conscience was dreadfully receptive, almost magnetic; little sins like
smuts lay always deep upon it. There were a few regrettable seconds in
every minute she lived, I think, though she never enjoyed the
compensations attached to a really considerable sin. Anyway her
conscience would have been a case for pumice-stone, and when she was
happy she always tried to forget it. Yet she was not without a good many
very small and unessential resources for sleepless moments. Often she
wrote vague comments on matters with which she was not familiar, in an
exercise-book, always eventually mislaid. She would awake from dear and
unspeakable dreams full of hope, and tell herself stories about herself,
trying on various lives and deaths like clothes. The result was never
likely enough even to laugh at.

To-day she had watched magic dancing in a mackintosh, and she was at a
loss.

There was a knock upon her door, and a voice: "Hi, cocky, could you
oblige me with a loan of a few 'alfpence for the milkman. I 'aven't a
bean in me purse."

"Nor have I," said Sarah Brown, opening the door. "But I can pawn--"

"Ow, come awf it, Cuffbut," said the fellow-lodger. "This is a
respectable 'ouse, more or less, and you ain't goin' out to pawn nothink
in your py-jams. I'll owe it to the milkman again. Not but what I 'adn't
p'raps better pay 'im after all. I got me money paid yesterday, on'y I
'ad thought to put it away for Elbert."

"Are you Peony, the other lodger?"