Some of the lodgers were already astir, searching among strange and unsavoury bundles in the dim light. Unlike Kennedy Court, most of the sojourners brought their bundles, which seemed to consist very largely of horrid looking skins⁠—“mog,” I suppose, in process of transfiguration to a higher plane. The skins of rabbit, cat and even dog, looked creepy, and I suspected insects and hurried past, with fearful feet.

It was a relief to be back in the open air once more, though the alley was by no means fragrant, forlorn and dilapidated dustbins obtruded their unseemly presence on the path side. I walked off my anger along the Waterloo Bridge Road, and so over the bridge and along the Strand. By this time the business of the day was astir, and over the bridges were coming those fragile, pretty creatures that London breeds by hundreds, nay, thousands; delicate daughters of the suburbs on the way to those offices where, victims of a white slave traffic in the commercial sense, they tap typewriters for seven or eight hours a day.