from her "on delivery of goods in order to prevent regrettable
mistakes," as printed cards, conspicuously placed in the shop,
informed customers--or clients, as Mr Siggers preferred to call
them.

One night, Mavis, by the merest chance, made a discovery that
gladdened her heart: she lighted upon Soho. She had read and loved
her Fielding and Smollett when at Brandenburg College; the sight of
the stately old houses at once awoke memories of Tom Jones, Parson
Adams, Roderick Random, and Lady Bellaston, She did not immediately
remember that those walls had sheltered the originals of these
creations; when she realised this fact she got from the nearest
lending library her old favourites and carefully re-read them. She,
also, remembered her dear father telling her that an ancestor of
his, who had lived in Soho, had been killed in the thirties of the
eighteenth century when fighting a famous duel; this, and the sorry
dignity of the Soho houses, was enough to stir her imagination.
Night after night, she would elude the men who mostly followed her
and walk along the less frequented of the sombre streets. These she
would people with the reckless beaux, the headstrong ladies of that
bygone time; she would imagine the fierce loves, the daring play,
the burning jealousies of which the dark old rooms, of which she
sometimes caught a glimpse, could tell if they had a mind. Sometimes
she would close her eyes, when the street would be again filled with
a jostling crowd of sedan chairmen, footmen, and linkboys; she could
almost smell the torches and hear the cries of their bearers. It
gave her much of a shock to realise how beauties, lovers, linkboys,
and all had disappeared from the face of the earth, as if they had
never been. She wondered why Londoners were so indifferent to the
stones Soho had to tell. Then she fell to speculating upon which the