth and that contangoes were in process of arrangement, without interest or understanding. She was thinking of something else. Miss Briggs coughed apologetically. Victoria looked up. Miss Briggs reflectively tied knots in her apron string. She was a tall, lantern-jawed woman of no particular age; old looking for thirty-five perhaps or young looking for fifty. Her brown hair, plentifully sprinkled with grey, broke out in wisps over each ear and at the back of the neck. Her perfectly flat chest allowed big bags of coarse black serge to hang over her dirty white apron. Her hands played mechanically with the strings, while her water-coloured eye fixed upon the Telegraph.
'You shouldn't read that paper, mum,' she remarked.
'Why not?' asked Victoria, with a smile, 'isn't it a good one?'
'Oh, yes, mum, I don't say that,' said Miss Briggs with the respect that she felt for the buyers of penny papers. 'There's none better. Mine's the Daily Mail of course and just a peep into Reynolds before the young gent on the first floor front. But you shouldn't have it. Tizer's your paper.'
'Tizer?' said Victoria interrogatively.
'Morning Advertiser, mum; that's the one for advertisements.'
'But how do you know I read the advertisements, Miss Briggs?' asked Victoria still smiling.
'Oh, mum, excuse the liberty,' said Miss Briggs in great trepidation. 'It's the only sheet I don't find when I comes up to do the bed. Tizer's the one for you, mum; I had a young lady 'ere, once. Got a job at the Inverness Lounge, she did. Married a clergyman, they say. He's divorced her now.'
'That's an encouraging story, Miss Briggs,' said Victoria with a twinkle in her eye. 'How do you know I want to be a barmaid, though?'
'Oh, one has to be what one can, mum,' said Miss Briggs sorrowfully. 'Sure enough, it ain't all honey and it ain't all jam keeping this house. The bells, they rings all day and it's the breakfast that's bad and their ain't blankets enough, and I never 'ad a scuttle big enough to please 'em for sixpence. But you ain't doing that, mum,' she added after a pause devoted to the consideration of her wrongs. 'A young lady like you, she ought to be behind the bar.'