’Bus-conducting is a profession that does not engross the mind unduly.  The eye and the ear and the hand work by themselves.  Charing Cross whispered in a conductor’s ear at the Bank produces a white ticket from her hand without any calculation on her part.  She becomes a penny-in-the-slot machine, with her human brain free for other matters.  She grows a great hatred for all fares above fourpence, because they need special thought.

Jay filled her day with unsatisfactory thinking.  She found to her surprise that one may love life and yet also think lovingly of death.  To live is most interesting in an uneasy way, but to die is to forget at once all these trivial turbulences, to forget equally the people you have loved and the people you have hated, to forget everything you ever knew, to be alone, and to be no longer disturbed by unceasing voices.

At this time I think Jay felt more hatred of everybody than love of any one person.  But then, of course, she had vowed to Chloris after the affair with young William Morgan that she would never fall in love again.  She said, “I have been through love.  It is not a sea, as people say.  It is only a river, and I have waded through it.”

“Yet there is certainly something very remarkable about that man,” she thought.  “I don’t believe I like him much, I don’t want to know him better, though I should like him to know me.  I believe he is my real next of kin.  I believe he has a Secret World too.”

She was on her last homeward journey, and it was one of her early days.  The hours of a conductor move up and down the day.  Sometimes Jay punctured her first ticket at a time when you and I are asleep, and when the coster-barrows, waving with ferns and fuchsias, move up the Strand like Birnam Wood moving to Dunsinane.  On those days she was due home at half-past four or so.  On other days she was able to have a late breakfast and to darn her stockings after it, but that meant that she did not get home till very late.  Some ’buses, I gather, are called “single ’buses,” but in this case the word does not imply celibacy alone.  The single ’bus is occupied by one conductor all day Jong for a fortnight.  The “double ’bus” is shared by two conductors, one presiding in the morning and the other in the afternoon.  The double state also lasts a fortnight; it is arranged as an opportunity for lady ’bus-conductors to recuperate after the rigours (the more remunerative rigours) of service on a single ’bus.  These statements of mine are open to extensive correction.  Jay’s hours always struck me as so very confusing that it is unlikely I should be able to retail the information correctly.  However, it doesn’t matter very much.

This was one of the early days on a double ’bus, and Jay was on her last journey, with several restless waking hours between her and possible sleep.  Her ’bus was full, but not pressed down and running over.  For the moment everybody in it was provided with a ticket.  Jay was laboriously thinking small thoughts because she was tired of thinking of Love and Life and other things with capital letters.