She noticed that his expression had grown more serious.
“We’re all for utility in these days, you know. Beastly unromantic world. We can only get our adventures by reading novels. I’m sorry for the girls who have to work. They don’t get fair opportunities, or a fair starting chance, except the few who can afford to spend a little money on special education. It’s no fun supplying cheap labour.”
“I suppose not.”
He drew a very deep and mind-deciding breath.
“No offence meant, but if I can be of use at any time, just give me the word.”
“It’s very kind of you to say that.”
“Nonsense, not a bit of it. We are both workers, aren’t we?”
Some days Eve got panic. A great cloud shadow seemed to be drifting towards her, and already she felt it chilling her, and shutting out the sunlight. She asked herself what was going to happen if she spent all her capital before she found a means of earning money regularly, and she lay awake at night, plotting all manner of schemes. Her sense of loneliness and isolation became a black cupboard into which Fate shut her ever and again as a harsh nurse shuts up a disobedient child. She thought of leaving Bosnia Road and of moving into cheaper quarters, and she cut her economies to the lowest point. Even Mrs. Buss’s face reflected her penuriousness, for the florid woman was less succulently urbane, and showed a tendency to be curt and off-hand.
Eve had begun to realise what a great city meant, with its agonies and its struggles. It was like a huge black pool in which one went drifting round and round with thousands of other creatures, clutching at straws, and even at other struggling things in the effort to keep afloat. There was always the thought of the ooze below, and the horror of submergence. Sometimes this troubled mind-picture reminded her of the wreck of the Titanic, with hundreds of little black figures swarming like beetles in the water, drowning each other in the lust to live. It was when the panic moods seized her that she was troubled by these morbid visions, for one loses one’s poise at such times, and one’s fears loom big and sinister as through a fog.
She had sold one picture in a fortnight, and it had brought her exactly three and sixpence. Her fashion-plates were returned. The various agencies were able to offer her situations as a domestic servant, the reality being indecently disguised under the description of “lady help.” She rebelled at the suggestion, and even a panic mood could not reduce her to considering that particular form of slavery, her pride turning desperate and aggressive, and crying out that it would be better for her to indulge in any sort of adventure, to turn suffragette and break windows, rather than go into some middle-class household as an anomaly, and be the victim of some other woman’s moods and prejudices.