“It’s lonely like,” she said. “I’ve been by myself all the evening. I felt I’d like to be near someone for a bit.”

The loneliness of the streets is something that comes upon you in great waves. You are not conscious of it when you are doped with the eternal walking about, but when consciousness stirs, you know you are alone, and very frightened. It is as if you were in a cold sea, where you kept afloat by ceaseless striving, knowing that if a billow breaks over you, it will sweep you away.

“Is there anywhere you could get a bed?” said I.

She knew a place, she said, where she could get a shakedown for a few pence.

“One gets tired,” she said. “A bed sometimes is past dreaming.”