When I had reached that point in my commercial career, however, I should have been faced by new difficulties. Directly you grow prosperous in this particular walk of life, the police get wise to you. While you remain furtive, dirty, and obviously destitute, so long as you are civilly spoken and quiet mannered you are allowed to rub along. But appear on your beat with the least appearance of well-doing, and keep up that appearance for a week or ten days and you will be pounced upon. For this reason my friend of the black plush coat clung to her unsavoury habiliments. For this reason⁠—apart from her vagrant instinct and her tendency to drug⁠—she would never sleep two nights running in the same house. Admitted, that her appearance militated against her in the sense that customers were not drawn towards her, still this disability was counterbalanced by her employment of younger and less dilapidated women who, like myself, worked on commission for sales.