"Stand back, Miss Quincey, if you please."

And Miss Quincey stood back, flattening herself against the wall, and the
procession passed her by, rosy, resonant, exulting, a triumph of life.




CHAPTER II

Household Gods


Punctually at four-thirty Miss Quincey vanished from the light of St.
Sidwell's, Regent's Park, into the obscurity of Camden Town. Camden Town
is full of little houses standing back in side streets, houses with
porticoed front doors monstrously disproportioned to their size. Nobody
ever knocks at those front doors; nobody ever passes down those side
streets if they can possibly help it. The houses are all exactly alike;
they melt and merge into each other in dingy perspective, each with its
slag-bordered six foot of garden uttering a faint suburban protest
against the advances of the pavement. Miss Quincey lived in half of one
of them (number ninety, Camden Street North) with her old aunt Mrs. Moon
and their old servant Martha. She had lived there five-and-twenty years,
ever since the death of her uncle.

Tollington Moon had been what his family called unfortunate; that is to
say, he had mislaid the greater portion of his wife's money and the whole
of Juliana's and Louisa's; he, poor fellow, had none of his own to lose.