I had to tell her the truth. I could not frame a suitable lie, besides this was a case when, it seemed to me, fiction would not help matters. The Church Army Shelter existed, I had been told, to supply beds at tenpence a night for destitute women. Why, then, should I shirk the admission of a palpable fact? And yet I felt somehow that my answer would do me out of the comfortable bed I needed so badly.

She seemed shocked at the mention of the casual ward, and positively bristled when I confessed to a common lodging house.

“Oh no,” she said, “I can’t give you a bed,” and I knew that the words were the spontaneous expression of her feeling. She did not want me and my bedraggled clothes in her bright, clean kitchen. She had no use for a woman who quite recently had lodged in Kennedy Court, and she hurled at me the condemnation of a whole world when she turned me down.