In this case, being still new to the life into which I was gradually
being drawn, it did not for one moment occur to me to start an
adventure of my own. I might have accosted the woman, who was, as the
saying goes, anybody's familiar; or I might have spied for another
excursion of her spirit, and, with all preparation made, have followed
her. But I did neither of these things at the time. I saw her next
day leaning bare-elbowed on the ledge of her half-door, her hair in
curl-papers, her face the pale unwholesome pinched oval of most London
women of her class. Her bodice was pinned across her chest; she was
coarse-aproned, new from the wash-tub or the grate. Not a sign upon
her but told of her frowsy round. The stale air of foul lodgment was
upon her. I found out indeed this much about her ostensible state,
that she was the wife of a cab-driver whose name was Ventris. He was
an ill-conditioned, sottish fellow who treated her badly, but had
given her a child. But he was chiefly on night-work at Euston, and the
man whom I had seen familiar with her in the daytime was not he. Her
reputation among her neighbours was not good. She was, in fact, no
better than she should be--or, as I prefer to put it, no better than
she could be.

Yet I knew her, withal, as of the fairy-kind, bound to this
earth-bondage by some law of the Universe not yet explored; not
pitiable because not self-pitying, and (what is more important) not
reprehensible because impossible to be bound, as we are, soul to body.
I know that now, but did not know it then; and yet--extraordinary
thing--I was never shocked by the contrast between her two states of
being. This is to me a clear and certain evidence of their
reality--just as it is evidence to me that when, at ten years old, I
seemed to see the boy in the wood, I really did see him. An
hallucination or a dream upsets your moral balance. The things