Turning northwards toward the Marylebone Road she met a bleak wind and turned back and down Devonshire Street and eastwards towards St. Pancras through a maze of side streets. The icy wind drove against her all the way. When she crossed a wide thoroughfare it was reinforced from the north. Eddies of colourless dust swirled about the pavements. At every crossing in the many little streets there was some big vehicle just upon her keeping her shrinking in the cold while it rumbled over the cobbles, overwhelming her with a harsh grating roar that filled the streets and the sky. Darkness was beginning; a hard black January darkness, utterly different to the friendly exciting twilights of the old year standing far far away with summer just behind them and Christmas ahead. …
Inside the house a cold grey twilight was blotting out the warm brownness. A door opened as she turned the stairhead on the second floor and a tall thin pale-faced young man in dark clothes and a light waistcoat flashed past her and leaped lightly downstairs. Miriam carried her impression up to her room, going hurriedly and stumbling on the stairs as she went. … Something hard, metallic, like a wire spring, cold and relentless. Belonging to a cold dreadful darkness and not knowing it; confident . He had whistled going downstairs, or sung. Had he? Perhaps he was the foreigner who had sung last night? Perfectly and awfully dreadful. … The whole house and even her own room had been changed in a twinkling. Coming in it had had a warmth, even in the cold twilight. Now it lay open and bleak, all its rooms naked and visible, a house “foreign young gentlemen” heard of and came to live in. He was one of the “Norwegian young gentlemen” who had lived in Mrs. Reynolds’ boarding house in Woburn Place and this was just another boarding house to him. Perhaps the house was full of boarders. … She had grown accustomed to the Baileys having come up from the basement to the ground floor and had got into the habit of coming briskly through the hall with a preoccupied manner, ignoring the invariable appearance of a peeping form at the partly opened door of the dining-room. It was strange now to reflect that the house had always been full of lodgers.