On these occasions our positions were reversed, I being the admiring
spectator of her prowess. Yet to me she was ever meek, almost
irritatingly submissive. She found out where I lived and would often
come and wait for me for hours, her little face pressed tight against
the iron railings, until either I came out or shook my head at her
from my bedroom window, when she would run off, the dying away into
silence of her pattering feet leaving me a little sad.

I think I cared for her in a way, yet she never entered into my
day-dreams, which means that she existed for me only in the outer
world of shadows that lay round about me and was not of my real life.

Also, I think she was unwise, introducing me to the shop, for children
and dogs--one seems unconsciously to bracket them in one's
thoughts--are snobbish little wretches. If only her father had been a
dealer in firewood I could have soothed myself by imagining mistakes.
It was a common occurrence, as I well knew, for children of quite the
best families to be brought up by wood choppers. Fairies, the best
intentioned in the world, but born muddlers, were generally
responsible for these mishaps, which, however, always became righted
in time for the wedding. Or even had he been a pork butcher, and
there were many in the neighbourhood, I could have thought of him as a
swineherd, and so found precedent for hope.

But a fishmonger--from six in the evening a fried fishmonger! I
searched history in vain. Fried fishmongers were without the pale.

So gradually our meetings became less frequent, though I knew that
every afternoon she waited in the quiet Stainsby Road, where dwelt in
semi-detached, six-roomed villas the aristocracy of Poplar, and that